THE canadian residential school system
Charles douglas
Upon hearing the word genocide, it is common for people to think of better-known instances such as the Rwandan genocide and the Holocaust as the only ones that have happened in recent history. However, what many people (even Canadians) overlook, is the fact that the Canadian Government conducted its own form of genocide; for over 100 years starting in the 1880s, the Residential school system was started, removing Indigenous children from their homes and communities. This was done by implementing Residential schools that strictly targeted Indigenous children. The first Residential school opened in the late 1880s with the intent of removing Indigenous children from their heritage and to turn them into ‘ideal citizens,’ under a colonial, Eurocentric principle of what was believed to be an ideal citizen. This would stand to have a long lasting impact on Indigenous peoples, not just as individuals, but as a culture and identity for the community as a whole. By removing children from their homes and stripping them of their identity, the Canadian government committed what can now be considered a cultural genocide that would, unfortunately, have a long lasting negative impact and ruining the lives of many generations of its first peoples.
Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous population is oftentimes referred to as a “Cultural Genocide”. Under the UN Genocide Convention the term “genocide” can be defined under Article II (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and section (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The term ‘cultural genocide’ can be defined as the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements which make a one group of people distinct from other groups. Despite the fact that the last residential school didn’t close until 1996 (over 100 years after the first school opened) many people are unaware that these schools ever occurred in the first place. In many high school history courses, the history of Indigenous Canadians is not looked at in enough depth to promote any awareness and many Canadians have no idea the terrible things that have happened to our country’s first peoples. The fact that more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken from their homes and placed in residential schools far away from their homes, seems to be an important enough issue that everyone in Canada should be aware of the atrocity that took place within its border. The sole intent of removing the children from their families was to change them from the traditional ways of the Indigenous people to better suit the colonizers beliefs.
It is important to note that the parents did not let their children attend these schools knowing the true purposes of the schools. The schools were created under The Indian Act of 1867 (amended in 1884 to include the schools) to force assimilation of Indigenous people into the ‘ideal’ European society. Parents where threatened by the former government, that if they didn’t comply they (the parents) would be sent to prison for withholding the children from the schools.
Upon entering the school system, students were faced with abuse by the Nuns and Priests running the schools. All of the schools were watched over by these religious figures, as they were seen to be of a proper religion. Around 60 per cent of the schools were run by Nuns and Priests from the Roman Catholic Church with the rest being other westernized Christian churches, however not all students faced abuse. Not only were children taken from their homes away from their families, but in the majority of survivors’ recollections, they were beaten and abused for things like speaking their native languages, practicing native religions, talking back to the Nuns or Priests that ran the schools, and even things like crying or bed wetting. Many students had to deal with mental and physical abuse, leaving many of them in a state of loss upon leaving the school system.
Many of the schools were underfunded, having the children live in inadequate conditions. There was a large shortage of food at many of the schools, leaving some survivors remembering the need to go steal food from a local farmer’s crop. Prince Albert Residential School survivor, Harry McGillivary, recalls stealing raw carrots from a local farm, “We used to pull the carrots and you know, you clean them up with that green stuff they’ve got on top there. You clean them up and there’s a little bit of dirt but that didn’t matter. We used to say it was a little bit of gravy.” Diseases were wide spread throughout the schools, which resulted in many students dead because of a lack of medical care at the institutions. Tuberculosis, influenza, and the Spanish flu were just some of those more responsible for over 6,000 deaths of youth in the schools. On some occasions students would be sent to their home communities, where the disease would spread due to the lack of current more modernized medicine, and the local community’s lack of knowledge of the foreign diseases. This action can be classified as an attempt to pursue the genocide of Indigenous communities, as many members would become sick and die not long after coming into contact with the disease. The schools themselves were, for the most part, not real academic institutions as many of the children staying at the schools were forced into untrained and unsupervised labour for the majority of the day, then receiving little education afterwards.
