From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Aboriginals: Algonquians/ Eastern Woodlands/Janet E Chute
Children traditionally learnt by emulating members of their parental generation. Parents accorded them considerable freedom in which to learn roles and skills considered appropriate to their age and sex, and bestowed rewards on those who achieved socially approved goals. Children who failed to conform encountered informal sanctions, such as teasing or withdrawal of attention. Fear of bogeymen, wild supernatural beings, or past traditional enemies such as the Iroquois was inculcated in young children to make them heed the limits of their social world. Some communities later extended the range of threatening personages to include white teachers, agents, and priests.
Formal schooling was extended at different times and places to Eastern Woodland Algonquians in Canada under the auspices of Anglican, Baptist, Congregationalist, Moravian, Presbyterian, Roman Catholic, and Wesleyan Methodist missionaries. Eleazar Wheelock, an American Congregationalist preacher, established a school for Indian children around 1750 at Lebannon, Connecticut, which in 1769 moved to Hanover, New Hampshire, on the Western Abenaki’s traditional hunting grounds. In 1769 as well, this institution became Dartmouth College, and for the next eighty years it continued to draw some of its native students from the Saint-François community at Odanak, Quebec.
One early experiment that involved the removal of native students from their parental surroundings occurred in New Brunswick at Sussex Vale, where, for a span of seven years after 1797, Malecite children were apprenticed to rural families at the same time as they attended classes. Boys were expected to become farmers or rural labourers, girls to enter domestic service. To some degree, the idea at Sussex Vale was to teach Malecite youth British values which would militate against them siding as adults with the Americans should hostilities arise between the British colonies and the United States. Although under the aegis of the London-based Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England, the Sussex Vale experiment was subject to abuses which later haunted many Indian residential schools. A belief that native youth should be made to forego all attachment to their indigenous culture permeated the ideology underlying the manual-labour and residential school systems, along with a presumptuous faith in the superiority of British culture and an emphasis on institutional self-sufficiency.
Methodists in Ontario during the 1840s established a manual labor school at Alderville and a residential school at Muncey. An Anglican residential institution, known as Shingwauk School, was built at Sault Ste Marie in 1875 under the auspices of the Anglican missionary E.F. Wilson, who opened yet another school in 1888 at Elkhorn near Brandon, Manitoba. Similar Roman Catholic institutions later were opened at Spanish on the north shore of Lake Huron and at Shubenacadie in Nova Scotia. Presbyterians ran residential schools at Kenora and Birtle, Manitoba.
Residential schools survived into the early 1970s, when the federal government created a system of day schools; however, the emphasis remained on cultural integration into the Canadian mainstream rather than building on strengths inherent in native culture. Dropout rates remained high, and few students attended community colleges or universities. It was not until Woodland native organizations from the late 1960s onwards spearheaded a major campaign to compel provincial school boards to include constructive native content in their elementary and high school curriculum that things began to change. Workshops and conferences were organized to discuss modes of combatting systemic racism. Regional efforts included the activities in the late 1960s and 1970s of the non-profit corporation TRIBE (Teaching and Research in Bicultural Education), which involved the Malecite, Passamaquoddy, and Mi’kmaq in improving the status of native education in the Maritimes provinces and Maine. By the late 1970s, moreover, native-studies programs were being offered by Native Friendship Centres, community colleges, and universities. Several universities have since then initiated specialized native access into their professional law, nursing, medicine, dentistry and social-work programs; as a result, a new generation of highly educated natives has arisen. Finally, in 1995 the Mi’kmaq Education Authority gained control over aboriginal education in Nova Scotia, a feat that others, most prominently Treaty 3 First Nations in Ontario and Manitoba, intend to emulate before 1997.
In the area of language, Eastern Woodland Algonquians had sophisticated systems of ideogramatic representations by which they could communicate messages and keep records on wood, bark, or stone. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an American Indian agent at Sault Ste Marie from 1822 to 1841, first noted the use of such ideograms inscribed on bark scrolls or wooden boards in the context of the Ojibwa Midewiwin and Wabano societies. In addition, Algonquians adopted the Iroquois practice of mnemonically encoding, in transportable wampum belts, valuable data regarding major political decisions and transactions.
During the late seventeenth century, a Recollect missionary, Chrestien LeClercq, employed Mi’kmaq ideograms in producing a hieroglyphic writing system which was later “reinvented” by the Abbé Pierre-Antoine Maillard in the mid-eighteenth century. Maillard popularized the idiographic system for instructing his Mi’kmaq followers in brief catechistic responses, but the Mi’kmaq adapted it to convey other kinds of information. Some nineteenth-century hieroglyphic texts, mostly of a religious nature, are still extant.
After a Methodist missionary, James Evans, devised a syllabic writing system in the 1830s, recognition of the utility of the script spread rapidly southward to the Ojibwa living north and northwest of Lake Superior (Norval Morriseau, the Ojibwa Woodland artist, employs syllabic script in signing his native name “Copper Thunderbird”). In modern newspapers and journals, however, various Latin orthographies have gained precedence over hieroglyphics or syllabic modes of presenting information. By the nineteenth century the Mi’kmaq community had developed a phonemic script for representing their own language using the Latin alphabet, a script that a Capuchin missionary, Father J. Pacifique, modified in publishing the Mi’kmaq-language monthly, Le Messanger Micmac (The Micmac Messenger; Resitgouche, Que., 1906–42). More recently, in March 1974, a systematic version of the same script was introduced in Agenutemagan, a newspaper of the Union of New Brunswick Indians. In keeping with a renewed emphasis on preserving indigenous culture, native linguists are devising new and improved Latin orthographies not only to communicate ideas among adults but also to teach native languages effectively to the rising generation. Those interested in learning to speak Mi’kmaq and Ojibwa also may purchase language tapes and instruction booklets.
Woodland Algonquian regional organizations almost all publish newspapers or newsletters, in either the English or French language depending on province and the nature of their readership. Publications are of four types: local, ethnic, regional, and popular. Contemporary newsletters such as the Nindawaabjig News of the Walpole Island First Nation Heritage Centre convey information of local import. Serving a distinct ethnic community, the Micmac Nations News (Sydney, N.S., 1965–) remains the main voice of the Union of Nova Scotia Indians. The Micmac-Maliseet Nations News, published by the Mainland Confederacy of Mi’kmaq since 1990, addresses a yet wider native constituency, while Native Life a new glossy magazine published in Ontario at the Georgina Island First Nation and devoted to native arts, health, culture, and political issues, appeals to mainstream and native audiences alike.
