A Knock on the Door: The Essential History of Residential Schools from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada

by Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, Phil Fontaine (Foreward), Aimée Craft

“It can start with a knock on the door one morning. It is the local Indian agent, or the parish priest, or, perhaps, a Mounted Police officer.” So began the school experience of many Indigenous children in Canada for more than a hundred years, and so begins the history of residential schools prepared by the Truth & Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Between 2008 and 2015, the TRC provided opportunities for individuals, families, and communities to share their experiences of residential schools and released several reports based on 7000 survivor statements and five million documents from government, churches, and schools, as well as a solid grounding in secondary sources.

A Knock on the Door, published in collaboration with the National Research Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, gathers material from the several reports the TRC has produced to present the essential history and legacy of residential schools in a concise and accessible package that includes new materials to help inform and contextualize the journey to reconciliation that Canadians are now embarked upon.

Survivor and former National Chief of the Assembly First Nations, Phil Fontaine, provides a Foreword, and an Afterword introduces the holdings and opportunities of the National Centre for Truth & Reconciliation, home to the archive of recordings, and documents collected by the TRC.

As Aimée Craft writes in the Afterword, knowing the historical backdrop of residential schooling and its legacy is essential to the work of reconciliation. In the past, agents of the Canadian state knocked on the doors of Indigenous families to take the children to school. Now, the Survivors have shared their truths and knocked back. It is time for Canadians to open the door to mutual understanding, respect, and reconciliation.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, Indigenous, Canada, Audiobook, Social Justice, Race

274 pages, Paperback

First published December 15, 2015

Reviews

[Petra · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book would make an excellent introduction into Indigenous Studies. It could be introduced at a High School level. It seeks the truth and looks towards reconciliation. It's a thoughtful, open examination that looks to find a resolution & reconciliation and to find a path forward.

This book looks at the policies that gave the Government and Churches rights over Indigenous children, how these children fared, how the policies were inadequate and how the system failed an entire Culture. The Residential schools caused more damage than a poor education. It separated children from their families and culture, their homes and made them ashamed of their history & roots. This damage spread to all parts of their futures and self-esteem.

The Commission that compiled the information looks to healing this failure and the People. By bringing Truth into the open, we as a society can help repair the hurt we caused.

I particularly liked the end of the book with the statements of how we can put these repairs into action with respect, honor and total acceptance of all People. We have a long way to go and many harms to heal, but if we follow the recommendations of the Commission, we will get there.

This is a wonderful introduction to a much larger issue. I am glad to have read this and now have a larger idea of the situation and will look to learn more.

[Christy]

I don't think you can rate the truth. It's not a "great" read; its just the truth.
While I was expecting it to go into a few more individual stories and reflections, the snippets of varied experiences alongside the research and history leave you with this sense that it's only scratching the surface of the effects of colonial policies. And in fact, this does only give a small taste of the effects of these policies. How can you summarize the lives and experiences of generations of people?
Of all things, I am impressed at the balanced research and presentation of facts; that not all experiences were wholly negative, and all along the spectrum from both staff and student perspectives.
The TRC recommendations should be mandatory reading for all Canadians, and I am hopeful that we can move towards reconciliation as more people become informed about these injustices.

[Emmkay · Rating 4 out of 5]

This abridged version of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission provides an essential, informative, and readable grounding in the Commission’s findings and recommendations, while explaining more about how it did its very careful work. It also reproduces all 94 of the Commission’s recommendations. All meaningful reading for me this year for the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.

The details of what children and families went through due to the residential school system are heart-breaking and the seriousness of what occurred and its effects to this day cannot be minimized. A decade on from the Commission’s report, I was reasonably familiar with this. But I was also fascinated by the information about the various inspectors and school personnel who did flag things they saw that were wrong - the food that wasn’t enough, the discipline that was too harsh, the work was too hard. Also by the descriptions of teachers and others who worked in the schools who believed that they were doing good, or tried to do good, or sometimes ameliorated the harshness. It made me think about people doing their jobs within unjust systems, and trying to do them well - what prompts people to speak up? Do they follow up? Do they stay? Do they make a difference? I’d be interested to read more about this in a residential schools context.

[Silvia C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gut-wrenching facts about the recent history of Canada that everybody should be aware of.
Hearing/reading the truth is such an important step on the way to reconciliation.

[Chelsey]

This is a must read for Canadians.

