Exploring Concordia’s colonial past
This text was written by Manon Tremblay, Senior Director of Indigenous Directions at Concordia.
Peter Gossage, Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of History, contributed to the research.
Content warning: The following contains references to Indian residential schools, child abuse, slavery and racism.
“Indian residential schools” is the formal name used in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and in historical and legal records referring to the school system established by the federal government to assimilate Indigenous children into Canadian society.
“How can we reconcile the presence of a monument to Catholic missionary zeal and settler-colonialist racism with our university’s progressive values and its specific commitment to Indigenous reconciliation?” - Peter Gossage, Concordia at Fifty, 2024.
Concordia University will unveil its newly renovated terrace behind the Hall Building today. The new terrace celebrates Indigenous cultures, showcases Indigenous art and is designed to foster a sense of belonging for First Nations, Inuit and Métis people on campus while providing an oasis for all Concordians to relax, meet with friends and enjoy the sunshine.
Today, Sept. 30, is the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, or, as many Indigenous people prefer, Orange Shirt Day. It is a day of commemoration for the children who never made it home from Indian Residential Schools and a day to support survivors whose lives were forever changed by their experiences in these schools.
The choice to unveil the terrace on this day is neither arbitrary nor tokenistic. The occasion also marks the long-awaited release of a report that explores Concordia’s association with religious orders that participated actively in the destruction of Indigenous cultures, religions and languages by enforcing government sanctioned assimilation policies.
Since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) tabled its final report and its 94 Calls to Action in 2015, universities across Canada have responded by creating their own action plans and building the necessary infrastructure to guide their institutions towards reconciliation.
Concordia launched its first Indigenous Directions Action Plan in 2019 and subsequently created the Office of Indigenous Directions to oversee reconciliation and decolonization efforts across the university. The Plan included a recommendation that Concordia undertake critical research into its history. In 2021, the Office commissioned a study by then-doctoral student Colby Gaudet, PhD 24, who studies interactions of religion and colonialism.
Gaudet’s report, Exploring Concordia’s Colonial Past: An Exploration of the University’s Past and Present Relationships with Indigenous Peoples, is now available online. The report seeks to shed light on the university’s past, its foundations and its associations with key players in the shaping and enforcing of colonial policies harmful to Indigenous peoples.
As a prominent member of the Montreal community committed to building mutually beneficial and respectful relationships with Indigenous communities, Concordia recognizes the importance of highlighting the report’s key findings.
The university also recognizes the need to invite deeper and more meaningful reflection on the continued negative impacts of settler-colonial teaching, learning and working environments on Indigenous faculty, students and staff.
Concordia University: 52 years of history
Concordia was founded in 1974 with the merger of Loyola College, a Jesuit institution, and Sir George Williams University.
Throughout its history, Concordia has experienced steady growth, adding academic programs and more than doubling its student population. The university has seen many firsts, including the first PhD in Art Education (1977) in Canada, the founding of the Simone de Beauvoir institute (1978), Quebec’s first executive MBA program (1985) and its first Major in First Peoples Studies (2011).
Concordia has grown into a world-class research institution. It has been ranked first in North America for universities under 50 years, the best business school in Canada, and one of Canada’s top research universities, among other accolades.
The university is also consistently ranked as a top employer, and its alumni have gone on to become leaders in their fields and communities, blazing a bright path for future generations.
Despite the success of its first 52 years, Concordia’s direct and indirect associations with organizations that played a prominent role in the cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples has been wilfully passed over in silence.
In the telling of its history, the stated values of the Jesuits, as well as the pervasive narrative of the Grey Nuns as benevolent and charitable, have been presented as fact and without critique in Concordia communications. This one-sided colonial narrative is at odds with Indigenous experiences of and interactions with members of these religious orders.
With the release of Gaudet’s report, Concordia has an opportunity to engage in a deeper reflection on its tacit complicity in erasing Indigenous voices.
Findings of the report
Exploring Concordia’s Colonial Past focuses on three organizations, two of which are direct ancestors of the institutions that merged in 1974 to become Concordia: namely, the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) for Sir George Williams University and the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) for Loyola College.
The third organization discussed in the report is the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, also known as the Grey Nuns, whose Mother House building was acquired by the university in 2007.
The report also examines how the social history of the Grey Nuns is selectively presented in Concordia communications. It describes how the university furthers the widely accepted colonial narrative of the sisters’ charitable work and their key role in Canada’s history, with no mention of their involvement in the Indian Residential School system.
What follows is a summary of the some of the report’s key findings.
