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WARNING: This story contains details of sexual abuse and experiences at residential schools.
The night was mild and the March moon bright when Agnes Benn fled the Birtle Indian Residential School through the playroom window, a few weeks after she told a friend that the principal, Henry Currie, put his hand over her mouth so she wouldn’t scream in his office.
Helen MacKay, the teacher on duty that Tuesday evening in the playroom, said the teen girl was acting up and hanging out the window, “which is strictly forbidden,” and ignoring commands to stop.
“To make sure she heard me, I twitched her dress. Still there was no response,” said MacKay in a handwritten letter to Duncan Campbell Scott, the notorious deputy superintendent for the federal Department of Indian Affairs.
The teacher said Agnes only stopped playing in the window after she threatened to send her to the principal’s office. While MacKay was distracted, Agnes jumped out the window sometime after 7 p.m. on March 11, 1930.
A search party of some older male students led by a staff member spent about two hours looking for Agnes, but found no trace and gave up, according to Indian Affairs records.
Principal Currie and Percy Lazenby, the Indian agent, “were not unduly alarmed” by Agnes’s escape.
Agnes was “strong and able-bodied” and an “experienced truant” who had walked 18 kilometres south from the institution in Birtle, Man., to her home on the Birdtail Sioux reserve on five previous occasions. Currie and Lazenby let the girl go, “knowing they’d bring Agnes back to the residential school soon enough,” said an Aug. 25, 1930, memo sent to Scott about the case.
Several weeks before running away, Agnes told 14-year-old Maggie Whitecloud that Currie took her into his office, “put his hand under her clothes and got on top of her,” according to a typewritten transcription of a statement Maggie gave to RCMP and Manitoba Provincial Police officers months later.
“She started to scream and Mr. Currie put his hand over her mouth to keep her from screaming,” said Whitecloud in her statement.
It wasn’t the first time.
Agnes Benn was found dead on April 16, 1930, about 12 kilometres from Birtle residential school. Her body was partly eaten by wolves, according to department records.
Manitoba’s “Official Notice of Death” says her date of birth was “not known exactly”; the document guessed her age to be 17. The information in the document was provided by Lazenby, who, as the Indian agent, oversaw and manged affairs in Agnes’s home reserve on behalf of the federal government.
The details of Agnes’s escape and what she told Maggie about Currie were omitted from the historical record compiled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was created to delve into Canada’s residential school history as a result of the multibillion-dollar 2006 residential school settlement agreement between the federal government and survivors of the institutions.
The reason the TRC heard very little about Agnes Benn is because the federal government failed to transfer records to the commission about her case — and the multiple sex abuse charges Currie faced.
Currie faced ‘serious criminal action’ involving girls
Currie waited nearly two weeks, until March 23, 1930, before finally alerting police that Agnes was missing. Police then launched the second search, which finally found her, according to department records.
Indian Affairs officials considered a formal investigation, but determined “there would be no merit” in charging Currie “with negligence in the case of Agnes Benn,” said the Aug. 25 memo to Scott.
In their estimation, Currie had bigger problems. He faced “a serious criminal action” involving other girls from Birtle, said the memo. Currie was awaiting trial on eight charges involving three girls at the school: Maggie Whitecloud, Helen Benn and Lucy McKay.
Currie was charged with several counts of indecent assault, illicit connection, “seduction of a ward” and “carnal knowledge of a girl between the ages of 14 and 16 not being his wife.”
The investigation also revealed that Agnes Benn was one of Currie’s victims, and that she “was to be whipped just previous to her leaving the school,” according to a Manitoba Provincial Police report.
Failure to transfer records raises questions
The TRC, which finished its work in 2015, did not receive any of the records outlining the investigation into Currie while he was principal of the Presbyterian Church-run boarding school. The official history of residential schools compiled by the TRC contained only fragments from this part of Birtle’s story.
The TRC report did mention Agnes Benn, citing a Winnipeg Free Press story that said she was found four kilometres from her home on the Birdtail reserve in “a hollow by a farmer looking for his stray horses.” The story said she froze to death at age 15 after she was caught in a blizzard.
Presbyterian Church records reviewed by the TRC said “no blame attached to the superintendent” for the girl’s death.
The TRC noted, separately, that Currie was “honourably acquitted” at a trial where he faced charges of “immoral conduct.” The TRC cites a 1940 Indian Affairs memo that reported two of Currie’s accusers “were given prison terms and a third relieved of her teacher’s certificate.” The TRC noted it “could locate no further information on this case.”
This part of Birtle’s history — which ran from 1888 to 1970 — came to light only after Tyla Betke, a doctoral candidate in the history department at Carleton University in Ottawa, unearthed the records at Library and Archives Canada in 2021. She published her findings in the December 2023 issue of The Canadian Historical Review.
The records were never microfilmed, which may explain why they were never turned over to the TRC, said Betke. She said the records included police reports and the transcription of verbal statements by Currie’s teenage victims.
“If someone deemed it too sensitive because of the abuse material within it, then how many other files that have the most sensitive of materials have never been microfilmed, that have never been digitized?” said Betke. “This can’t be the only case.”
CBC News was provided a redacted copy of about 400 pages of records by researcher Edward Sadowski, who obtained them through the Access to Information Act. Sadowski also provided CBC News with a copy of Agnes Benn’s Manitoba death record.
