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Canada's Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939: The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Volume I
Between 1867 and 2000, the Canadian government sent over 150,000 Aboriginal children to residential schools across the country. Government officials and missionaries agreed that in order to “civilize and Christianize” Aboriginal children, it was necessary to separate them from their parents and their home communities. For children, life in these schools was lonely and alien. Discipline was harsh, and daily life was highly regimented. Aboriginal languages and cultures were denigrated and suppressed. Education and technical training too often gave way to the drudgery of doing the chores necessary to make the schools self-sustaining. Child neglect was institutionalized, and the lack of supervision created situations where students were prey to sexual and physical abusers. Legal action by the schools’ former students led to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada in 2008. The product of over six years of research, the Commission’s final report outlines the history and legacy of the schools, and charts a pathway towards reconciliation. Canada’s Residential Schools: The History, Part 1, Origins to 1939 places Canada’s residential school system in the historical context of European campaigns to colonize and convert Indigenous people throughout the world. In post-Confederation Canada, the government adopted what amounted to a policy of cultural genocide: suppressing spiritual practices, disrupting traditional economies, and imposing new forms of government. Residential schooling quickly became a central element in this policy. The destructive intent of the schools was compounded by chronic underfunding and ongoing conflict between the federal government and the church missionary societies that had been given responsibility for their day-to-day operation. A failure of leadership and resources meant that the schools failed to control the tuberculosis crisis that gripped the schools for much of this period. Alarmed by high death rates, Aboriginal parents often refused to send their children to the schools, leading the government adopt ever more coercive attendance regulations. While parents became subject to ever more punitive regulations, the government did little to regulate discipline, diet, fire safety, or sanitation at the schools. By the period’s end the government was presiding over a nation-wide series of firetraps that had no clear educational goals and were economically dependent on the unpaid labour of underfed and often sickly children.
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First published December 9, 2015
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March 20, 2023
Reports of the graves of small children being discovered around the sites of Canada’s residential schools for Indigenous children have shocked many Canadians, It shouldn’t have, because this 2015 report provides a detailed, documented account of exactly what happened.
The commission that researched and wrote the report convincingly argue that the schools represented a determined attempt at cultural genocide. Operating under the ideas of racial and cultural superiority, government officials and missionaries attempted to “save the child by killing the Indian,” transforming them into a White cultural model. Further, some children were used as hostages for their parents’ good behavior when the government had determined that the parents might constitute a threat to the continuing settlement of the West. Some students were subject to physical abuse, including sexual abuse. Thousands died as a result of disease, partly due to the overcrowded, dirty nature of the places where they were living. All this was done under the supervision of the major Canadian churches, the Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Prime Minister Harper did the right thing when he apologized to the former students of the residential schools on behalf of the Canadian government.
For the first part of this review, I will attempt to summarize the major findings, using the report’s own language as much as I can.
“Residential schools were intended to reshape Aboriginal children and detach them from the influence of their parents.” Thus, “[m]any schools strictly controlled parental contact.” Indian Affairs mostly followed a policy of trying to keep indigenous parents or leaders uninformed of school policies or their rights. Parents might go five or six years without seeing their children. ”The underlying tensions of the residential school system were present from the outset: the schools’ desire to provide training that would discourage children from following their parents’ way of life, and the parents’ unwillingness to part with their children for schooling except in conditions of economic and social stress.” “Parents often had a very clear understanding of the failings of the schools, and proposed realistic and effective solutions to those problems [but] [a]lmost invariably, the system declined to accept parental and student criticisms as being valid.”
The federal government allowed the churches to run the schools for three reasons. First, it was not unusual at the time for schools to be run by churches, Second, the churches and the government largely shared the assimilationist goals for Indigenous education. Lastly, missionary labor was cheap labor, and the government wanted to save money. “In this policy vacuum, the churches seized the initiative and shaped the growth of residential schooling.” “As part of the civilization process, it was expected that the schools would produce young people who would reject Aboriginal marriage and would choose instead to be married by the church according to Canadian marriage laws.” “The federal government’s assimilationist policy deliberately stressed the suppression of traditional practices and sought to prevent children from being raised within those traditions. Conversion to Christianity was a specific element of that policy.” “On a parallel track, from the 1880s onwards, the government also actively sought to suppress and criminalize Aboriginal peoples’ own spiritual ceremonies.”