Concordia’s Jesuit roots
Concordia traces its roots to the Society of Jesus, a Roman Catholic teaching order. The Jesuits actively participated in the French colonial mission to convert Indigenous people to Christianity and assimilate them into the New France settlement. These early Jesuit mission schools served as prototypes for the Indian Residential School model that became a part of Canadian federal policy during the late-19th and most of the 20th century.
Throughout Turtle Island, Indigenous people were dispossessed of their lands through policies such as the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius, which stipulated that lands not owned by Christian entities were free for the taking. In New France, the Jesuits became significant landowners, acquiring by royal grant nearly one million acres of land in the St. Lawrence Valley, the ancestral homelands of the Haudenosaunee people.
The Jesuits took possession of these lands without the knowledge or consent of the Haudenosaunee people. For decades after, the Jesuits deeded significant sections of their land holdings to French settlers, expropriating Kanien’kéhà:ka people in the process.
The Jesuits also relied on the labour of enslaved African and Indigenous people to operate their landholdings and their mission schools across the Americas. Examples include the large Jesuit-owned haciendas of coastal Peru, where enslaved Africans supported the Jesuit colleges in Lima, Cartagena, and elsewhere.
Through their annual reports, “Relations des Jésuites de la Nouvelle-France” (“The Jesuit Relations”), the Jesuits updated their superiors on their progress in the religious conversion of Indigenous peoples. Heavily edited to appeal to the broader public, these chronicles contained accounts of Jesuit martyrdom at the hands of Indigenous people.
These annual reports laid the groundwork for the Canadian historical narrative of the Haudenosaunee and Wendat peoples as hostile and violent nations, prone to acts of unprovoked cruelty. The takeover of ancestral and unceded Indigenous homelands in the early days of New France set the stage for settler-colonial alienation of Indigenous title that continues to this day.
The founding of Loyola College
Loyola College was founded in 1896 as an extension of the English-language classical program of the Jesuit Collège Sainte-Marie, established in Montreal in 1848. In January 1900, land was purchased in the city’s Notre-Dame-de-Grâce neighbourhood. Construction began in 1913 and Loyola College moved to its new building in 1916.
The former Jesuit college is now the Loyola Campus’s Administration (AD) building, and the former Jesuit Residence is now the JR building.
Jesuit participation in Indian Residential Schools
In the 1840s, several Jesuits left Québec to establish missions in Indigenous communities further west, notably on Walpole Island, Ont., and in Wikwemikong, Ont. The Wikwemikong mission soon became a busy Christian community with more Jesuits arriving from Europe.
To secure continued funding from federal authorities for their mission schools, the Jesuits espoused the Indigenous education policies issued by the Department of Indian Affairs. The Department’s Davin Report (1879) introduced some of the first official residential school policy in Canada. It recommended that residential schools be established off reserve to weaken family and community influence over the children.
Under this pressure from the federal government, the Jesuits opened new gender-segregated schools in Spanish River, Ont., in 1913. These schools, which came to be known as the Spanish Indian Residential Schools, were the only Indian residential schools in Canada operated by the Jesuits. However, throughout the Indian Residential School era, the Jesuits also operated at least 30 such schools in the United States.
In the early 2000s, during the time of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, and later during the Truth and Reconciliation inquiries, survivors of the Spanish Indian Residential Schools provided testimonies of the abuse and neglect they suffered as pupils.
In 2023, the Jesuits of Canada released the names of 29 Jesuits “credibly accused of sexual abuse of minors” in institutions across Canada. Of this group, nine were associated with Loyola College and Concordia University and seven were assigned to work at the Spanish Indian Residential Schools. Eight of the 29 Jesuits were also assigned as parish priests in Indigenous communities in Quebec and Ontario.
Many of the Spanish Indian Residential Schools’ administrators and faculty were tied to Loyola College, having been educated there or having taught there for a time. William Hingston, S. J., Loyola College rector from 1918 to 1925, was one of them.
The son of a prominent doctor and former Montreal mayor (1875–77), Hingston served as a chaplain in the First World War. He is credited with bringing Loyola College into the modern era, overseeing a fundamental change in its academic programming. Hingston also oversaw developments at the Spanish Indian Residential Schools in his capacity as a Jesuit Superior.
Concordia’s present-day Hingston Hall residence (HA and HB) is named after him.
As a stepping stone for Jesuits who would later go on to abuse Indigenous children, oversee the federal government’s assimilation policies and enact the Roman Catholic Church’s agenda of religious conversion, Loyola College was inextricably linked to the Indian Residential School system.
