Genocide in the Garden: Landscape Change, Botanical Colonization, and Ecological Alienation in Western Canadian Residential Schools, 1880s-1920s
Date
2025-01-15
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0009-0004-3957-9731
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
The landscapes of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools were not neutral: they reflected the ideals, aspirations, and histories of the Church and Government officials who oversaw their creation. This thesis explores the settler-colonial belief that values were embedded in the visual form of the landscape, and that as such, residential school gardens and grounds were considered active tools in the over-arching aims of Canada’s residential school system and national “Indian Policy” more broadly. It argues that far from being simply an accessory or afterthought, school gardens were in fact a central pillar of the project of cultural assimilation that undergirded the school system. The schools’ landscapes embodied in microcosm the anticipated transformation of the West’s natural ecosystems into production-oriented agricultural spaces, a process which itself represented the attempted elimination of the Indigenous cultures that existed in deep relationship to those ecosystems.
Using textual analysis of residential school records and visual analysis of photographs and picture postcards, this thesis explores the symbolism implanted in three schools in Canada’s Northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This includes the Methodist-run Industrial School in Brandon, Manitoba, which displayed British-derived landscape garden ideals, the Roman Catholic Industrial School in Lebret (Qu’Appelle), Saskatchewan, a more formal French-colonial-styled garden in a celebrated valley location, and the Anglican Mission Boarding School in Hay River, Northwest Territories, a remote garden with less emphasis on aesthetics but no less symbolic significance. This thesis argues that despite the differing cultural and ecological realities which shaped them, the gardens and grounds at all three schools can ultimately be interpreted as sites of botanical colonization and cultural genocide through ecological alienation.
This thesis’ use of the term botanical colonization recognizes the extent to which control of plants has been central to settler-colonial structures including Canada’s residential school system. Through the additional framing of ecological alienation, it highlights how forced physical separation from and transformation of the natural places central to Indigenous cultures is a direct form of identity alienation, a process which characterized the residential school experience.
Description
Keywords
Residential schools, gardens, landscape, settler colonialism, photographs, postcards, Western Canada, Brandon, Manitoba, Lebret, Saskatchewan, Hay River, Northwest Territories,
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
History
Program
History