Untangling the Web: Church and Public Accountability in National Reconciliation 

Evan J. Habkirk and Alanaise Ferguson

This essay is part of a series. See the other entries here.

When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) submitted their final report in 2015, Canadians saw how the federal government and national Catholic and Protestant churches created one of the most destructive systems of cultural genocide. Missing from this analysis was an explanation of how these institutions and the national Residential School program implicated and needed the support of everyday Canadians. 

In 2023, Drs. Habkirk and Ferguson entered into a partnership with the archives of the Anglican Diocese of Kootenay. For the project, Kathryn Lockhart, archivist for the Diocese, gave us access to 2,000 scans of handwritten documents generated between 1910-1988 by the Women’s Auxiliary (WA) in 13 parishes. Habkirk and Ferguson trained 40 undergraduate Indigenous Studies students in historical transcription methods ensuring that this evidence could be converted to searchable and indexable typed text. These records contained the meeting minutes of WAs from individual churches who provided fundraising and material goods for 17 Anglican Residential Schools in Canada.

Throughout Fall 2023, Lockhart and the Dean of the Diocese Cathedral, David Tiessen, facilitated the document transcription and hosted a well-attended knowledge sharing event where 25 student-created posters were presented, alongside their analysis of these archival documents, to show current parishioners that a more complete accounting of Residential Schools includes their local church and potentially members of their families. During an event debrief, our project leadership (Tiessen, Lockhart, Habkirk, Ferguson) generated the following questions:

• Who was affected by this support of Residential Schools?
• Who were these local peoples who supported them and why?
• Who benefited from this support of Residential Schools?

We tried to answers these questions by organizing more knowledge-sharing events to present our findings and collect responses and impressions from students and parishioners, as well as national history scholars. We presented the financial and material contributions that the Diocese’s WAs (1920-1974) made to 17 Anglican Residential Schools, and showed the connection these schools had to Canada’s nation building, colonization, assimilation, and cultural genocide within a local and national context.[1] Another event was held online in June 2025. There we addressed several questions, including:

• Who were the members of the national and local WAs?
• What was their overall mission? How did this lead them to supporting Residential Schools?
• How and why did the Anglican Church of Canada support Residential Schools and what were they telling their parishioners to enlist their involvement?

For these discussions, we had the help of Drs. Alan Hayes[2] and Wendy Fletcher[3] to tell the national story, while members of our team provided the local story of settler involvement in Anglican Residential Schools. Our target audience were local community members interested in local history and reconciliation. Fifty participants registered and attended this online conference including current parishioners of Anglican churches across the Diocese. This work was presented in front of a Syilx Elder and community members who provided comment, context, and oversight to our research findings, ensuring that survivors’ perspectives were included, valued, and centered in our knowledge sharing.

The engagement after these events has been enlightening. Attracting 30 to 50 loyal parishioners, deeper questions about local support of Residential Schools have emerged to inform our future work. Although we need to educate settlers about the national story of Residential Schools and the national colonial project they were a part of, we also need to interrogate settler places and roles in Canada’s history as this shapes our present-day experiences and understandings of Residential Schools. This will allow us to find a roadmap of what our church communities need to do to reconcile their relationship Indigenous peoples.

Anglican Women’s Work, Residential Schools, an the “Power Paradox”

Residential Schools were an essential component of the domestic mission field, especially for women, but this has been largely overlooked in the examination of Residential School histories in Canada. In her presentation, Dr. Fletcher drew on the “Power Paradox” in her work on WAs and the role of women in the architecture of the Anglican Church. She outlined that their WA work increased their access to social capital while they were simultaneously exploited for their labour. Women contributed to cultural genocide via evangelism and by assisting the National Church to meet its financial and material obligations to their Residential Schools.