The history of the Jesuits of Montreal and Loyola College are covered in Section Three of the report.
The YMCA and Sir George Williams University
The Young Men’s Christian Association was founded by Sir George Williams in 1844. A worldwide youth organization, the YMCA’s mission is “to put Christian values into practice by developing a healthy body, mind and spirit.” In Canada, local YMCA chapters deliver services and promote activities that focus on youth development.
A key feature of the YMCA’s programming is its summer camps, where millions of children across North America spend their holidays. Historically, these camps had a common theme of “playing Indian”: through costumes, programs, and campfire practices, non-Indigenous campers were encouraged to adopt and romanticize stereotypes of Indigenous life, relying on stolen Indigenous symbolism and traditions.
Through its summer camps, the YMCA indulged in full-scale cultural appropriation at a time when Indigenous children were being forcibly removed from their homes to attend residential schools. While non-Indigenous children were encouraged to paint their faces and practice war whoops in camps that featured tipis and totem poles, Indigenous children were forbidden from speaking their languages or expressing any aspect of their cultures.
Sir George Williams University was founded by the Montreal YMCA — an organization that has been complicit in making a mockery of Indigenous traditions and reinforcing devastating stereotypes that endure to this day.
Section Five of the report explores Sir George Williams University and the YMCA, including Section 5.18, “Playing Indian’” at Camp.
Sainte Marguerite d’Youville and the Sisters of Charity
The Sisters of Charity of Montreal, also known as the Grey Nuns, is a Roman Catholic order founded in 1737 by Marguerite d’Youville.
Born Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais in Varennes, Que., in 1701, she married François-Magdeleine You d’Youville, a bootlegger and slave trader, in 1722. The d’Youvilles were notorious enslavers. A post-mortem inventory of François’ property included an enslaved Indigenous person “aged about ten to eleven years.” This child became the property of the newly widowed Marguerite.
After François’ death, Marguerite d’Youville acquired several more enslaved people. In 1738, she went to court in a dispute over the ownership of an enslaved person she had inherited from her father-in-law.
As a congregation, the Grey Nuns originally ministered to the poor. Under Marguerite d’Youville’s direction, the new congregation supported their growing enterprise through the labour of enslaved people, prisoners of war and indentured servants. They also relied on the free labour of the unwed mothers, sex workers, orphans and elderly individuals they professed to be helping.
Supported by this abundant free labour, the Grey Nuns excelled in their many entrepreneurial pursuits. They ran a brewery and sold tobacco and sundry items produced by the labour of enslaved people.
Marguerite d'Youville enslaved Indigenous people up until her death in 1777. She was canonized as a saint by the Catholic Church in 1990.
Grey Nuns participation in Indian Residential Schools
By the 1840s, the order had expanded considerably and became an important provider of education, health care and social services in Canada and parts of the United States. During that time, the Grey Nuns expanded westward and established a new convent in St. Boniface, in what is now Manitoba. They were soon joined by a male Roman Catholic order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, who began expanding their own mission network into Northwest Canada.
Together, the Oblates and the Grey Nuns began to staff residential schools across the Prairies. From the late 1870s to the 1980s, the Grey Nuns of Montreal worked as administrators, teachers, nurses and staff in at least 22 residential schools across Canada and the United States, including:
Ontario
- St. Mary’s
- St. Margaret’s (Fort Frances)
Manitoba
- Pine Creek
- Assiniboia
Saskatchewan
- Muscowequan
- Beauval (Île-à-la-Crosse)
- Qu’Appelle (Lebret)
Alberta
- Sacred Heart (Brocket)
- St. Mary’s (Blood)
- Holy Angels (Fort Chipewyan)
- Lac la Biche
- St. Albert (Youville)
- Blue Quills (Sacred Heart)
Northwest Territories
- Fort Providence Boarding Home (Sacred Heart)
- Fort Resolution (St. Joseph’s)
- Aklavik (Immaculate Conception)
- Fort Smith (Breynat Hall)
- Inuvik Roman Catholic (Grollier Hall)
- Fort Simpson Roman Catholic (Lapointe Hall)
- Fort Smith (Grandin College)
Nunavut
- St. Mary’s (Turquetil Hall)
North Dakota
- Fort Totten Indian Boarding School (St. Michael's)
Other schools, including the notorious St. Anne’s Residential School in Northern Ontario, and École Sainte-Thérèse-de-l’Enfant-Jésus in Fort George, Que., were operated by affiliated congregations. Examples include the Sisters of Charity of Ottawa, which began in 1845 as an outpost of the Grey Nuns of Montreal but achieved its formal autonomy in 1854.
