Mom's letter circa 1950 about non-Treaty Indians and their plight

I had an interesting visit from a lady who was collecting any old clothes the girls might have.  She is the nurse and girls’ supervisor in an Anglican Native school in Alberta.  She says just Treaty Indians go to this school and the non-treaty Indians have a terrible time.  Sometimes the grandfather chose to be Non-Treaty and if his family tries to change status to become Treaty, it isn’t allowed.  They can never get back onto Treaty.  The non-treaty children can come to the school but only as day-pupils and in bad times have nothing but rags to wear and no help at all, no hospitalization or anything.  I gave her lots of clothes and books. 

Apparently, a Non-Treaty Indian woman showed up at the nursing station with her baby who had pneumonia.  She had tried to get the Catholic Hospital to take it and they wouldn’t because she was Non-Treaty.  The baby was dying and the nurses at the school would get into trouble of they were caught helping her but the Principal said they couldn’t turn the baby away so they took the baby and the Mother in. They kept the baby alive for two days in a vapour tent but the Indian Agent found out.  The only way they could keep their jobs was to prove that they had personally bought the Vick’s Vapor Rub that was used in the vapour tent and it wasn’t from the school’s medical stores.

I couldn’t sleep at all the night following her visit.  I could not turn off my memories.  My father was part Indian, my mother was not, but she had no interest in or training in how to keep house and she showed no interest in the six of us kids.  Our house was filthy and shabby.  It was known all over town as the house where the dirty Indian kids lived.  I didn’t look like an Indian but it didn’t stop Tommy Bailey from calling me a papoose.  On Cortes Island, I’ve been able to escape this history by simply not mentioning it.  All that remains is that worm that squirms in my memory bank and refuses to die.

(Mom was in fact Metis but in her childhood was called part-indian. Mom's grandfather was AC Anderson, Hudson's Bay Fur Trader who married a Metis woman. His life is written about by my sister Nancy Anderson in her book "The Pathfinder".)