The term ‘intergenerational effects’ or ‘intergenerational trauma’ are terms often associated with Residential School survivors. These terms refer to “a collective trauma inflicted on a group of people who share a specific group identity or affiliation—ethnicity, nationality, and religious affiliation. It is the legacy of numerous traumatic events as community experiences over generations and encompasses the psychological and social responses to such events.” Many survivors of the schools experienced this trauma after being stripped of their cultural identity and not knowing who to trust in the world; being told that your peoples beliefs are wrong and that their parents didn’t love them any longer created large amounts of distrust. Lorna Rope, a survivor from St Paul’s in Saskatchewan, recalls the abuse she suffered from the hands of her father who also stayed at a residential school as a child, “he was abusive at times, when he would get angry he would kind of lose control and he would hit us on the head with his knuckles, and that was the same way the Nuns did to us, to me, when I was there. I remember them doing that. As I got older I correlated the two and realized that my dad had picked this training up from the school and realized it wasn’t part of himself.” Lorna’s story would not be the only one where a child suffered from the hands of a parent who attended the schools and didn’t know how else to be a parent than from their own experience at the residential schools.
The legacy left behind by the Residential school system is not one that should be forgotten by Canadians. In 2008, the Canadian government, led by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, issued a formal apology for the wrong doings of the previous government. Harper acknowledges that the two main objectives from the schools were too “remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.” Harper also acknowledges that the schools had lasting traumatic effects on the 80,000 remaining survivors, which in turn resulted in intergenerational effects upon the children and grand-children of the survivors. This apology came with mixed emotions for Indigenous Elders because, although Harper did apologies, many felt that it was hollow because of the fighting the federal government was doing to put more money into the Indigenous communities.
Many communities in Canada today are still faced with issues of things deemed essential to human life. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2010 called “64/292. The human right to water and sanitation”, which states that all human beings should have access to clean and safe drinking water. This document brings attention to the fact that over 880 million people do not have access to safe drinking water and that countries with the ability to offer assistance to these people in need, should be donating money and people to help. A country like Canada is one of the countries many people would think of to offer support, however, our government cannot even support its own Indigenous people with the basic needs of human life. Canada’s Indigenous community faces many current hardships despite the government claiming that Canada is an equal society and frowning upon racial discrimination, or discrimination of any kind.
Not only are Indigenous people faced with a lack of basic life necessities, Indigenous peoples are faced with many other, subtle forms of discrimination. Although Residential schools have been closed since 1996, the rate of Indigenous youth being removed from their homes and being placed into the child care system lies on an usually high rate compared to those of other people in Canada. A 2006 study shows that Status First Nations children represent 16% of the child population in Manitoba, but 70% of these children have been removed from their homes and taken into child care. Not only do children still suffer, Indigenous adults are extremely misrepresented within correctional facilities in Canada. In 2010/2011 more than 20% of those in some form of custody were Indigenous adults. In a province like Nova Scotia Indigenous people represent only 2.4 per cent of the total population, however, make up 10 per cent of the total Nova Scotian inmate population.
Survivors stories like that of Lorna Rope, and how her father abused her the way the Nuns and Priests abused him, leads into another path of helplessness that many Indigenous people struggle with. Many Indigenous people, survivors and later generations become involved with substances like drugs and alcohol in an attempt to forget the pain and suffering they encountered during their time at residential schools, or to get away from the pain inflicted upon them by those who attended the schools. Indigenous people have the highest rate of addiction and substance abuse in Canada, despite them representing only 4.3% of an average provincial population. On average 34.4% Indigenous people are considered heavy drinkers, compared to 26.6% of non-aboriginals. (Heavy drinking refers to the consumption of five or more drinks on one occasion at least once a month in the 12 months.) 40% of Indigenous people ages 12-24 were considered heavy drinkers, versus 35.5% of non-aboriginals. This is very troubling as both PTSD and alcoholism can result in violence against family members, depression, and more mental issues.