“Although the use of Aboriginal languages was not completely banned at all times and in all places, it is clear that it was seen as a sign of progress if a principal could report that Aboriginal languages were not spoken in the school, or, even better, that children had forgotten how to speak them.” Students might be punished for speaking their native language. “The school language policies created painful divisions within families, making it difficult, if not impossible for children to communicate with…family members...[a]nd to pass on cultural heritage.” It needs to be noted that often the parents themselves wanted their children to be educated to read and write in English; they just did not want their native language to be banned.
“It is clear that even by the standards of the period in which they operated, residential schools failed to provide students with an adequate education and the promised vocational training.” “Those children who completed their schooling often found that their ties to their home communities and cultures had been severed, but they had not been given the skills needed to succeed in the broader society.” “[T]he schools were sites of hunger, overwork, danger and disease, limited education, and, in tens of thousands of cases, physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and neglect.”
Generally, the schools were not sited well, and often had inadequate sanitation and water supply. While some schools were well built, they could be cramped, poorly lit, ventilated and heated fire hazards. The most residential schools operating at any time during the period was eighty. There were one hundred and seventeen fires documented during this time, with the result that thirty-seven schools were destroyed. The fact that twenty-four fires were started by arson by the students tells you how much many of them hated the places. Fire escapes and windows might be locked to prevent the students from running away. About forty students died from fires in total, as best the commission can determine.
“The prevention of disease and the treatment of sick Aboriginal children were a shameful failure.” While some schools were well-built, with well-looked-after students, dirty, unsanitary, insufficient water or sanitation or washing facilities were documented for many other schools. Students were often described as “dirty” and “poorly clothed”. The diet offered to the children was often substandard. There were no clear guidelines offered by the federal government, and an emphasis on cost savings. The churches kept sick children at school and admitted more sick children so that the healthy ones became infected. At least two thousand five hundred children died in the schools during the period, with tuberculosis as the most common listed cause of death. Tuberculosis was the major cause of death among all aboriginal people and most people in Canada at the time, and treatment was rudimentary for all Canadians. But it was even worse in these schools. One report at the time concluded that the tuberculosis rate was twenty times higher in the residential schools than nationally. In 1908, at the residential school in Chapleau, Ontario, thirty-eight children died in three months. Medical specialists made recommendations that would have ameliorated the situation, but those recommendations were not followed because of cost and the opposition of the churches. There was a very callous attitude and treatment towards sick children in the care of the government at the residential schools. The Canadian government chose economy over life.
“Although no staff member was prosecuted or convicted for abusing students at residential schools during this period (from 1867 to 1939), it is clear that such abuse took place.” “Frequently, investigations amounted to little more than seeking out and accepting the denials of the accused school official. Even when government and church officials concluded that the allegations were accurate, they were more likely to simply fire the perpetrator than bring in the police. In some cases, individuals whose predatory behaviour was recognized were allowed to remain at the schools, which provided them with continued opportunities to abuse children.” “It is not possible to quantify the extent to which children were sexually abused at residential schools during this period. It is clear, however, that such abuse did take place.”
“[T]he schools came to resemble reformatories, the staff member’s life was the life of a jail keeper, and harsh discipline remained as an underlying cause of the schools’ ongoing problems with runaways and recruitment.” “Students ran away…[because]…they were lonely and missed their parents; they found the school strange and alienating; they were poorly fed, housed, and clothed; they were subject to harsh discipline; and, in some cases, they fell prey to abuse from both staff and fellow students.” Some children died trying to get home. “The deaths of these children highlight many of the system’s failings.”
The most serious, detailed allegations about student neglect, physical and sexual abuse, death are true and the report proves them. “The residential school system, and those in charge of it, appeared resolutely unwilling to learn from its errors.”