[Rochelle Benoit · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Too many Canadians know little or nothing about the deep historical roots of these conflicts." This passage from the book could not be more accurate. I was shocked at how uninformed I had been prior to reading this book. So many horrible things happened and we need to accept them as part of our history and attempt to educate ourselves so we can make sure it never happens again. I would highly recommend this book to anyone looking to enlighten themselves on the history of residential schools in Canada.

[Karly · Rating 5 out of 5]

It feels funny to give this book a rating…it wasn’t an “amazing read”, it was an account of the past told with truth and first hand stories. The 5 stars from me are given to show my appreciation for the people who came together to create this book. Thank you for sharing your stories and educating students, teachers, politicians, religious people, and everyone in between. I’m so sorry for what happened and how it is affecting so many people still today.

[Duncan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thought it only fitting to read some history of residual schools in honour of the first Truth and Reconciliation Day and this did not disappoint. So much information. The scope of effects stemming from residential schools can't be understated. Such sad personal accounts of the life at residential schools and afterward. Highly recommend to anyone interested in indigenous (and otherwise) issues in Canada.

[Warren Wulff · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don’t think a better introduction to residential schools exists. It is extraordinary well written and unstintingly from the survivor point of view. A must read for all Canadians.

[Aya · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was an incredibly critical read that I wish more Canadians were able to spend time with. It can be very painful to learn about things we wish didn't happen in our country but reckoning with facts and acknowledging the realities of colonialism is the only way to begin to support survivors and move forwards towards reconciliation.

[PJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very very good info. I just hate when so much of the content is footnotes. A book of footnotes.

[Karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

4 stars

This is essential reading for Canadians. I'm very grateful the the Truth and Reconciliation Commission for the work that they've done and for creating this book in such a way that makes it accessible to the general public without glorifying the horrific details.

At first, I found the footnote narrative distracting but once I caught on to the audio format, I was able to follow better. There are a lot of dates, names and details in this book and many of those were lost while trying to drive my car and listen at the same time so perhaps audio is not the best format to digest that level of understanding.

[Ceris Backstrom]

Idk about rating this as it’s literally an abridged version of the truth and reconciliation commission report-which is a great way to make a very important document accessible. Is the Canadian government five stars? Nope. Is this text very significant and important? Yes. So... five stars

[Dasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book demonstrates the continuing importance of addressing Canada’s past with residential schools and the ongoing outcomes such policies have on Indigenous communities. Importantly, it highlights calls to actions that educate readers on the necessary changes to various Canadian institutions to help with the process of reconciliation, including church apologies, museum and archive restructuring and collaboration with Indigenous peoples, increased funding for CBC to platform Indigenous voices, language, and news, and funding to protect and revitalize Indigenous languages. The title A Knock on the Door is also powerful in its dual meaning. On one hand, it refers to the beginning of many children’s residential school experiences when a knock on the door indicated it was time to leave home for school. On the other hand, it also refers to opening and keeping open archives and research in order to continue to reveal these histories. As such, a portion of the proceeds from this book goes to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. It is highly accessible and Canadians should find it a good starting point to learn about this important history.

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

OUTSTANDING Indigenous read.

Powerful book.

I felt it was similar to 21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act: Helping Canadians Make Reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples a Reality, but even better.

Would highly recommend this.

Very important read - especially today on The National Day for Truth and Reconciliation (September 30).

A must-read

5.0/5

[Chinook · Rating 5 out of 5]

With Orange Shirt Day approaching, I want to make sure that I’m doing more than symbolically wearing a t-shirt. I learned nothing about this history in school, so in order to ensure my children grow up with a more truthful history, I need to educate myself.

At the end, when the list of every school is read out, I cried. This is such a heavy history. We can’t let indigenous Canadians bear that weight alone.

[Lesley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This took me over 3 years to read for a reason. It is certainly commendable the thoroughness of the The Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the commitment to uncovering and acknowledging the horrors and evil done to indigenous families and children in Canada. If only my own country would own it's atrocities and begin making amends. It's a difficult read but entirely worth it.

[Melanie Bartelings · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have rated this with 5 stars because I believe it is a book that all Canadians should read. While it isnt a long read it was difficult to get through because the content is heavy. They took thousands of stories and used parts of them to explain the various aspects of residential schools. It was hard to hear 5 different people's stories in one heartwrenching paragraph.

[Amanda]

I don’t want to rate this book because giving 5 stars to something that talks about such pain and the horrific conditions of these institutions feels wrong. I will say that this book was very informative and definitely worth the read to educate yourself on the atrocities that have been committed against the Indigenous people.

