Unreconciling the Summer Camp: Revisting the Assimilation Era Through the Architectures of Education for Indigenous and Settler Children, 1880-1950

Abstract

Through a comparative analysis of the architectures of two antithetical Ontario “educational” spaces–the summer camp for Settler children and the residential school for Indigenous children, this paper explains how both worked in parallel to privilege Canada’s settler-colonial agenda. Between 1880 and 1951 the Canadian government—following the recommendations of the 1879 Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half Breeds (The Davin Report)—committed to the development of a system of residential schools; that coincides with the founding of summer camps at the start of the twentieth century. Back-to-nature summer camps ensconced white settler children in bucolic wilderness settings “playing Indian” (Deloria) and bonding with the landscape as they learned to canoe, build fires, and live away from urban environments. Indigenous children, meanwhile, were torn from their families–who had inhabited those lands for millennia–and relocated to residential schools designed explicitly to “civilize,” Christianize, and sever their relationships with their languages, ways of life, and land. By focusing on how curricula orient children towards, or away from, land, I set parallel images from case studies operating in Ontario in overlapping years thus contributing to an alternative perspective on the intersection of white children playing Indian at summer camps with the targeting of Indigenous children for assimilation. I set location, landscape, and architectural design as key components to the consolidation of Settler possession and Indigenous dispossession. Recognizing the role that summer camps played in colonialism creates a mandate to reorient the sites as spaces for reconciliation–and perhaps decolonization, in the present.