Home Social Landscape Featured Articles Reverend Mr. John Nelson: Missionary with an Impossible Mission

Reverend Mr. John Nelson: Missionary with an Impossible Mission¹

by Uta H. Fox

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Originally, at the Battleford Industrial School, government policy insisted that students had to be between 14 and 16 years old so that, in effect, the industrial school functioned as a high school. At Red Deer, the majority of students who enrolled had received some education at other institutions, but the School, desperate for its per-capita grants, also accommodated students of all ages, with a few as young as five years old. Had the Red Deer School functioned as a high school, only 28 students of the first enrolment of 52 would have been eligible to attend. Health was one of the most tragic problems for these students at the school. Many of them were either tubercular on entering the school, or became so due to the confinement of their physical surroundings. Thus the industrial and boarding schools became breeding grounds for tuberculosis and other epidemics. The "Register" indicates that 17 (27 per cent) of the 62 students enrolled during the years that John Nelson was principal of the school (1893-95), died prematurely, at the school, immediately after leaving it, or within a decade of leaving it.²⁰

John Nelson was unable to realize the goals that both the Methodist Church and the state had dictated; neither the Church nor the state produced the resources to achieve the desired results. The Methodist Church was overextended financially and territorially; the government did not provide sufficient funding; and neither the church nor the state presented their educational program so that Indian parents would be supportive. Parental resistance also effectively undermined Nelson's ability to make the school palatable to the native community. Nonetheless, during Nelson's two years at the school, the students did learn life-skills and literacy, and, according to The Christian Guardian, he did win the approval of his students. It noted the farewell message that the students prepared for Reverend Mr. and Mrs. Nelson, which thanked them for being "very good to us and ... [teaching] us to be obedient and to be polite, like ladies and gentlemen, and how to speak English and how to work. But the most important thing that you taught us was how to live right...."

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From: Aspenland 1998 — Local Knowledge and Sense of Place
Edited by: David J. Goa and David Ridley
Published by: The Central Alberta Regional Museums Network (CARMN) with the assistance of the Provincial Museum of Alberta and the Red Deer and District Museum.