[Jessica]

It's very comprehensive and easily disgestable. It should be required reading for all Canadians. I did the audiobook and they tried to make it accessible but there are charts and stats that didn't translate that I will go back and check out. The footnotes were very well done though which is rare for audio.

[Marion · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent overview. Highly recommend for those who can't put in the time to read longer, more complex books. This is a great way to introduce yourself to the topic.

[Rodrigo · Rating 4 out of 5]

It’s curious what happens when the colonized is able to tell his version. A lot of terrible stories and a long path to amendments.

[Andrea Frazee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Audiobook

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important history for all Canadians to understand.

[Alder]

not the kind of thing you rate or review. this would be an effective teaching tool in schools. it was enriching to read this type of report especially the call to action section

[Emma · Rating 5 out of 5]

An extremely approachable and readable introduction to the history of residential schools that succeeds in making me want to read the six-volume report it’s abridging.

[Maria · Rating 5 out of 5]

An accessible introduction to the TRC's findings on residential schools. Lots of details on historical records and testimony from residential school survivors. Really sad, and for me especially sad that none of this was taught in public school history.

[JC · Rating 5 out of 5]

A few weeks ago, I went for a nice little hike with an old high school friend and we wandered nearby the UTM Campus, along the steeper embankments of the Missinihe (Credit River), down to where the Erindale Dam once used to be, back up to Riverwood. It was only my second time seeing someone since the start of the pandemic back in March of the previous year. I had pretty much been holed up for over a year and it was really nice to be able to enjoy the Missinihe summer woods in the company of an old friend. We always discuss books and politics, and he mentioned he was working his way through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports. He was in fact the first to share with me the news of the Kamloops residential school mass gravesite.

Shortly after, in an SCM (Student Christian Movement) book study I’m participating in (we're reading Unsettling the Word: Biblical Experiments in Decolonization), we also went through some of the TRC Calls to Action in our group session, focusing on the ones directed at churches and faith groups, and working through how the Christian Church had been a central force in carrying out colonial genocide and perpetuating the Doctrine of Discovery and terra nullius that the TRC specifically denounces and calls on all faith groups to likewise repudiate. It was this process of reading through these TRC Calls to Action with other fellow Christians, and thinking about ways we could better carry out these calls to action, which compelled me to read this book, which is mainly excerpts and testimony compiled by the Anishinaabe-Metis lawyer Aimee Craft from the larger body of TRC reports. Craft was a research director for both the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls and at the National Centre for Truth and Reconcilliation.

The TRC calls to action are actually included at the end of the book, and it was really helpful to return to them and re-read them again after having worked through all the materials compiled in this book from the larger body of TRC reports. I think this book should in some way be recommended reading for all people who identify as Christians. It’s so important to carefully and critically learn about all the atrocities that have been committed under the banner of one’s own faith tradition. My family in Asia became Christian under British colonialism and its attendant values of white supremacy, and a number in the SCM reading group have family that arrived at the faith tradition in a similar way, through different European colonial powers. There are of course many Indigenous people who identify with the Christian tradition. And so when white evangelicals get touchy about their faith tradition being criticized as imperialist and genocidal, they don’t have any sense that it is often people who identify as Christians who are levelling these criticisms. And self-criticism is such an important aspect of both radical politics and the Christian tradition. This book was hard to read, but it’s so important to realize that it was Christians that were at the heart of the residential school system and committed what basically amounted to genocide. Not just cultural genocide, but pure genocide with no qualifier.

Reading this book, it was also illuminating to see how closely the principles of contemporary neoliberalized education model in the age of capitalist austerity aligns with the principles of the colonial residential school. This is the thing that I think gets missed in a lot of media coverage, and reading this book was my first encounter with this sort of information. These residential schools were severely underfunded. The state relied on some strange notion of religious devotion that it believed its religious teachers would have and paid them very little to go into remote areas all over Turtle Island to teach in these residential schools. The schools were basically expected to be economically self-sufficient, which meant that it was the labour of Indigenous children that was expected to produce enough commodities for market, maintenance for their buildings, sustenance for themselves, and so on. As a result the children spent large portions of their day working in farm fields, cleaning parts of the building, collecting firewood, and not actually learning in the school. In some cases, that hard labour was all that they did. If they did get to spend some time learning, the quality of the teaching was very poor, as the very low teacher incomes did not attract good quality instructors. It was very reasonable for parents to want to pull their children out of these schools. The TRC report has an account of one father who tried to do so, commenting that his son just worked all day for the residential school, if he was going to work all day, he might as well do it for his own family rather than the colonial administration. But after he had pulled his son out of the school, his son was forcefully removed from him and returned back to the ‘school’ (or more accurately child slave labour camp).