Now for the discussion and criticism.
The report could have used a better editor. The commission sometimes gets bogged down in details and self-contradictions that they don’t see, often to the detriment of their main points. For example, they spend ten or twenty pages writing about the milk shortage in schools, and what a problem this was. They also mention, without seeming to understand how they are contradicting themselves, that milk was not a traditional indigenous food, that as a result many indigenous people are lactose intolerant, and that milk was a source of transmission for tuberculosis, thus making the consumption of large quantities of milk possibly problematic for indigenous children. Add to that the fact that modern dieticians would say large quantities of milk fat are also problematic. And yet the central point that they were trying to make without this superfluous distraction is also true: too many indigenous residential school students did not receive enough high-quality food.
The most deficient part of the report is called “The Context”, which sets out the modern anti-colonial point of view, in which former European empires are blamed for many modern ills. This is actually very contentious, activist anti-colonialism as history. Viewpoints are far more diverse than the authors of this study would have you believe and they have only been shut up in Canada by heavy-handed self-censorship in the universities. Unfortunately for the credibility of the report, Pax Roman and Pax Brittanica were not myths. They were historical facts. Empires provide a zone of peace in which trade and wealth become possible. The problem is, they do it through oppression and violence.. Here are some of the many books where you can read all about it. "Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference" by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. "Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind," by Yuval Harari. "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat. "War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots" by Ian Morris. Queen Victoria said that as long as Britain had an empire, it would always have a war. That is true. But there wasn’t war everywhere all the time. Life without a central, organizing leviathan is anarchic and violent.
Further, there is no distinction between the impact of contact and the impact of colonialism. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond documents the results when people possessed of more powerful technology and resistance to diseases encountered people without these things in places as diverse as Japan, Indonesia and Africa. The result was always the same: the replacement of the less powerful population. Colonialism, on the other hand,” is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. ”What would have been the result if the Canadian state had not assumed jurisdiction and responsibility for the Canadian West when it did? A paradise? How about a Wild West of Gatling guns, whisky sellers, illegal settlers and running warfare? How would that have helped anyone? What would have happened when the buffalo ran out and nobody was there to offer the starving to trade their now buffalo-free land for food? Indigenous peoples had no desire anyway to be left alone in splendid isolation. They very much sought out the technical products that contact provided. In the end that contact overwhelmed them.
The way the report writes about the tuberculosis epidemic is a good example of this oversimplification. Epidemics do not ONLY arise from “disruptions with humans’ relationship with the natural environment.” They occur because diseases hit vulnerable populations. Read "Plagues and Peoples" by William McNeill. Tuberculosis was a result of contact with a population with little or no immunity to the disease. It was made worse by the actual conditions of colonialism in the schools, but it would have been bad anyway.
Lynn Beyak was a Canadian senator who was fired for, among other things, encouraging people to write about the good experiences of the residential schools. While the disadvantages of the residential school system far outweighed the advantages, the report admits that “it is important to recognize that, within the schools, many positive relationships [between students and staff] did develop.“ If you read the chapters on the students’ self-reported experiences, you can find out that they had some positive ones. There were cases of children being literally ripped from their parents’ arms, but the residential schools also functioned as a welfare system for orphans for children whose parents could not take care of them. The problem is that they were not well taken care of once they were in the system. Lynn Beyak was wrong, but she was not totally wrong.
I teach my students that, in order to usefully compare two things, they must be somewhat similar. For example, it is not useful to compare an apple and a chair, as there are no bases upon which to compare them. We can, however, compare an apple and an orange on the bases of such things as taste, texture, smell and color.
