“TO THOSE WHO SAY WE ARE ASSIMILATED, I SAY HOGWASH!”: A HISTORY OF THE WYANDOT OF ANDERDON DAY SCHOOL EXPERIENCE, 1790 TO 1915

Since the early seventeenth century, the Wendat/Wandat have engaged with colonial education and other strategies of adaptation to ensure their community’s survival. It is of little surprise that in the 1800s, acknowledging their place in a growing settler society, the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation requested western-style schools. For the Wendat/Wandat, adopting western-style education was not an act of conciliation or defeat; it was deft political maneuvering and a way to help maintain Wendat/Wandat continuity throughout the Wendat/Wandat diaspora. This dissertation counters Indigenous education scholarship which argues that western-style schooling seeks to erase Indigenous ways of knowledge and replace it with Settler systems of knowing. Moreover, this dissertation builds on diaspora and Wendat/Wandat studies, which highlight how the Wendat/Wandat relied on pre-diaspora traditions by utilizing educational strategies to ensure community and cultural survivance. Through an ethnohistoric approach and decolonizing methodologies, this dissertation uses colonial government records, missionary accounts, as well as private collections from the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation to reveal a model of a cooperative, rather than forced, schooling. In 1846, the Wyandot of Anderdon Nation opened an Indigenous-run western-style school near Windsor, Ontario. Through this case study, a long-established pattern of mixing Settler knowledge and Indigenous epistemologies is revealed, reinforcing the argument that incorporating colonial education did not result in a rejection of Wendat/ Wandat teachings. The Wendat/Wandat developed a cultural matrix where both Wendat/Wandat and non-Wendat/Wandat practices existed simultaneously. As a result, Wendat/Wandat students continued to preserve and pass on community knowledge for future generations while also understanding and navigating the increasingly hostile Settler states of Canada and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

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