Residential Schools

Already struggling with dwindling attendance and student truancy, the outbreak of the Northwest Resistance caused the school to be abandoned and brought a number of challenges for the principal, Rev. Thomas Clarke. After instruction was stopped at the school in 1885, the building was used as military barracks for Canadian troops fighting the resistance movement.Students of the school were scattered by the resistance, some of whom went missing. At the end of March the townspeople fortified themselves in the Mounted Police barracks. The school was initially plundered by the townspeople and the police before they fortified themselves in the barracks. Members of the rebellion also looted some of the abandoned homes in the area and the school's food supplies. Later in the summer the school started to be used to station Canadian troops. In autumn of 1885 the principal was notified that the school would be needed as winter barracks for a gunnery battery. The Northwest Resistance brought with it a host of problems for the school. Even after the facilities had been renovated and were back in use, the school struggled to increase enrolment to the revised expectations of thirty boys and thirty girls. Rev. Thomas Clarke was defended the school and his staff against accusations of mistreatment including poor diet and lack of medical treatment. He also was accused of keeping children longer than agreed upon and of not allowing parents to remove their children from the school whenever they desired.

Battleford Industrial School was opened in 1883 on the orders of the Federal Government and the recommendation of Edgar Dewdney who selected Rev. Thomas Clarke to be principal and overseer. Establishing industrial schools in the Northwest Territories was the idea of Edgar Dewdney as a response to the poor attendance within day schools. Rev. Thomas Clarke ran the school until July 1, 1895.

In an attempt to continue the government's goals of assimilation and segregation, graduates from the File Hills Boarding School and Qu’Appelle Industrial School were selected as part of a farming colony, which was established on prime agricultural land in the Peepeekisis reserve. Officials recognized that older generations of Aboriginal people would likely not embrace a Euro-Canadian way of life, so instead they focused their assimilative efforts on young people. In addition, it was believed that after having attended residential schools, Western-educated Indigenous people would cease to visit their home reserves and leave the influence of their family. Promising graduates from these two schools, both male and female, were selected to be part of the farming colony, and were made to marry each other to create ideal farming homes. In its first year of operations, the File Hills Colony consisted of three families who were each provided with a $125 loan to purchase farming supplies. They were encouraged to participate in acceptable Euro-Canadian practices, and forbidden from interacting with other Indigenous people who engaged in traditional cultural practices.