Wrecker's ball claims White Calf Collegiate

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When the wrecking crews arrived March 23 at the former White Calf Collegiate in Lebret, Vern Bellegarde made plans to be there.

He wanted to be the third generation of the Bellegarde family to see the Indian residential school destroyed.

Crews from Bosoged Projects arrived that morning to start tearing down one of the last Indian residential schools in Canada, almost a year after the Star Blanket First Nation closed the facility.

"My grandfather, John Bellegarde, was at the school in 1903 when it burned down. My father, Joseph Bellegarde, was there in 1932 when it burned down again. I didn't see it get burned down but . . ." laughs Bellegarde, a former child care worker and chief administrator at the school.

About a dozen people watched when a backhoe started pummeling the former residences and classrooms, reducing walls to piles of bricks and mortar. More than just bricks and mortar fell that morning - one of the last reminders of the residential school system which brought despair and abuse to generations of Indian peoples was also reduced to dust.

Last year the Star Blanket First Nation, which took over the school's operation in 1983, lobbied the federal government for a new school to replace White Calf Collegiate, but Bellegarde and Star Blanket band councillor Michael Starr said the federal government said, "No."

"If we were to renovate the building it would cost $11 million. A new school for 200 students would have cost $9 million," said Bellegarde.

"But I think the Department of Indian Affairs just wanted to wash their hands of the residential school concept."

Starr agreed, saying plans for another school along the lines of White Calf ran contrary to the future plans for the department and Saskatchewan's First Nations.

"The federal government wasn't too receptive because they felt they were going in a different direction. Partly it was putting to rest the residential schools, and also the First Nations leadership across Canada wanted their children back at home," he said.

School was out forever at White Calf Collegiate in June 1998.

Starr attended the school for two years in the mid-1970s as a day student.

"It's a very emotional day," he said, pointing to the small crowd watching the backhoe at work. "Some of the history is gone . . . in a lot of ways the people who have been hurt by the residential schools have had some of that pain taken away by knocking it down. At the same time there were a lot of good memories in the school."

The first Indian residential school in Lebret opened in the early 1880s. As part of the conditions within Treaty 4, signed in 1874, the federal government was to provide schools and education to Indian people.

The federal government, in turn, gave that responsibility to religious denominations. The Catholic Order of the Grey Nuns first operated the Lebret school.

However, such Indian residential schools were less concerned with teaching the three R's than they were in teaching Indian children how to live in non-Aboriginal society. Children were forbidden to speak their languages and were often beaten by teachers and administrators, in addition the children were often sexually assaulted. Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart admitted as much in January 1998 when she apologized on behalf of the government to victims of sexual and physical abuse in the schools.

It's a historical period that Aboriginal leaders blame for thousands of broken lives, for drug and alcohol dependency, for most of the social ills that currently plague their people.

The federal government later took over operations of the school. When Starr attended - about the same time Bellegarde was a child care worker based at the school - it held students from Grades 1 to 10.

When the Star Blanket band took over control of White Calf, things were to be different. While students would still be required to live at the school, the band, not the missionaries and not the federal government, would control how the school oprated.

"As we took it over we made a decision that the young kids should be taught closer to home. We moved up the grades taught at the school from Grades 6 to 12," Starr said.

At its height, the school had about 200 high school students from across the province, with a support staff of 70, ranging from teachers to counsellors, dorm supervisors, cooks, seamstresses and janitorial staff, Bellegarde said.

For a while White Calf appeared on its way to being to Aboriginal society what such schools as the Athol Murray College of Notre Dame are to non-Aboriginal Saskatchewan residents - an academically challenging finishing school for the best and the brightest young people.

In its last three years of operation the school selected students from as many as 600 applicants across the province, Bellegarde said.

"The school's real legacy is the graduates who have gone back to their communities as teachers, as social workers, administrators or who sit on band councils or who are chiefs," he added.

But while the former first-vice chief of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations mourns the school's closing, Bellegarde also acknowledges that times have changed.

"I'm a firm believer in getting on with life," he said. "I think our eventual dream is for a school along the lines of Notre Dame. That will take a lot of work and planning, though."

Bosoged Projects of Regina has also been commissioned for a land-use survey on the former school's site. The band is examining three options for the land after the school is torn down. One option calls for a residential development; the second calls for cottages and resort facilities to be built; a third calls for a modern version of the former collegiate, Starr said.

The school's gymnasium will remain in place. It's currently used as a meeting hall, recreation facility and bingo hall for Star Blanket First Nations members.

The adjoining Eagledome, home of the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League's Lebret Eagles, will also remain.

"Whateer is done to the land will complement the Eagledome and its program," Bellegarde said.