Documentary record Bound by Fear
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Conviction Christian institutions & contexts Other or denomination not established Gordon's Reserve, Saskatchewan, Canada · 1945

Canada (1945): Gordon's residential-school staff member convicted — documented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Record class

Core record

Evidence status

Convicted

Authority role

staff member at the Anglican-run Gordon's Indian Residential School

Organization

Gordon's Indian Residential School (Anglican)

Spiritual nexus

Indigenous children held in a church-run school's total custody — the same institutional-authority nexus as the corpus's Mount Cashel and Ryan Report records.

  • Institutional obedience or isolation
  • Pastoral or clerical authority

Evidence structure

Proceedings

  1. 1945-01-01 · conviction

    Canadian court (documented in TRC final-report appendix of convicted abusers). Ewald Holfeld, a staff member at the Anglican-run Gordon's Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, was convicted in 1945 on two counts of buggery, one of attempted buggery, and common assault against children of the school — one of the earliest convictions listed in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's appendix of convicted residential-school abusers.

Documented coercion mechanisms

  • total institutional custody of Indigenous children in a church-run school

Primary record

Sources

official commission finding commission conviction listing Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Final Report, Appendix 3 (convicted abusers).

The commission's official listing of residential-school convictions.

Related record

Related cases · Christian institutions & contexts

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