Notre Dame des Victoires / Lac La Biche Mission National Historic Site

Notre Dame des Victories / Lac La Biche Mission was designated as a national historic event in 1989.

The Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada reviewed this designation in 2024.

Reasons for designation

Established by the Oblates in 1853 and relocated to its current site in 1855-56 in the traditional lands of the nêhiyawak (Cree) and other First Nations and the homeland of the Métis, this mission was created to convert the First Nations and Métis peoples who visited the nearby fur trade post to Christianity and to minister to the small community of free traders located there.

Located strategically near the Churchill and Mackenzie River watersheds, from the 1860s to 1889 this mission played a pivotal role as a transshipment point for supplies to northern Oblate missions, allowing the congregation to expand their missionary frontier.

Beginning in the 1860s, the Grey Nuns of Montréal operated a school at the mission for First Nations, Métis, and non-Indigenous children. It began taking in boarders and was among the Catholic church’s earliest experiments in residential education in the northwest outside of the Winnipeg area. In time, this school began receiving federal funding, and by 1892 was considered by the federal government as an Indian Industrial School. It was relocated to another site in 1898. A second, separate boarding school for Indigenous and non-Indigenous children, run by the Filles de Jésus, was located here from 1905 to 1963.

Catholic religious congregations ran the majority of residential schools and were essential to their day-to-day operation. In doing so, their intention was to convert Indigenous children and assimilate them to Euro-Canadian culture. The residential school system was imposed on Indigenous Peoples by the federal government for over a century as part of a broad set of assimilation efforts to destroy Indigenous cultures and identities and suppress their histories. The accounts of residential school survivors provide critical insight into the devastating experiences children had at residential schools, which included poor living conditions, physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, neglect, malnutrition, hard labour, the deliberate suppression of their cultures and languages, and forced separation from their families and communities. These experiences had long-term impacts not only on survivors, but also on their families and communities. In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada described the residential schools as a form of cultural genocide.

Review of designation

Reviews are undertaken on an ongoing basis to ensure that designations reflect current scholarship, shifts in historical understandings, and a range of voices, perspectives and experiences in Canadian society.

In 2024, this designation was reviewed due to colonial assumptions and an absence of a significant layer of history in the commemorative plaque text, and the statement of commemorative intent. The original plaque text, approved in 1990, highlighted the Mission’s role in the development of the fur trade and transportation and communications in the West. The original text did not reference the schools that were operated at the site, including an Industrial School for Indigenous children.

New reasons for designation were expanded to include the site’s connection to the residential school system and to elaborate on its role as a transshipment point for Oblate missions in the Northwest. The original plaque was removed, and a new plaque will be prepared as time and resources permit.

Sources: Historic Sites and Monuments Board of Canada, Minutes, June 2022; December 2023.

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