Life and Death Under the Indian Act: Coming to Know Lorna Blackbird in an “Indian Act” Way

In April 1876, 150 years ago, Parliament passed An Act Respecting Indians, a document that brought together existing imperial Indian policy as Canadian federal jurisdiction. The act defined who an Indian was and what a reserve was; it defined laws that applied to Indians and to reserves and a structure and vision for managing those laws. This anniversary is an opportunity to consider the Indian Act’s impact on our lives over the course of the last 150 years. When I was a teaching assistant at Trent University for the “Indians of Canada” course, the professor stated that the Indian Act is present in First Nations’ lives from birth to death. I remember thinking at the time, how is that possible? It is just a law and therefore just one aspect of one’s life. How could it be present at something so intimate as birth and death and everything biological, social, cultural and developmental that happens in between? Over the course of studying histories of First Nations health in Manitoba over many years, I’ve come to learn about how the Indian Act limits opportunities, shapes or simply takes over decision-making, often with no consultation with the people most affected, limits the authority of First Nation Citizens and governments, and enacts authority to govern decisions about important aspects of life including education, health care and even where and how you live your day to day life.

The Indian Act not only shapes every stage of First Nations peoples’ lives but also how we come to know about family and communities from the past. It does so through the records of the Indian Act’s management, through the records of the Indian Department and other branches of government that were charged with jurisdiction over treaties and Indian Act law. The records created by these departments, whether kept, restricted, destroyed, or open, determine what we can know about the past, but also how we come to know about First Nations history. The moments where our lives are documented by mediators of the Indian Act are not always the ones we might choose to document in our own lives. Sometimes they record the worst moments of our lives, the ones in which we had the least amount of power.

Manitoba Indigenous Tuberculosis History Project researchers first came know Lorna Blackbird as a type-written name in a Dominion of Canada Registration of Death of an Indian form (the definition of “Indian” here being within the meaning of “Indian” as that word is defined in the “Indian Act” of Canada”) which we had ordered from the Manitoba Vital Statistics Branch. We were looking at this record following project direction we had received from First Nations to work toward locating the burial locations of missing people. While reviewing the deaths recorded in the Manitoba’s Vital Statistics Agency’s online database for Brandon, Manitoba, we noticed a name that was already familiar to us through previous research relating to children taken to Indian Residential Schools. Curious about whether the person listed in the online database was the person who had been taken to the Birtle Indian Residential School, we decided to investigate further.

Through our work tracing Indigenous people who were taken to medical institutions in Manitoba, we have learned that many First Nations people who died at hospitals in Brandon during the time when Lorna Blackbird passed away were buried at the Sioux Valley Dakota Nation cemetery. But when we ordered Lorna’s long form registration of death from the province, we found that she was not buried at Sioux Valley. While the long form death registration alerted us to this, it also led us to learn more about her life and death as it played out “in an Indian Act way.”

Lorna was born on the 11^th of April 1928. At the time of her birth, her Keeseekoowenin Ojibway First Nation community, which was also known as the “Riding Mountain,” or “Clear Lake” Band, was living on land in what is now Riding Mountain National Park in western Manitoba.[1] When Lorna was born, and up until 1949, Lorna’s Nation was administered by Canada under the Birtle Indian Agency. When Lorna died in 1955, her band was administered under the Portage la Prairie Indian Agency.

Lorna spent her early years in the shadow of the forced expulsion of her Nation and her family from their homes by government officials operating under the Indian Act. Beginning in the early 1930s, Canada undertook a campaign to remove her Nation from their Reserve and relocate them outside of the newly created Riding Mountain Park. The 1931 Census locates Lorna at the “Clear Lake Reserve,” but her remains were interred at the “Okanis Reserve Cemetery” in Strathclair, Manitoba, where, in the 1930s, her Nation had been relocated under a federal directive to expel First Nations from their rich hunting and fishing territory within the area of what had just become Riding Mountain National Park. In 1932 government officials decided that Lorna’s father, McKay Blackbird, and others living in Riding Mountain should be re-established at Keeseekoowenin with “houses similar to the new Indian houses that have been built on the Waywayseecappo reserve; namely concrete foundation, log walls, and floors, roofs, doors windows &c of frame construction; the usual size being approximately 18’ x 22’, the walls being 9’ high for a single story house and 12’ high for a 11/2 storey house.”[2]

Lorna would have lived her early years against a backdrop of First Nations resistance to this expulsion that Canada ultimately accomplished through the harassment of Clear Lake residents; a Ministry of Justice legal decision in favour of National Parks Branch and the Department of Indian Affairs officials who argued that Ojibway lands within Riding Mountain did not constitute a permanent reserve within the meaning of the Indian Act; and, finally, a Cabinet order that authorized the federal government to expropriate the land for the purposes of a national park. Lorna’s father, McKay Blackbird, was among the residents Canada removed to the reserve at Elphinstone by June 1936.[3] We know from Indian Affairs correspondence from Indian Agent P.G. Lazenby who was stationed at Birtle that McKay’s house and barn were counted among the “Indian buildings” on Clear Lake land subject to “taking over by the National Parks Branch.”[4] The spectre of the Indian Act that hung over Lorna’s life throughout her Nation’s expulsion did not end when her family was removed from their homes and territory.

