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Manitoba School for the Deaf Building (1891 \u2013 1914), Winnipeg Public Library.<\/p>\nManitoba School for the Deaf Building (1891 \u2013 1914), Winnipeg Public Library.<\/p>\n
Sandy Barron<\/em><\/p>\n Historians of deaf communities and disability can no longer take for granted that our field cuts across those of race, class, and gender in consistent ways. Although in recent years scholarship and activism have begun to redraw and trouble these distinctions, deaf and disability histories in Canada have only begun to wrestle with the nation\u2019s colonial past and present, and how disabled experiences and politics can be refracted and intensified by white supremacy. In reflecting upon this necessary \u201ccolonial turn,\u201d I offer the story and commemorative reconstruction of an Indigenous student at the Manitoba School for the Deaf in the early twentieth-century.<\/p>\n Judy Wilson[1]<\/a>\u00a0spent her first six years in a Woods Cree community, living with her parents and brother on the land near what is now Carcross, Yukon Territory. In 1903, Judy and her brother were found by a prospector with her deceased parents. Sent to Whitehorse, the children were adopted by an Anglican priest who then relocated with his family to Vancouver in 1904. That year, Judy became the first of four identifiably Indigenous children to attend the Manitoba School for the Deaf (MSD) between 1889 and 1940. Like the others, she had been adopted and was on the path to \u201ccitizenship\u201d and had lost status under the 1876 Indian Act as a member of a white settler family. Accompanied by a B.C. Department of Education official, she arrived in Winnipeg in late 1904.<\/p>\n <\/span>Judy, in the extant records available in\u00a0The Echo<\/em>, the MSD\u2019s newspaper, and Annual Reports filed by Principal Duncan McDermid, appears to have learned sign language rapidly, been popular with her schoolmates, and excelled academically. In late 1906, Judy contracted a serious case of scarlet fever and was admitted to the Winnipeg General Hospital. In February of 1907, she died of tuberculosis, after her immune system had been weakened in her struggle against scarlet fever. She was buried in Winnipeg, with school residents and the local deaf community attending her service.<\/p>\n Principal McDermid, in his 1907 MSD Annual Report, mourned her death and called it \u201cinevitable.\u201d In making this argument, he relied on two colonial tropes \u2013 the idea of the \u201cdisappearing Indian\u201d and the widely accepted settler narrative that Indigenous people were naturally susceptible to TB. McDermid also wrote that Judy was well-regarded and was popular with her fellow students, so much so that she did not feel that she was \u201cdifferent in colour than other children.\u201d[2]<\/a>\u00a0McDermid, in constructing Judy as a tragic figure integrated into the life of a settler school, was unknowingly putting his finger squarely on a theoretical and epistemological problem with the dominant twenty-first century framing of the power of disability rhetoric in nineteenth-century North America. Wilson faced both pity\u00a0and\u00a0<\/em>destiny, unlike her settler deaf schoolmates, who faced a paternalism that at least contained the possibility of escape.<\/p>\n Douglas Baynton argues that the language of disability allowed for the political exclusion of women and racialized people in a society that claimed to offer citizenship and liberal rights to all. \u201cDisability is everywhere in history, once you begin to look for it, but conspicuously absent in the histories we write,\u201d Baynton argues in a phrase that has become a clarion call for the entire field of disability history.[3]<\/a>\u00a0Language and tropes that characterized popular stereotypes of disabled people were applied to other groups in order to cast doubt on their capacity to cast votes responsibly, Baynton argues. Scholars and community members, in pursuit of these exceptions from the liberal order, have produced wonderful studies by identifying where liberal models have fallen short.<\/p>\n More recent work, however, has turned toward linking the liberal order itself to racist and colonial legacies. Canadian disability histories need to theorize the colonial and liberal projects together as two sides of the same coin if the field is going to contribute to wider discussions in political and social history. In my pursuit of assumed rules around the attendance of Indigenous children at the MSD, I have settled on an argument that Judy Wilson\u2019s story led me to \u2013 Indigenous children were actively barred from settler deaf education before the 1950s, and those who were admitted as members of settler families were seen by their educators as objects of pity and destiny, meaning that they were children who could attend school and develop vocational skills, but not truly graduate without a further transformation into settler citizens. Judy Wilson, then, is the exception that proves the rule \u2013 an Indigenous student not barred from attendance at the MSD was still barred in important rhetorical and cultural ways.<\/p>\n A 1916 commemorative piece in\u00a0The Echo<\/em>\u00a0written by missionary and Methodist minister R.O. Armstrong of Kenora, Ontario, makes this point clearly in allegorical, turgid prose. The piece is written in a strange narrative style using an omniscient narrator with access to Judy\u2019s thoughts. Armstrong tells us that, upon arriving at the school, \u201cThe Indian girl has at last become conscious that her face is a different colour than those around her.\u201d One night, Wilson asked the school\u2019s matron if God could do anything she asked him for. Seeing \u201cyes\u201d from the matron, she returned to her room. \u201cThat night,\u201d Armstrong wrote, \u201ca new prayer was heard in heaven. It marked the new dawn of a new faith in a soul. It marked a new epoch in a history of a race. The Indian girl prayed to be white.\u201d[4]<\/a>\u00a0The next morning, Armstrong assured his readers, Wilson awoke in her same skin. After her death, students of the MSD realized something profound, in Armstrong\u2019s telling. \u201cMany of her silent playmates went to her funeral,\u201d Armstrong wrote, \u201cand sought to glance again upon the face they had learned to love. How strange was the support they all gave. With self-repressed excitement they signed to each other \u2018changed.\u2019 It was not the natural way. What could it mean? Again the prayer of [Judy Wilson] was answered. Her face was white.\u201d<\/p>\n