When it comes to Canada’s residential schools and the Soviet Gulag, we actually have two types of fruit. I have recently read "Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum, which details the system of prison slave labor camps that were set up by Stalin in the USSR in the early and mid-twentieth century. They definitely have some things in common. A bad ideology: communism or imperialism, in which people were misused as means to an ideological end generally for only being a member of a group which had been identified as somehow undesirable. Although in the gulags, unlike in residential schools, inmates were murdered, in fact most people who died, died of neglect, disease, starvation, frostbite, or just being worked to death, just as in the residential schools. The scale is different. Thousands died in the residential schools while hundreds of thousands or millions died in the gulags. And many of the people who were sent to the gulag were sent there by authorities who knew they would almost certainly die, unlike the intent of the keepers of the residential school. I believe that the residential schools were not a gulag, but the fact that we can compare them is an indictment of the system that tells us we should never let something like that happen again.
To say that the report oversimplifies the context for the schools is not to dismiss it entirely. It is, however, to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions inherent in an historical inquiry. From a certain level of analysis, we can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a very common experience in the past: living in an empire, or the legacy of living in a former empire. From another level of analysis, we can examine the functioning of a certain institution within a certain empire; in this case, the residential schools under the jurisdiction of the Department of Indian Affairs in Canada.
The borders of every country in the world are a result of centuries of conflict. Xenophobia, warfare, oppression, slavery: these things were not aberrations in the past but condition normal for most people for most of the time. Being a liberal democracy, based on the consent of the governed and an idea of civic nationalism (also in Canada’s situation a legacy of empire) is a much better ideology, but one that is recent, possibly fragile, and something that Canada can be proud of.
Canada has done wrong. That means it is a normal country.
The commission that researched and wrote the report convincingly argue that the schools represented a determined attempt at cultural genocide. Operating under the ideas of racial and cultural superiority, government officials and missionaries attempted to “save the child by killing the Indian,” transforming them into a White cultural model. Further, some children were used as hostages for their parents’ good behavior when the government had determined that the parents might constitute a threat to the continuing settlement of the West. Some students were subject to physical abuse, including sexual abuse. Thousands died as a result of disease, partly due to the overcrowded, dirty nature of the places where they were living. All this was done under the supervision of the major Canadian churches, the Catholics, Anglicans, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Prime Minister Harper did the right thing when he apologized to the former students of the residential schools on behalf of the Canadian government.
For the first part of this review, I will attempt to summarize the major findings, using the report’s own language as much as I can.
“Residential schools were intended to reshape Aboriginal children and detach them from the influence of their parents.” Thus, “[m]any schools strictly controlled parental contact.” Indian Affairs mostly followed a policy of trying to keep indigenous parents or leaders uninformed of school policies or their rights. Parents might go five or six years without seeing their children. ”The underlying tensions of the residential school system were present from the outset: the schools’ desire to provide training that would discourage children from following their parents’ way of life, and the parents’ unwillingness to part with their children for schooling except in conditions of economic and social stress.” “Parents often had a very clear understanding of the failings of the schools, and proposed realistic and effective solutions to those problems [but] [a]lmost invariably, the system declined to accept parental and student criticisms as being valid.”
The federal government allowed the churches to run the schools for three reasons. First, it was not unusual at the time for schools to be run by churches, Second, the churches and the government largely shared the assimilationist goals for Indigenous education. Lastly, missionary labor was cheap labor, and the government wanted to save money. “In this policy vacuum, the churches seized the initiative and shaped the growth of residential schooling.” “As part of the civilization process, it was expected that the schools would produce young people who would reject Aboriginal marriage and would choose instead to be married by the church according to Canadian marriage laws.” “The federal government’s assimilationist policy deliberately stressed the suppression of traditional practices and sought to prevent children from being raised within those traditions. Conversion to Christianity was a specific element of that policy.” “On a parallel track, from the 1880s onwards, the government also actively sought to suppress and criminalize Aboriginal peoples’ own spiritual ceremonies.”
“Although the use of Aboriginal languages was not completely banned at all times and in all places, it is clear that it was seen as a sign of progress if a principal could report that Aboriginal languages were not spoken in the school, or, even better, that children had forgotten how to speak them.” Students might be punished for speaking their native language. “The school language policies created painful divisions within families, making it difficult, if not impossible for children to communicate with…family members...[a]nd to pass on cultural heritage.” It needs to be noted that often the parents themselves wanted their children to be educated to read and write in English; they just did not want their native language to be banned.