Sadowski, who retired as research and archives co-ordinator for Algoma University’s Shingwauk Residential School Centre in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., transferred thousands of documents from his decades of work to the Investigative Journalism Foundation, which has unveiled a one-of-a-kind database of residential school records.
‘There are documents out there’
The previous Liberal government told CBC News it continues to search for, identify and transfer residential school related records.
Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) said “scoping” work through a residential schools documents advisory committee identified 23 million residential school-related documents that go “beyond the type” initially transferred to the TRC.
Some key records still remain beyond the scrutiny of historians and the public, said Cadmus Delorme, the former chair of the residential schools documents advisory committee.
Delorme, whose mother attended Birtle residential school, said the federal government refuses to release many records, citing solicitor-client privilege between Justice Canada and the federal departments it represented — such as Indian Affairs, which was split into CIRNAC and Indigenous Services Canada.
Other records, such as files from Indian hospitals and sanitoriums, which treated residential school students, remain locked away as a result of ongoing class-action litigation, said Delorme.
“I cannot say a number, but I can tell you, there are documents out there,” said Delorme, former chief of Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan.
“They’re technically our documents.… Those are our family members…. In order for us to truly do reconciliation in this country, we need to validate the truth. These documents validate the truth.”
CIRNAC Minister Gary Anandasangaree announced in early March that the government had reached a settlement agreement on the Indian hospital class-action case. It’s unclear if this will lead to the release of related records.
The federal government destroyed thousands of pages of residential school records throughout the 1900s. As a result, the true number of how many children attended and died at residential schools may never be known.
That’s what makes these recently discovered Birtle records significant. They contain the words and experiences of three young girls who were violated and then abandoned by the system that was supposed to protect them, said Betke.
“It was a 14-year-old girl retelling what happened,” Betke said. “You could tell the girls didn’t understand what was happening to them, what had happened to them.”
How the case against Currie fell apart
In her June 10, 1930, statement to police, Maggie Whitecloud said Currie took her into his office in April and closed the door. Maggie said she “tried to stop him,” but “he was too strong.” She said she cried and Currie told her not to tell anyone, and gave her candy. When Currie found out she had told someone about what happened, he stripped her naked in the boy’s bathroom and beat her with a strap.
“Then he gave me bread and water for supper and breakfast,” said Maggie.
In her June 10 statement, Helen Benn said the second time Currie attacked her, it happened in the laundry room around Christmastime when when she was 18. She said Currie threw her to the floor. Benn said she tried “to shout out, but Mr. Currie put his hand over my mouth.”
In her statement, Lucy McKay said Currie first started to fondle her when she was 16, and that it continued every month for the next two years. He would tell her not to worry, that she wasn’t going to have a baby. She said he gave her cream and powder for her face and told her that he wanted to take her back to British Columbia with him.
All three girls told police they met Currie the morning before their interviews, and he told them to say nothing.
After the June 18, 1930, preliminary hearing held at the town hall in Birtle, Man., Currie was ordered to stand trial in October.
The records show that Currie, with the help of Indian agent Lazenby and the interim principal at Birtle, began a pressure campaign through the girls’ relatives to get them to change their stories. In one case, Currie used money and a sack of flour to convince the sister of one of the victims to sign a note with the victim’s name rescinding her allegations.
Currie was charged with the rape of a former student named Annie Benn before the start of his Nov. 11, 1930, trial in Minnedosa. The Crown lined up 17 witnesses to testify. But it all fell apart.
Rescinding the allegations
Maggie and Helen recanted their allegations at trial. The Crown then withdrew the rape charge involving Annie Benn. The jury acquitted Currie on the charges involving Lucy.
Maggie, Helen and Annie were then charged with perjury and tried in January 1931. During their trial, Maggie and Helen both said they were pressured into changing their stories during Currie’s trial. The Crown withdrew the perjury charge against Annie. None of the girls were represented by a lawyer, because officials deemed it wasn’t necessary.
Magistrate H.P. Reid concluded that “Mr. Currie had been acquitted on perjured evidence,” but couldn’t be tried again, according to a report on the hearing by Lazenby. Reid sentenced Maggie and Helen to serve two years at the Salvation Home in Winnipeg.
The case created “a great deal of dissatisfaction” in the Birtle district, wrote W.M. Graham, an Indian commissioner based in Regina, Sask., in a letter to Duncan Campbell Scott, the deputy superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs, shortly after the girls were sentenced.
Graham suggested the department should try to have the girls released and sent to another residential school to calm local emotions.
“Anyone who knows Indians well could understand how easy it would be to get them to perjure themselves,” wrote Graham.
Scott dismissed the suggestion.
“I am inclined to let them finish their sentence,” he wrote in a February 1931 response. “The age of these girls and their recent experience would make them rather disturbing influences in one of our schools.”
The Investigative Journalism Foundation has just published a database containing thousands of pages of information about residential schools that have never before been made public. See their website to view the database and read about what the documents reveal.
Support is available for anyone affected by their experience at residential schools and those who are triggered by the latest reports. A national Indian Residential School Crisis Line has been set up to provide support for former students and those affected. People can access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866-925-4419.
