Always beware of good ladies on a mission: Rachel W. Laue, ‘Good Lady Missionaries’: Presbyterian Women in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, 1885-1925, PhD dissertation, University of Florida, 2025 | settler colonial studies blog

Always beware of good ladies on a mission: Rachel W. Laue, ‘Good Lady Missionaries’: Presbyterian Women in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, 1885-1925, PhD dissertation, University of Florida, 2025

15Oct25

Abstract: This dissertation examines the role of white, colonial women in Canada’s Indian Residential School System in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Though a vital pillar of the schools throughout their history, women have largely been overlooked as key players in the attempted cultural eradication of Indigenous people in Canada. I argue that these women were not only critical to Canada’s national and imperial project of assimilation, they were uniquely suited to the task of reeducating Native children. By doing so, they stepped into an active imperial role that had previously been held primarily by men. In this analysis, the project of constructing colonial identities had two major outcomes. The first, the destruction of Indigenous cultures, languages, and lives. The second, the reconfiguration of Canadian women as active imperial subjects. The Women’s Missionary Society of the Presbyterian Church in Canada provides the perfect example of this broader trend in Canada and throughout the British Empire. For nearly 40 years, the Society funded and administrated twelve Indian Residential Schools. In that time, the women under its employ forged new paths for themselves as colonial subjects, embracing new ideas of the scope of women’s roles in the imperial world. However, they did so at the great expense of the Indigenous children under their care, many of whom did not survive or were left with lasting traumas.

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