Quarterly returns records of the Indian Residential School at Birtle show that Lorna was taken from her home and admitted to the institution on August 7, 1936. Birtle IRS records from June 1941 state that Lorna was of Keeseekoowenin, categorizing her as a top student with perfect attendance, in fourth grade, and training in the laundry “trade.” In the next quarterly return, September 1941, however she is shown as having been away from the school for about 20 days, being “home ill. In School now.” Lorna would soon be taken, once again under the Indian Act, to a distant Indian Hospital.

The Birtle December 1941 quarterly return recorded that Lorna had been away from the IRS for almost half of the time she had been registered as a pupil there, “In Hodgson San. With T.B.” From March 1942 to March 1944 quarterly returns state “T.B. Hodgson Hospital,” “Sanatorium,” “In San,” or “In Sanatorium.” In June 1944, the same month that Lorna’s name is mentioned in the Manitoba (Ninette) Sanatorium’s publication The Messenger of Health,[5] Birtle’s quarterly return states “In Ninette Sanatorium” and in September of that year, “in sanatorium” and “(now ready for discharge [from the IRS]).” A letter from A.G. Smith, Indian Agent at Birtle Manitoba to Philip Phelan, the Chief of the Training Division of Indian Affairs confirmed that Lorna’s discharge from Birtle Residential School was approved. The quarterly return of September 1944 noted that Lorna was discharged September 30, 1944, at the age of 16, having spent 6 years at the school, and achieving Grade five, with very good proficiency in Domestic Science. Remarks upon discharge were “of age now – has spent much school time in San.”[6]

Located a long way from where Lorna’s family lived, the Hodgson hospital was an Indian hospital run directly by the federal government, while Ninette, which was also a long way from Elphinstone, was a provincially funded hospital run by the Sanatorium Board of Manitoba. We know from her death certificate that Lorna died at a third hospital, the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases. Importantly, because Lorna was a status Indian, her care at all three hospitals would have been a matter that fell under the federal government, the Indian Act, and the Department of Indian Affairs’ management strategy adopted to discharge federal responsibilities at the time. The timing, location, nature and extent of Lorna’s treatment would have been matters decided by Indian Affairs alone, with input from doctors whose services were paid for by Indian Affairs. Documents remaining from these decisions don’t tend to provide a rationale for the decision-making they record. With many questions unanswered by Indian Affairs records, the MITHP team turned to other records to help fill in details.

“Voters Lists,” records created before elections detailing citizens that have been enumerated as being eligible to vote in municipal, provincial and federal elections are one of the sources that can be important for researching hospitals. At the time of Lorna’s institutionalization, status Indians were enumerated if they were of voting age and had an off-reserve address. In 1953, Lorna was registered to vote as a patient at the Ninette Sanatorium.[7] Her death at the Brandon Hospital for Mental diseases in 1955 suggests that she was transferred there from Ninette in the interim.

Lorna’s longform death certificate states that she died of “Pulmonary Tuberculosis” at the age of 26 on March 28, 1955, at the Brandon Hospital for Mental Diseases. When she passed away, Lorna had had TB for approximately 12 years. The doctor who signed her death certificate also indicated that she had been diagnosed with “Schizophrenia, Paranoid Type” for approximately 21 months, a “morbid condition” “contributing to death but not casually related to immediate cause.”

Looking at Lorna’s life, and the “Indian Act” way that we have come to know about it matters not just to her family and community but to all Canadians as it teaches us about ourselves in a way that matters to the present. While we often think about the Indian Act, especially at anniversaries such as this, as historic, the Indian Act remains an agent of control and of trauma in the lives of First Nations people – trauma that is both historic and ongoing. We’ll pick up this theme again in June, during Indigenous History Month.

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[1] The 1931 Census of Canada enumerated Lorna, age of 3, at her home, the youngest of three children of trapper McKay Blackbird and homemaker Victoria Blackbird, all Presbyterian Saulteaux Indians of Clear Lake Reserve. Seventh Census of Canada, 1931 Folder Number: T-27320 Census Place Marquette Manitoba, Canada, p. 14.

[2] Letter to Indian Affairs from P.G. Lazonby, Indian Agent, 20 July 1932. Library and Archives Canada, RG 10 Volume 7766, File 27106-4 Pt. 2.

[3] John Sandlos, “Not Wanted on the Boundary: The Expulsion of the Keeseekoowinin Ojibway band from Riding Mountain National Park,” Canadian Historical Review 89:2 (June 2008): 189-221.

[4] Letter to Indian Affairs from P.G. Lazonby, Indian Agent, 20 July 1932. Library and Archives Canada, RG 10 Volume 7766, File 27106-4 Pt. 2.

[5] The Messenger of Health, (n.p.: Winnipeg, MB, June 1944), 20. Available at the MITHP website: https://indigenoustbhistory.ca/files/The-Messenger-of-Health-June-1944.pdf

[6] Library and Archives Canada, RG 10 [Indian Affairs], Volume 6251, File 575-2, part 1 Volume Birtle Agency – Birtle Residential School – Presbyterian Church – Quarterly Returns 1941-1951.

[7] Canada, Voters Lists, Federal Elections, 1935-1980, Rural Preliminary List of Electors, Electoral District of Brandon-Souris Rural Polling Division No. 40, Ninette Sanatorium, p. 1.