“It is clear that even by the standards of the period in which they operated, residential schools failed to provide students with an adequate education and the promised vocational training.” “Those children who completed their schooling often found that their ties to their home communities and cultures had been severed, but they had not been given the skills needed to succeed in the broader society.” “[T]he schools were sites of hunger, overwork, danger and disease, limited education, and, in tens of thousands of cases, physical, sexual, and psychological abuse and neglect.”
Generally, the schools were not sited well, and often had inadequate sanitation and water supply. While some schools were well built, they could be cramped, poorly lit, ventilated and heated fire hazards. The most residential schools operating at any time during the period was eighty. There were one hundred and seventeen fires documented during this time, with the result that thirty-seven schools were destroyed. The fact that twenty-four fires were started by arson by the students tells you how much many of them hated the places. Fire escapes and windows might be locked to prevent the students from running away. About forty students died from fires in total, as best the commission can determine.
“The prevention of disease and the treatment of sick Aboriginal children were a shameful failure.” While some schools were well-built, with well-looked-after students, dirty, unsanitary, insufficient water or sanitation or washing facilities were documented for many other schools. Students were often described as “dirty” and “poorly clothed”. The diet offered to the children was often substandard. There were no clear guidelines offered by the federal government, and an emphasis on cost savings. The churches kept sick children at school and admitted more sick children so that the healthy ones became infected. At least two thousand five hundred children died in the schools during the period, with tuberculosis as the most common listed cause of death. Tuberculosis was the major cause of death among all aboriginal people and most people in Canada at the time, and treatment was rudimentary for all Canadians. But it was even worse in these schools. One report at the time concluded that the tuberculosis rate was twenty times higher in the residential schools than nationally. In 1908, at the residential school in Chapleau, Ontario, thirty-eight children died in three months. Medical specialists made recommendations that would have ameliorated the situation, but those recommendations were not followed because of cost and the opposition of the churches. There was a very callous attitude and treatment towards sick children in the care of the government at the residential schools. The Canadian government chose economy over life.
“Although no staff member was prosecuted or convicted for abusing students at residential schools during this period (from 1867 to 1939), it is clear that such abuse took place.” “Frequently, investigations amounted to little more than seeking out and accepting the denials of the accused school official. Even when government and church officials concluded that the allegations were accurate, they were more likely to simply fire the perpetrator than bring in the police. In some cases, individuals whose predatory behaviour was recognized were allowed to remain at the schools, which provided them with continued opportunities to abuse children.” “It is not possible to quantify the extent to which children were sexually abused at residential schools during this period. It is clear, however, that such abuse did take place.”
“[T]he schools came to resemble reformatories, the staff member’s life was the life of a jail keeper, and harsh discipline remained as an underlying cause of the schools’ ongoing problems with runaways and recruitment.” “Students ran away…[because]…they were lonely and missed their parents; they found the school strange and alienating; they were poorly fed, housed, and clothed; they were subject to harsh discipline; and, in some cases, they fell prey to abuse from both staff and fellow students.” Some children died trying to get home. “The deaths of these children highlight many of the system’s failings.”
The most serious, detailed allegations about student neglect, physical and sexual abuse, death are true and the report proves them. “The residential school system, and those in charge of it, appeared resolutely unwilling to learn from its errors.”
Now for the discussion and criticism.
The report could have used a better editor. The commission sometimes gets bogged down in details and self-contradictions that they don’t see, often to the detriment of their main points. For example, they spend ten or twenty pages writing about the milk shortage in schools, and what a problem this was. They also mention, without seeming to understand how they are contradicting themselves, that milk was not a traditional indigenous food, that as a result many indigenous people are lactose intolerant, and that milk was a source of transmission for tuberculosis, thus making the consumption of large quantities of milk possibly problematic for indigenous children. Add to that the fact that modern dieticians would say large quantities of milk fat are also problematic. And yet the central point that they were trying to make without this superfluous distraction is also true: too many indigenous residential school students did not receive enough high-quality food.
