The $35,000 Proposal to Measure What Nine Saskatchewan Residential Schools Were Doing to Children

Inside the forgotten 1950s archival proposal to study student health, adaptation, and conditions at nine Saskatchewan residential schools.

On April 4, 1966, a letter arrived at the desk of Mr. R.F. Davey, the Director of Indian-Educational Services in Ottawa. The correspondence, typed on the letterhead of The Canadian Welfare Council, carried a seemingly modest price tag of just under thirty-five thousand dollars. Attached to it was a document that would attempt to peel back the layers of an institution that was slowly changing its shape but not its walls. This document was the 1966 Residential School Study, a comprehensive proposal designed to evaluate the physical, social, and psychological conditions of nine schools in Saskatchewan.

The proposal emerged at a pivotal moment in Canadian history. By the mid-1960s, the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Affairs was overseeing 10,000 Indigenous children in residential schools. While the population in these institutions had dropped significantly from twenty-five years prior, the absolute number of children had actually risen by over 1,000 since 1940. The government needed to know if the system was working, and specifically, if it was meeting the “emotional and social needs” of the students. The resulting proposal offers a stark, high-resolution snapshot of the bureaucratic machinery attempting to measure the human cost of assimilation.

The Shift from Education to Social Welfare

By 1966, the function of the residential school was undergoing a quiet but radical transformation. The Canadian Welfare Council noted that the schools were shifting from a primary focus on education to a role defined by “child welfare”. Admissions were no longer solely about schooling; priority was now being given to children from “family breakdown,” including cases of desertion, neglect, or the death of a parent.

The proposal outlined a study that would focus on 1,650 children across nine schools in Saskatchewan—seven operated by the Oblate Fathers of the Roman Catholic Church and two by the Anglican Church of Canada. The objective was qualitative research to evaluate whether these facilities could truly replace a home. This was not merely an academic exercise. Mr. R.F. Battle, the Assistant Deputy Minister, explicitly requested the study to plan resources “required immediately and on a long term basis for the education and care of Indian children outside their homes”.

The study proposed to act as a segment of an “overall evaluation” of the Indian Affairs Branch services. It was a recognition that the integration of educational services required a deeper look at the “effect of the residential school environment on the child”. The government acknowledged that traditionalism and parental preference might still be driving admissions, but they needed hard data to understand the shifting demographics inside the dormitories.

The 1966 Residential School Study and the Twelve Questions

Perhaps the most revealing section of the proposal is the list of twelve specific questions posed by R.F. Davey, the Director of Educational Services. These questions strip away the veneer of policy and ask directly about the quality of life for the children. Davey asked: “To what extent are residential schools admitting pupils who are not institutional cases?”. He wanted to know how many children were orphans or from “poor homes” in the sense of neglect.

But the questions went deeper, probing the psychological impact of the system. Question ten asked: “How well are the schools satisfying the emotional and social needs of the students?”. Question eleven was even more pointed: “Is the residential school atmosphere and the disciplinary methods employed compatible with the development of good mental health?”.

These inquiries demonstrate that as early as 1966, the federal government was actively questioning whether the discipline and atmosphere of these schools were detrimental to the mental health of Indigenous children. The study was designed to answer these questions by assessing the children’s “adaptation to the school and to the white culture” alongside their “personal and social adjustment”. The proposal aimed to scrutinize the rationale for selecting children and even the guardianship status of orphans who dropped out of the system.

Measuring Adaptation to White Culture

The methodology proposed for the 1966 Residential School Study was rigorous and revealing of the era’s assimilationist goals. The researchers planned to use the “California Test of Personality” to measure the personal and social adjustment of children from Grade 5 and up. This standardized test was intended to evaluate “self-reliance,” “sense of personal worth,” and “nervous symptoms”.

However, the study also included a specific analytic outline for measuring “Adaptation to the White Culture”. The researchers intended to query children on their values regarding work, possessions, and family structure. They asked if the child valued “life on the Reserve exclusively” or if they saw themselves adapting to the demands of work in wider society.

The proposal broke this down into granular detail. Researchers would ask children about their idea of a “good sized family” and the kind of house they wanted, checking to see if they were committed to “Indian values” or if they would “strive for some change from their background”. They even planned to measure the child’s preference for associating with Indians versus Whites, and the location of those interactions. The “Dependent Variable” was explicit: the child’s adaptation to a specific set of cultural norms defined by the state.

Auditing the Institution: From Food to Discipline

The Canadian Welfare Council proposed a forensic audit of the daily life inside the schools. The analytic outline for the institutional study covered everything from “sleeping arrangements” to “methods of discipline”. The researchers planned to count the number of children per room and assess the “night supervision arrangements”.

Clothing was another critical metric. The study sought to determine if children wore “individually owned” clothes of their personal choice, or if they were subjected to “mass purchase” uniforms or, worse, “interchangeable clothing” shared among the student body. In the dining halls, they would observe if food was served family-style or cafeteria-style, whether snacks were available, and if children were used as labor in the kitchen.

The section on discipline was particularly clinical. The proposal included a “Discipline Score” that would categorize methods such as physical punishment, isolation, deprivation of privileges, and the “deprivation of meals”. The researchers also planned to document “group punishment” and the student reaction to these measures. This data was to be cross-referenced with school records of behavior symptoms deemed indicative of maladjustment, such as “stealing” or “running away”.

Tracking the Graduates and the Budget

To understand the long-term effects of the system, the study proposed tracking down “graduates” who had left the schools in the previous five years. The researchers acknowledged the difficulty of finding a random sample, noting that Department officials advised that “most former students are still on reserves”. They aimed for a quota sample of fifty cases to assess their “success” based on employment and social situation.

The interviewers planned to ask these former students about their work patterns, their reliance on “relief” (welfare), and their living conditions. They explicitly sought to determine if the graduates had “followed the traditional Indian patterns” or adopted “more of the white patterns” regarding family size and housing.

The cost for this exhaustive inquiry into the lives of 1,650 children and fifty graduates was estimated at $34,956. This budget included $6,000 for the Project Director, George Caldwell, and funds for research assistants recruited from universities in Montreal and Saskatoon. The timeline was tight: Phase I, the field work, was scheduled for April to June 1966, with the final report due by January 1967.

This 1966 document serves as a blueprint of government intent. It reveals a system that was self-conscious enough to ask if it was damaging children’s mental health, yet committed enough to its assimilationist goals to measure success by how well a child rejected their own culture’s values for another’s.

This report is part of the Hansard Files, an independent project dedicated to unearthing the pivotal, overlooked documents that shaped our history. If you value this kind of deep-dive investigative archival work, please consider subscribing.

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Source Documents

• Canadian Welfare Council. (1966, April 4). Proposal prepared by The Canadian Welfare Council for the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Affairs regarding a Study of Indian Residential Schools in the Province of Saskatchewan, Canada.