Content warning: Rape, abuse, child death
Note: A national Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for residential school students and their families. Access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866-925-4419.
Donations to the Indian Residential School Survivors Society can be made here.
On Jan. 2, 1937, four boys — two aged seven, and an eight-and-nine-year-old — were found dead, their bodies frozen trying to cross Fraser Lake northwest of Prince George after running away from the nearby Lejac Residential School in the hopes of seeing their families following Christmas.
On November 18, 1948, Reverend J. Fergus O’Grady, principal of the Kamloops Residential School, wrote the following letter to the parents of children who were forced to attend the institution he ran telling them that seeing their kids at Christmas is a privilege, and one which could be revoked.
Dear Parents,
It will be your privilege this year to have your children spend Christmas at home with you. The holidays will be extend from DECEMBER 18th to JANUARY 3rd. This is a privilege which is being granted if you observe the following regulations of the Indian Department.
1) THE TRANSPORTATION TO THE HOME AND BACK TO THE SCHOOL MUST BE PAID BY THE PARENTS.
The parents must come themselves to get their own children. If they are unable to come they must send a letter to the Principal of the school stating that the parents of other children from the same Reserve may bring them home. The children will not be allowed to go home alone on the train or bus.2) THE PARENTS MUST BRING THE CHILDREN BACK TO SCHOOL STRICTLY ON TIME.
If the children are not returned to School on time they will not be allowed to go home for Christmas next year.I ask that you observe the above regulations in order that this privilege of going home for Christmas may be continued from year to year. It will be a joy also for your children and it will bring added cheer and happiness to your home.
O’Grady almost certainly would have been aware of the deaths at Lejac. He was ordained in Ottawa in 1934 before coming to B.C., and the loss of the four boys three years later was national news, as well as the subject of a federal investigation that uncovered issues of abuse throughout the residential school system.
And yet there he was, informing parents that the ability to see their children at Christmas was a “privilege”, and one that would be taken away should the kids not be returned to the school on time.
* * *
When I was growing up, Prince George was still home to O’Grady High School, a private Catholic school that shut down partway through my grade ten year. We still have an O’Grady Road and last year O’Grady Heights, a major new apartment complex, began welcoming residents. But until this past week, I had never given any thought to where the O’Grady name from until I saw his letter making the rounds on social media following news that the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation believes they have found the remains of 215 children, some as young as three, in unmarked graves around the former Kamloops Residential School over which O’Grady once presided.
I don’t know whether any of these children died during O’Grady’s tenure in Kamloops (forensic analysis is underway in an attempt to learn more details about who they were) but it’s not outside the realm of possibility. The Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc were searching the grounds based on the oral testimony of residential school survivors who said children disappeared, so this is living memory, not ancient history. However, his time in Kamloops was brief compared to his long career in Prince George as the head of the Roman Catholic Church in Northern B.C.
According to an article in the Prince George Citizen written upon his retirement in 1986, J. Fergus O’Grady became the fist-ever Bishop of the Prince George Diocese in 1956 and soon set up about building more Catholic schools across the north and interior in B.C., most notably Prince George College which would later become O’Grady. Most of these schools were not residential and, in fact, O’Grady was praised for having the “foresight and energy” to establish the first high school in B.C. to register “both native and white students.” He also received an honourary law degree from UBC for his “religious work in the area, particularly with Native Indians.”
As for regrets, the Bishop told the paper he has “relatively few.”
I found a more nuanced examination of O’Grady’s legacy in two places: a 2012 Vancouver Sun article looking at allegations of abuse levelled against VanOC CEO John Furlong (for the purposes of this blog post I will note that these allegations have neither been proven in court nor have they been disproven in court) and a 2001 master’s thesis by minister and a former O’Grady High student Kevin Edward Beliveau titled “Belief, Backbone and Bulldozers! Fergus O’Grady’s Vision of Catholic ‘Integrated’ Education In Northern British Columbia 1956-1989“.
The Sun article, by Lori Culbert and Gord Hoekstra, uses the Furlong story to launch into a longer examination of the Catholic Church in Prince George and the surrounding area under the leadership of O’Grady, who recruited thousands of young Catholic volunteers from other parts of the world to work in his schools in northern B.C. which for administrative purposes stretched from the central interior region all the way to Prince Rupert.