Canada as a whole should feel more responsible for the current situation that Indigenous peoples are facing in 2017. The despite the government offering an apology for the actions of past governments, does not mean that there should be any less attention paid to the current lives of these peoples. The removal of Indigenous children and stripping them of their cultural identity to better suit the visions of the European settlers left the survivors of the schools on a downward spiral leaving them in a state of mistrust and helplessness as the discrimination brought on by Canada’s first government has not been easily shaken from the rest of Canadian society. The results of the cultural genocide brought on by the Eurocentric traditions and values of European settlers has been extremely devastation upon Canada’s current Indigenous population, with little support from past governments to rehabilitate the communities and the people.
Canada’s treatment of its Indigenous population is oftentimes referred to as a “Cultural Genocide”. Under the UN Genocide Convention the term “genocide” can be defined under Article II (c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part; and section (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group. The term ‘cultural genocide’ can be defined as the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements which make a one group of people distinct from other groups. Despite the fact that the last residential school didn’t close until 1996 (over 100 years after the first school opened) many people are unaware that these schools ever occurred in the first place. In many high school history courses, the history of Indigenous Canadians is not looked at in enough depth to promote any awareness and many Canadians have no idea the terrible things that have happened to our country’s first peoples. The fact that more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children were taken from their homes and placed in residential schools far away from their homes, seems to be an important enough issue that everyone in Canada should be aware of the atrocity that took place within its border. The sole intent of removing the children from their families was to change them from the traditional ways of the Indigenous people to better suit the colonizers beliefs.
It is important to note that the parents did not let their children attend these schools knowing the true purposes of the schools. The schools were created under The Indian Act of 1867 (amended in 1884 to include the schools) to force assimilation of Indigenous people into the ‘ideal’ European society. Parents where threatened by the former government, that if they didn’t comply they (the parents) would be sent to prison for withholding the children from the schools.
Upon entering the school system, students were faced with abuse by the Nuns and Priests running the schools. All of the schools were watched over by these religious figures, as they were seen to be of a proper religion. Around 60 per cent of the schools were run by Nuns and Priests from the Roman Catholic Church with the rest being other westernized Christian churches, however not all students faced abuse. Not only were children taken from their homes away from their families, but in the majority of survivors’ recollections, they were beaten and abused for things like speaking their native languages, practicing native religions, talking back to the Nuns or Priests that ran the schools, and even things like crying or bed wetting. Many students had to deal with mental and physical abuse, leaving many of them in a state of loss upon leaving the school system.
Many of the schools were underfunded, having the children live in inadequate conditions. There was a large shortage of food at many of the schools, leaving some survivors remembering the need to go steal food from a local farmer’s crop. Prince Albert Residential School survivor, Harry McGillivary, recalls stealing raw carrots from a local farm, “We used to pull the carrots and you know, you clean them up with that green stuff they’ve got on top there. You clean them up and there’s a little bit of dirt but that didn’t matter. We used to say it was a little bit of gravy.” Diseases were wide spread throughout the schools, which resulted in many students dead because of a lack of medical care at the institutions. Tuberculosis, influenza, and the Spanish flu were just some of those more responsible for over 6,000 deaths of youth in the schools. On some occasions students would be sent to their home communities, where the disease would spread due to the lack of current more modernized medicine, and the local community’s lack of knowledge of the foreign diseases. This action can be classified as an attempt to pursue the genocide of Indigenous communities, as many members would become sick and die not long after coming into contact with the disease. The schools themselves were, for the most part, not real academic institutions as many of the children staying at the schools were forced into untrained and unsupervised labour for the majority of the day, then receiving little education afterwards.
The term ‘intergenerational effects’ or ‘intergenerational trauma’ are terms often associated with Residential School survivors. These terms refer to “a collective trauma inflicted on a group of people who share a specific group identity or affiliation—ethnicity, nationality, and religious affiliation. It is the legacy of numerous traumatic events as community experiences over generations and encompasses the psychological and social responses to such events.” Many survivors of the schools experienced this trauma after being stripped of their cultural identity and not knowing who to trust in the world; being told that your peoples beliefs are wrong and that their parents didn’t love them any longer created large amounts of distrust. Lorna Rope, a survivor from St Paul’s in Saskatchewan, recalls the abuse she suffered from the hands of her father who also stayed at a residential school as a child, “he was abusive at times, when he would get angry he would kind of lose control and he would hit us on the head with his knuckles, and that was the same way the Nuns did to us, to me, when I was there. I remember them doing that. As I got older I correlated the two and realized that my dad had picked this training up from the school and realized it wasn’t part of himself.” Lorna’s story would not be the only one where a child suffered from the hands of a parent who attended the schools and didn’t know how else to be a parent than from their own experience at the residential schools.
