ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the struggle over age of discharge between 1920 and 1940 through the lens of correspondence between parents and other family members, the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) and school staff about the return of female pupils. In 1931, at the height of the Indian residential school system in Canada, there were approximately eighty schools in operation; forty-four were run by Roman Catholics, twenty-one were run by Anglicans, thirteen were run by the United Church of Canada and two were Presbyterian schools. The Indian Act is a consolidation of pre-Confederation Indian legislation into a nationwide framework and is part of a legal complex that equips the Canadian federal government to operate as a colonial power. Indigenous scholars argue that Indigenous women are doubly disadvantaged in societies that are colonial and patriarchal. Yet the irony is that while Indigenous women were assigned a low status in these societies, their place within them was vitally important.