“That O’Grady was well-liked and well-intentioned is almost universally accepted, including by many band leaders and former native students.
“But his goal of integration appears to have failed, as many former native students say they never felt equal to white children and complain of mistreatment by some of the nuns and volunteer teachers.
“Some academics argue native students’ experiences at the Catholic day schools were not dissimilar to the assimilation that was the focus of B.C.’s notorious residential schools.”
Indigenous students in this article recall harsh treatment, verbal abuse, physical punishment and the sense that they had no choice but to attend the Catholic schools under O’Grady’s authority. That sort of testimony is readily available from former students elsewhere, including testimony collected in the Truth and Reconcilation Commission of Canada’s final report. I have heard it myself at the Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girl’s Inquiry, and virtually any time Indigenous people in the Prince George region are speaking about their history or trauma — if they didn’t attend Lejac they have a parent or grandparent or older sibling or cousin who did, and it continues to impact them and their families.
Unlike Lejac, Prince George College was not a residential school. Nor were the majority of the schools built under O’Grady’s leadership. Instead, according to Beliveau’s thesis, “Three decades of residential school administration inclined him to support the closure of residential schools,” in favour of integrated ones that saw Indigenous and non-Indenous students learning together.
UPDATE: It’s been pointed out to me, and indeed I should have included this originally, that while Prince George College was not a residential school, it has residences on it and Indigenous children from reserves throughout the north and interior were sent to live there. And as is noted by Beliveau’s thesis, having been pushed into the Catholic system themselves, many parents may not have felt that they had any choice but to send their children to the only Catholic high school available.
In my quick search I was able to find several references O’Grady made in interviews of his desire to integrate. Speaking to the Vancouver Sun in 1969, for example, he said, “The Indians want to integrate but they don’t want to lose their identity… we hope to preserve their crafts and traditions.”
But Believeau notes that this attitude may also not have been as wholly progressive as it seems. For one, “integration” was much closer to “assimilation” with Indigenous students expected to adapt to Catholic/Canadian culture and language but white students not being expected to learn much about Indigenous culture. And to the extent that Indigenous culture was incorporated into the school it seems to have been for show: a sort of Disney-fied version of Indigenous culture aimed at drumming up publicity and donations from Catholic communities across Canada and around the world:
“For example, the Los Angeles Times described Bishop O’Grady as “often in a fringed Indian jacket and mukluks”. It reminded readers that the diocese was “adjacent to Alaska and runs freely from the Pacific to Alberta!” An article in the newspaper of the archdiocese of Seattle highlighted “the problems of the poor, almost-destitute Indians of northern British Columbia”. No reference was made to the history of exploitation that caused this destitution. One account from the Glasgow Observer referred to the need to “help the Indian population in the area” of whom there are “about five or six different tribes, the predominant tribe being the Western Danes [sic]” . In time, campaigns claimed to recruit the largest group of lay mission helpers anywhere in the world.”
On another occassion, O’Grady recruited Jay Silverheels, the actor who played “Tonto” on the Lone Ranger television show, to come to town to open Prince George College’s library. In short this was very much a colonial project and the culture of Indigenous people was viewed through a colonial lens, under the wider mission of converting and ‘civilizing’ children.
And it worked: O’Grady is widely viewed as a fundraiser extraordinnaire, buying up land for the Catholic Church in the area of Prince George now known as College Heights. In fact that name came to be because of O’Grady: Prince George College, College Heights, described by the Vancouver Sun in 1979 as one of the then-booming cities largest housing development, being created in conjunction with the Catholic church. Likewise, Domano, the main road in the neighbourhood, was coined by O’Grady by taking the first two letters from the Latin phrase “Domane Mane Nobiscum” (“O Lord, Stay With Us)”. Domano was also the name of the construction company he started.
* * *
But this also brings us to another important point from Beliveau’s thesis: While O’Grady may or may not have had altruistic reasons for creating an integrated Catholic school in Prince George, he certainly had financial ones, as the federal government subsidized private schools for taking on Indigenous students.