The legacy left behind by the Residential school system is not one that should be forgotten by Canadians. In 2008, the Canadian government, led by former Prime Minister Stephen Harper, issued a formal apology for the wrong doings of the previous government. Harper acknowledges that the two main objectives from the schools were too “remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.” Harper also acknowledges that the schools had lasting traumatic effects on the 80,000 remaining survivors, which in turn resulted in intergenerational effects upon the children and grand-children of the survivors. This apology came with mixed emotions for Indigenous Elders because, although Harper did apologies, many felt that it was hollow because of the fighting the federal government was doing to put more money into the Indigenous communities.
Many communities in Canada today are still faced with issues of things deemed essential to human life. The United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution in 2010 called “64/292. The human right to water and sanitation”, which states that all human beings should have access to clean and safe drinking water. This document brings attention to the fact that over 880 million people do not have access to safe drinking water and that countries with the ability to offer assistance to these people in need, should be donating money and people to help. A country like Canada is one of the countries many people would think of to offer support, however, our government cannot even support its own Indigenous people with the basic needs of human life. Canada’s Indigenous community faces many current hardships despite the government claiming that Canada is an equal society and frowning upon racial discrimination, or discrimination of any kind.
Not only are Indigenous people faced with a lack of basic life necessities, Indigenous peoples are faced with many other, subtle forms of discrimination. Although Residential schools have been closed since 1996, the rate of Indigenous youth being removed from their homes and being placed into the child care system lies on an usually high rate compared to those of other people in Canada. A 2006 study shows that Status First Nations children represent 16% of the child population in Manitoba, but 70% of these children have been removed from their homes and taken into child care. Not only do children still suffer, Indigenous adults are extremely misrepresented within correctional facilities in Canada. In 2010/2011 more than 20% of those in some form of custody were Indigenous adults. In a province like Nova Scotia Indigenous people represent only 2.4 per cent of the total population, however, make up 10 per cent of the total Nova Scotian inmate population.
Survivors stories like that of Lorna Rope, and how her father abused her the way the Nuns and Priests abused him, leads into another path of helplessness that many Indigenous people struggle with. Many Indigenous people, survivors and later generations become involved with substances like drugs and alcohol in an attempt to forget the pain and suffering they encountered during their time at residential schools, or to get away from the pain inflicted upon them by those who attended the schools. Indigenous people have the highest rate of addiction and substance abuse in Canada, despite them representing only 4.3% of an average provincial population. On average 34.4% Indigenous people are considered heavy drinkers, compared to 26.6% of non-aboriginals. (Heavy drinking refers to the consumption of five or more drinks on one occasion at least once a month in the 12 months.) 40% of Indigenous people ages 12-24 were considered heavy drinkers, versus 35.5% of non-aboriginals. This is very troubling as both PTSD and alcoholism can result in violence against family members, depression, and more mental issues.
Canada as a whole should feel more responsible for the current situation that Indigenous peoples are facing in 2017. The despite the government offering an apology for the actions of past governments, does not mean that there should be any less attention paid to the current lives of these peoples. The removal of Indigenous children and stripping them of their cultural identity to better suit the visions of the European settlers left the survivors of the schools on a downward spiral leaving them in a state of mistrust and helplessness as the discrimination brought on by Canada’s first government has not been easily shaken from the rest of Canadian society. The results of the cultural genocide brought on by the Eurocentric traditions and values of European settlers has been extremely devastation upon Canada’s current Indigenous population, with little support from past governments to rehabilitate the communities and the people.