The documents evidence that the members of the WAs provided the center of fellowship for these church communities and did a lot of charitable and religious work within the diocese and local churches including:

• fundraising for the poor in their communities
• paying for church mortgages and renovations
• raising funds for international and domestic missions

These women were also under pressure to expand their work beyond the local church to support larger projects, with some being publicly shamed if they did not support the national church’s missionary endeavours. This criticism led many women to follow Residential School directives while being excluded from male church leadership until the 1960s.[4]

WA’s support of Residential Schools has led to many hard conversations within our team. One early concern posed to us by our students was the use of goods provided by the WA. Indigenous students in Residential Schools were portrayed to WAs as children in need. Many WA members sought information about these children, often requesting student names so they could send more gifts, especially around Christmas time. The material goods they provided included sleeping garments, quilts, and toiletries like tooth brushes. Aside from letters from school administrators acknowledging the receipt of these goods, it is unknown if these goods actually reached the intended student. Our students became concerned after reading descriptions from survivors of children being ordered to scrub floors and other parts of the school with toothbrushes. Was this the end result of the gifts WAs generated for the students?

Ethical considerations going forward

An ethical consideration our team has had to unpack was the fact that the women of the WA were also in charge of running their church’s Sunday Schools. These Sunday School children were used to raise money for the Anglican Missionary Fund, which supported Residential Schools. Finding this connection to Residential Schools was jarring for the team as we now have to reconcile the idea that non-Indigenous children were used to raise money to support the Residential School system. These facts will challenge us as we position ourselves to have conversations about Canadian citizens’ support of the Residential Schools system.

Another ethical question our team has been forced to confront is the Anglican Church of Canada’s use of the women’s and children’s groups to fill budgetary shortfalls at Residential Schools operated by the Anglican church. Although the literature about the national Residential School project speaks to these shortfalls,[5] the use of everyday Canadians to make them up is rarely discussed. What is also concerning is that, during times of local and national economic hardships, local WAs cut their support of Residential Schools, preferring to support other local causes. The outcome was that the already overstretched budgets of the 17 Residential Schools supported by the Diocese of Kootenay, who were already unable to adequately care for these children, went without the support and funds provided by the WAs during these periods. As we continue to work with the Diocese of Kootenay, its churches, and their parishioners, we will continue to have difficult conversations about their role in supporting the national Residential School system.

While this project limits our investigation of Canadian citizens’ material and financial contributions to Anglican-run schools from local churches to a single diocese, all Catholic and Protestant churches in Canada need to undertake this painful work of disentangling the spiritual call to service from the presence of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and white supremacy and hold themselves accountable for supporting the genocidal Residential School program. Although our team members are mapping a way forward to hold the members of this diocese accountable by providing answers to their questions on their journey towards reconciliation, this reflection work needs to be done by individual dioceses, churches, and settlers, as long as they remain open, willing to learn, and brave throughout our research investigations.

Evan J. Habkirk, PhD is a settler Historian and Lecturer at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus, in the Indigenous Studies Program. His research focuses on historical and contemporary treaty issues and treaty making, residential schools and reconciliation, Indigenous military and militarism, and implementing innovative practices into Indigenous Course Requirements at the post-secondary level (evan.habkirk@ubc.ca)

Alanaise Ferguson, PhD is a Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Health, Healing, and Community Revitalization at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. She is a member of the Sandy Bay Ojibway First Nation and a Registered Psychologist in BC (alanaise.ferguson@ubc.ca)

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[1] Links to some recordings from these events can be found at circleforsharingindigenousvoices.ca

[2] Selected works of Alan Hayes about Indigenous Peoples and the Anglican church include, “Settler Churches, the Doctrine of Discovery, and the Shifting Blame,” Historical Papers 2023 of the Canadian Society of Church History, 5-23; “The Churches, the Indian Residential Schools, and the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples,” Historical Papers 2022 of the Canadian Society of Church History, 43-58; “T.B.R. Westgate: Organizing and Financing Indigenous Erasure for the Anglican Church, 1920-1943,” Toronto Journal of Theology, 36, 1 (2020): 54-74; and “The Elusive Goal: The Commitment to Indigenous Self-Determination in the Anglican Church of Canada, 1967-2019,” Anglican and Episcopal History 89, 3 (2020): 255-280.

[3] For more about the work of Wendy Fletcher, see https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=0ov7OmQAAAAJ&hl=en

[4] All of the documents referenced in this post are found in various parish files throughout the Diocese of Kootenay Archives and, therefore, cannot be cited as individual documents or collection.

[5] For example, see John Milloy’s A National Crime (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 1999) and J.R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996).