The physical, psychological, spiritual and cultural abuses that Indigenous children were subjected to in residential schools are well documented by the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2015). This abuse — as well as the unsanitary conditions, poor nutrition, child labour, frequent fires and the rampant spread of tuberculosis and childhood diseases — contributed to a high mortality rate that the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation is still documenting.
Since 2021, unmarked graves have been discovered across Canada on the grounds of former Indian residential schools.
To this day, the Catholic Church refuses to accept full responsibility for its actions. An apology by Pope Francis during a 2022 visit to Canada was deemed insufficient by survivors, their descendants, and Indigenous leaders, including Murray Sinclair, former TRC chief commissioner.
In a statement published in response to the apology, Sinclair wrote that rather than accept institutional responsibility, Francis concentrated on laying blame at the feet of individual perpetrators.
Members of the Catholic Church have gone so far as to remark that many students had a good experience and benefited from the education they received from residential schools. This narrative has helped to fuel anti-Indigenous racism as well as residential school denialism and conspiracy theories.
The Grey Nuns are directly responsible for harming tens of thousands of Indigenous children across Canada and, by extension, entire Indigenous communities. Like the Jesuits, they played an active role in enforcing the Canadian government’s assimilation policies. Through their actions, they engaged in genocide. Many survivors of residential schools and their descendants have had their lives forever altered by their childhood experiences of violence and deprivation.
The history of the Grey Nuns and their ties to Indian residential schools is covered in Section Four of the report.
A selective narrative at Concordia
In the narrative of Concordia’s history, the Jesuits’ and Grey Nuns’ participation in the oppression and attempted assimilation of Indigenous peoples has been ignored. Specifically, after the purchase of the Grey Nuns’ Mother House in 2007, the congregation’s history as presented on Concordia’s website was limited to a colonial narrative. There was no mention of the nuns’ involvement in Indian Residential Schools.
For example, a reference to the sisters being sent to isolated communities in Manitoba, Alberta, Saskatchewan and the Northwest Territories to establish shelters, schools and orphanages in the mid-19th century failed to make the painful connection between these activities and Indian residential schools. Some of this information has since been revised or removed as part of recommendations made in light of this report.
At a time when government-funded inquiries into the Indian residential school system were in full swing and covered extensively in the media, articles and promotional material about the building’s 2014 opening focused on its architectural heritage and the dominant social and cultural roles religious institutions once played in Quebec. There was no mention of the Grey Nuns’ widespread participation in these schools.
Described on Concordia’s website as a “Montreal architectural jewel,” the GN building now serves mainly as a student residence. Yet, it was from this architectural jewel that generations of Catholic nuns were sent to work at Indian residential schools across Canada.
The GN building also contains a crypt, in which 232 Grey Nuns who once lived at the Mother House are interred. Some of these graves contain the remains of nuns who were directly involved in residential schools.
Of all the buildings owned by Concordia, the Grey Nuns Mother House is the one that elicits the most visceral reactions amongst Indigenous peoples. It is seen as emblematic of 150 years of oppression and cultural genocide. The building, its name, the chapel, the crypt, the religious iconography within the building and on its grounds, and its federal and provincial designations as a heritage building are all problematic for many Indigenous people.
The Grey Nuns building serves as a permanent reminder of the children who lost their lives in Indian residential schools and the intergenerational trauma suffered by survivors and their descendants.
Concordia’s selective account of the Grey Nuns’ history has been deeply harmful to Indigenous peoples. For Concordia to achieve lasting reconciliation with Indigenous peoples, it is important to provide a true historical account that includes Indigenous voices. It is also necessary to situate the Grey Nuns Building and the congregation’s history as a major force in the Indian residential school system.
Looking forward
Over the last decade, Concordia has taken steps to build relationships with Indigenous communities and has invested in programs and services to attract and serve the needs of Indigenous students, faculty and staff. By exploring its past associations and the legacy of some of its buildings, Concordia has an opportunity for deeper reflection on its history as well as its commitment to reconciliation with Indigenous peoples.
This work is far from over.
To achieve true reconciliation, Concordia must build spaces that make Indigenous people feel welcome. The university must explore its history and understand and acknowledge the role its founding institutions and associations have played in the subjugation, oppression and assimilation of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people.
In the next 50 years, a greater commitment will be needed to elevate Indigenous voices, prioritize Indigenous concerns and build Concordia into a university of choice for Indigenous students.
Read the full report, "Exploring Concordia's colonial past".