The most deficient part of the report is called “The Context”, which sets out the modern anti-colonial point of view, in which former European empires are blamed for many modern ills. This is actually very contentious, activist anti-colonialism as history. Viewpoints are far more diverse than the authors of this study would have you believe and they have only been shut up in Canada by heavy-handed self-censorship in the universities. Unfortunately for the credibility of the report, Pax Roman and Pax Brittanica were not myths. They were historical facts. Empires provide a zone of peace in which trade and wealth become possible. The problem is, they do it through oppression and violence.. Here are some of the many books where you can read all about it. "Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference" by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper. "Sapiens, A Brief History of Humankind," by Yuval Harari. "War in Human Civilization" by Azar Gat. "War! What is it Good For? Conflict and the Progress of Civilization from Primates to Robots" by Ian Morris. Queen Victoria said that as long as Britain had an empire, it would always have a war. That is true. But there wasn’t war everywhere all the time. Life without a central, organizing leviathan is anarchic and violent.
Further, there is no distinction between the impact of contact and the impact of colonialism. In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond documents the results when people possessed of more powerful technology and resistance to diseases encountered people without these things in places as diverse as Japan, Indonesia and Africa. The result was always the same: the replacement of the less powerful population. Colonialism, on the other hand,” is the policy or practice of acquiring full or partial political control over another country, occupying it with settlers, and exploiting it economically. ”What would have been the result if the Canadian state had not assumed jurisdiction and responsibility for the Canadian West when it did? A paradise? How about a Wild West of Gatling guns, whisky sellers, illegal settlers and running warfare? How would that have helped anyone? What would have happened when the buffalo ran out and nobody was there to offer the starving to trade their now buffalo-free land for food? Indigenous peoples had no desire anyway to be left alone in splendid isolation. They very much sought out the technical products that contact provided. In the end that contact overwhelmed them.
The way the report writes about the tuberculosis epidemic is a good example of this oversimplification. Epidemics do not ONLY arise from “disruptions with humans’ relationship with the natural environment.” They occur because diseases hit vulnerable populations. Read "Plagues and Peoples" by William McNeill. Tuberculosis was a result of contact with a population with little or no immunity to the disease. It was made worse by the actual conditions of colonialism in the schools, but it would have been bad anyway.
Lynn Beyak was a Canadian senator who was fired for, among other things, encouraging people to write about the good experiences of the residential schools. While the disadvantages of the residential school system far outweighed the advantages, the report admits that “it is important to recognize that, within the schools, many positive relationships [between students and staff] did develop.“ If you read the chapters on the students’ self-reported experiences, you can find out that they had some positive ones. There were cases of children being literally ripped from their parents’ arms, but the residential schools also functioned as a welfare system for orphans for children whose parents could not take care of them. The problem is that they were not well taken care of once they were in the system. Lynn Beyak was wrong, but she was not totally wrong.
I teach my students that, in order to usefully compare two things, they must be somewhat similar. For example, it is not useful to compare an apple and a chair, as there are no bases upon which to compare them. We can, however, compare an apple and an orange on the bases of such things as taste, texture, smell and color.
When it comes to Canada’s residential schools and the Soviet Gulag, we actually have two types of fruit. I have recently read "Gulag: A History" by Anne Applebaum, which details the system of prison slave labor camps that were set up by Stalin in the USSR in the early and mid-twentieth century. They definitely have some things in common. A bad ideology: communism or imperialism, in which people were misused as means to an ideological end generally for only being a member of a group which had been identified as somehow undesirable. Although in the gulags, unlike in residential schools, inmates were murdered, in fact most people who died, died of neglect, disease, starvation, frostbite, or just being worked to death, just as in the residential schools. The scale is different. Thousands died in the residential schools while hundreds of thousands or millions died in the gulags. And many of the people who were sent to the gulag were sent there by authorities who knew they would almost certainly die, unlike the intent of the keepers of the residential school. I believe that the residential schools were not a gulag, but the fact that we can compare them is an indictment of the system that tells us we should never let something like that happen again.