“It is possible that Fergus O’Grady knew of the potential economic benefits of Aboriginal and “integrated” education from his days at Kamloops Indian Residential School in the 1930s.
“It was this shrewd business sense that strongly supported the presence of First Nations students, in particular, to offset some of the opening and operating costs of the institution – in essence, subsidizing Catholic education in northern B.C.“Because true integration never existed at Prince George College, First Nations families were in fact financially supporting Catholic endeavors in the region without the corresponding integration. A number of documents attest to this twofold “vision” of integration policies. One plan was to take advantage of federal funds earmarked to build and often maintain “joint” schools. The other plan was to attempt to integrate or in fact assimilate Native students into white society and to a European-created, “pan-Indian culture” by schooling Native students alongside white peers.”
Indeed, Beliveau notes that not long after these subsidizations ended, the number of Indigenous students recruited to O’Grady High declined and by 2001, it was closed forever. Around the same time the local Catholic diocese, which once owned huge tracts of College Heights, was in dire financial straits and selling off land to make way for Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire.
Beliveau’s thesis is well worth a read for anyone interested in O’Grady’s legacy or Prince George history. However, he himself acknowledges that his perspective is limited and does not include much in the way of Indigenous experience. Still, he notes:
“Yet, if Catholic missionaries believed that they had Natives’ “best interests” in mind, their educational work
in Canada and their efforts at working with Aboriginal youth were often destructive. O’Grady remains a complex
figure who appeared convinced that he was acting in the “best interests” of Aboriginal people. It has, however, been difficult to document any “benevolence”, particularly towards local Aboriginal people, because of a dearth of necessary correspondence. His missionary mindset was predicated on the assumption of European spiritual and cultural superiority.”
All of this said, he seems to have been well-liked. A Facebook page for O’Grady High is full of former students, many of whom are Indigenous, reminiscing about their time at Prince George College and the energetic Bishop, and when he died it was reported that members of the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc attended to bless his grave.
* * *
None of this should be used to minimize the negative impacts of the Catholic and residential school system on Indigenous people in this region. I’ve already made note of some, but it is difficult to overstate it. Hundreds of lives lost, decades of abuse and trauma and the attempted erasure of entire cultures, well-intentioned or not. And if O’Grady was not among the worst offenders, his successor was.
Hubert O’Connor took over as head of the Prince George Diocese in 1986 and resigned in 1991 when he became the highest ranking Catholic official in the country to be charged with sex crimes. He was charged with sexually assaulting four Indigneous students who worked for him while he was principal of the Williams Lake Residential School between 1964 and 1968. Ultimately, he was convicted of rape and sexual assault against two of his victims.
I haven’t found any research about whether O’Grady was aware of or in any way took responsibility for O’Connor’s actions, although he would have been under his employ. Nor have I found any record of him acknowleding any of the other abuse documented to have taken place within his Diocese by teachers, staff and members of the church during his time in charge here. There have been other court cases and accusations about abuses at St. Mary’s, Prince George College and elsewhere during his tenure, though none I’ve found name him directly. And right now there is a human rights case that RCMP failed to adequately investigate when former students told them about abuses at both Immaculata Elementary and Prince George College. And while a former volunteer interviewed by the Vancouver Sun said she is confident he would not have condoned this behaviour, the fact remains that all of these abuses are said to have taken place while O’Grady was in charge.
* * *
The vast majority of this was unknown to me when I started doing research this weekend. I knew nothing of O’Grady or Prince George College and I had no idea that Prince George had been the site of one of the most significant convictions of a Catholic official in Canada. I’m writing this all down as a way to help organize the multiple sources and pieces of information I’ve been able to find so far.
At the same time, campaigns have already started to have UBC rescind O’Grady’s law degree and for Prince George to remove his name from street signs. I have no doubt this will, again, spark a debate about who we honour, how, who’s left out, and understanding our history as a whole. So here’s some you may not have known. And if there is a part of the story you think I’ve missed, please contact me on twitter or however you’d like.
Selected References:
Ad nauseam
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