The conditions of the school were also terrible. There were so many horrifying statistics mentioned in this book. The food served to the children was often terrible, and in a number of documented cases, after children had vomited out a meal, they were forced to eat their own vomit again by residential schoolteachers. There was almost always a two-tiered meal system where the clergy and white school staff would get much better quality food, and the Indigenous children were served far poorer quality food, sometimes inedible, and only in very rare instances did they both receive the same quality food, only out of the voluntary generosity of a particular school master, but that was extremely rare.

This book was really important to read. There are a lot of details about how churches were involved in this horrifying colonial project, and even before the revelations of the mass grave sites, this book enumerates shockingly large numbers of expected childhood deaths that occurred in this school, and it is just horrifying to me that it took ground-penetrating radar evidence for me to hear about these shocking death rates. These high mortality rates have been known for some time, although they were just estimates based on testimony. So much of my experience in my youth when trying to learn about Indigenous issues was hearing this notion that Indigenous genocide mainly happened in the US, but the colonialism of Upper Canada was not as brutal and did not really commit genocide. It is so clear that this is not the case. The TRC has been making these claims for years, and I’m gravely sad that I did not take the time to learn about them sooner. I am working through the TRC calls to action now and trying to work on them in my SCM faith community.

One of my evangelical friends brought up the mass residential school gravesite issue with her pastor, a week or so after the news broke, asking if he could comment on it or take time in their service to pay respects to the children who had died in these schools. The pastor said that he could not comment on it and that he felt like he didn’t have enough information to know the full picture and what really happened, and that congregations who were commenting on it were merely engaging in a practice of virtue signalling. While I might agree with his second comment that faith communities often do apologize with a certain brand of unique hypocrisy, it’s absolutely astounding the contemporary state of Canadian evangelicalism is in the practice of genocide denial. It infuriates me to no end when not just Christians but Christian leaders take no responsibility for the atrocities that were committed in the name of their faith, and act as if they aren’t sure there’s anything to be said about it in church.

There’s an entire section on the TRC Calls to Action addressed to churches and faith communities. It is our responsibility as people of faith to hold our institutions accountable and we continually demand that they work on these calls to action and carrying out the actions that Indigenous communities have asked of them. So many comment on how overwhelming the news of the school gravesites was and that they didn’t really know what to do. Indigenous Nations have been meeting and listing out actionable items for many years for newcomers on Turtle Island to work on. It’s actually a very low bar. All the work of compiling these action items has been done. One of the items is having faith congregations learn about the way their denomination was involved in the colonial project of residential schools. It is so easy for ‘non-denominational’ evangelicals to feel like they are somehow not complicit in this history. All Christians should feel some responsibility for understanding how certain Christians in history were colonizers and were involved in genocidal projects that left thousands of Indigenous children dead. Settlers cannot continue in denial when Indigenous people have called them to be better than that.

[Heather Eyk · Rating 4 out of 5]

A sobering, yet important history that every Canadian should read.

[Ron Peters · Rating 5 out of 5]

When my mom was young, she was told she had to leave home to go to Residential School. She cried and cried for days until her parents agreed to hide her when the officials came looking for her and they made up some story. So, she was lucky enough to avoid that experience, but as a result, she had no formal education.

I was never told why, but her brother, my uncle Leonard, was not so lucky. He ended up in the Port Alberni Residential School, where he was regularly beaten, and he didn’t get out until he was sixteen years old, and his parents had already died. Compared with my mom, all he got was a really bad education. He grew up to be a wreck of a person who headed a large dumpster fire of a family.

The question of reconciliation around the legacy of Residential Schools is difficult and complex. It touches on both the complex personal effects of the school experience itself, and many lasting social consequences in areas like child welfare, education, language and culture loss, health, justice, and so on.

A book like this can be a useful educational tool. It should be used in high schools across Canada along with other appropriate programs, but it could also be used by Reading Groups in our public libraries. The information it contains should be used to provide all Canadians with educational programming through the CBC, and it should be made mandatory reading in all journalism, law, education, health care, and political science programs across Canada. Only when average Canadians understand this history can there be a real political will to push our politicians to fully implement the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the UN Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

It’s also worth noting that a portion of the proceeds from the sale of this volume goes to support the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation in Manitoba.