To say that the report oversimplifies the context for the schools is not to dismiss it entirely. It is, however, to acknowledge the complexities and contradictions inherent in an historical inquiry. From a certain level of analysis, we can discuss the advantages and disadvantages of a very common experience in the past: living in an empire, or the legacy of living in a former empire. From another level of analysis, we can examine the functioning of a certain institution within a certain empire; in this case, the residential schools under the jurisdiction of the Department of Indian Affairs in Canada.
The borders of every country in the world are a result of centuries of conflict. Xenophobia, warfare, oppression, slavery: these things were not aberrations in the past but condition normal for most people for most of the time. Being a liberal democracy, based on the consent of the governed and an idea of civic nationalism (also in Canada’s situation a legacy of empire) is a much better ideology, but one that is recent, possibly fragile, and something that Canada can be proud of.
Canada has done wrong. That means it is a normal country.
September 28, 2024
This was not an easy read. And not because it's poorly written. Considering the amount of information and statistics within it, it was actually a very accessible read.
This is the first volume of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It details the beginning of residential schools to 1939. The years following that to 2000 are in the second volume. The text of this volume was 700+ pages. The rest of the 900+ pages were notes and a bibliography.
Of course I was aware of the abuse, the family disruption, and the violence in residential schools, but I had a lot to learn, and I found time and again one glaring principle: the government of Canada had taken on more than they could manage from a financial standpoint. Putting aside the immorality of removing a child from her parent because that parent is "uncivilized" is one thing; attempting to do it without the proper funds is another. The government did everything on the cheap, whether it was not providing nutritious food, not providing proper attention when children were sick, to poorly construction structures, to the lack of proper fire escapes in an era where buildings burned down with great regularity.
It's also clear that these schools operated with numerous villains: the churches, the government, the settler. And all of these groups lived with the underlying principle that Indigenous peoples were sub-human. The attitude toward them was more than paternalistic; it was combative.
I had to read this in short sittings at times, especially the chapters dealing with the discipline of children and the devastation of tuberculosis. But it's important to understand. How can we truly say we understand this country we call home if we are unaware of what happened?
Some Canadians believe that we, unlike the US, have not built this country with slavery. I disagree. Residential schools were another form of slavery. And it was not just the students who were in that slavery. Their parents were as well. Conquered by the settler population, stripped of their land and way of life, Indigenous parents knew their children needed educating to cope in a settler-dominated world. They had no choice but to trust the government to educate their children. Having no choices is another kind of slavery.
This is the first volume of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It details the beginning of residential schools to 1939. The years following that to 2000 are in the second volume. The text of this volume was 700+ pages. The rest of the 900+ pages were notes and a bibliography.
Of course I was aware of the abuse, the family disruption, and the violence in residential schools, but I had a lot to learn, and I found time and again one glaring principle: the government of Canada had taken on more than they could manage from a financial standpoint. Putting aside the immorality of removing a child from her parent because that parent is "uncivilized" is one thing; attempting to do it without the proper funds is another. The government did everything on the cheap, whether it was not providing nutritious food, not providing proper attention when children were sick, to poorly construction structures, to the lack of proper fire escapes in an era where buildings burned down with great regularity.
It's also clear that these schools operated with numerous villains: the churches, the government, the settler. And all of these groups lived with the underlying principle that Indigenous peoples were sub-human. The attitude toward them was more than paternalistic; it was combative.
I had to read this in short sittings at times, especially the chapters dealing with the discipline of children and the devastation of tuberculosis. But it's important to understand. How can we truly say we understand this country we call home if we are unaware of what happened?
Some Canadians believe that we, unlike the US, have not built this country with slavery. I disagree. Residential schools were another form of slavery. And it was not just the students who were in that slavery. Their parents were as well. Conquered by the settler population, stripped of their land and way of life, Indigenous parents knew their children needed educating to cope in a settler-dominated world. They had no choice but to trust the government to educate their children. Having no choices is another kind of slavery.
December 11, 2025
Why is it so long?!
What do you mean "Part 1" ?!
What do you mean "Part 1" ?!
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews