Take the Indian Out of the Child

November 26, 2020 10:15 AM

Residential Schools were part of a system set up to "assimilate" First Nations people in Canada by taking their children to schools where they lived and were taught and were often abused. Some children died and were buried in unmarked graves. Started in the 1800s, the last residential school closed in 1996. The government has officially apologized but not everyone thinks residential schools were a bad thing [tiktok].
posted by aclevername (26 comments total)

Is Lynn Beyak teachning in Abbotsford these days?
posted by jacquilynne at 10:24 AM on November 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

I may have mentioned this in another thread but the Satanic Panic podcast on CBC ends with what was for me a stunning reflection that while an entire town was subsumed by fear of Satanic murdering child abusers flooding their town,* and people had huge "Believe the Child" signs up in their windows,** a few kilometers down the road there was still, extant, a residential school where cultural genocide and all manners of child abuse was taking place pretty darn openly.

I attended one of the public events during the Commission and this is something that all Canadians should learn about, be aware of, reflect upon (settlers anyway), and fight to look out for again.

* I always feel I should note here that the backlash against the tv-fueled Satanists Everywhere and very real situations where children were led into bizarre allegations, there is also no doubt in both my mind and experience that ritualized abuse - abuse where the abuse is tied to religious beliefs and in some cases rituals - exists.

In residential schools, in fact.

** In general believing kids is a good idea even if there are isolated cases where things go off the rails - many, many fewer than situations where kids are not believed and supported.
posted by warriorqueen at 10:50 AM on November 26, 2020 [17 favorites]

Homework assignment to list 'positive' stories about residential schools under investigation

As Tanya Tagaq just put it: This is the opposite of education.

Previously:

Orange Shirt Day and the legacy of colonialism in residential schools

“...the darkest most troubling chapters in our collective history”
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 10:50 AM on November 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

Thanks for the CBC link, I'm glad it's being investigated.

I was trying to be calm but I came back in to add that although my children's Toronto-area schools are now doing a much better job and each has covered the residential schools and centred some indigenous stories in their readings, when my oldest son started his learning in history I had to have meetings right up to the trustee level because the material he received was a) offensive and b) was inaccurate even at that level as it misplaced the dates by a century.

We have a long, long way to go here.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:01 AM on November 26, 2020 [4 favorites]

I don't remember when I first learned about the residential school system (when I was in university in the mid-90s, probably), but it wasn't until a few years ago that I learned the last residential school closed its doors in 1996, which was the year I finished my undergrad. So we're not exactly talking about the distant past.
posted by The Card Cheat at 11:33 AM on November 26, 2020 [7 favorites]

I have a friend from British Columbia all of who's relatives went to residential schools around the province. Many of them have fond memories of the schools, especially the smaller local ones. (They definitely stemmed from heinous policies, but far from all of them were abusive hell holes, although those were around too.) Basically it gives me some comfort to hear the stories where the kids had a good time too.
posted by tatiana131 at 12:04 PM on November 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

I debated with myself whether to mention this or not, because I don't want to be one of those Americans who jumps into every story about another country to re-center it around the American experience, which is certainly not my intent.

I do want to say, however, that schools of this sort were far from a uniquely Canadian institution and many countries have inflicted, and in some cases continue to inflict, the same damage on their indigenous minorities.

Why bring this up and risk a derail? Well, besides feeling the need to acknowledge the damage my own adopted state has done to its Alaska Native population: when one sees the same patterns of abuse surface over and over and over again in every country where such systems have been implemented, an honest reckoning has to confront the fact that, whatever the claimed intentions of those who establish them might be, ultimately the purpose of a system is what it does.
posted by Nerd of the North at 12:06 PM on November 26, 2020 [5 favorites]

“from 3 different websites” that’s a clever way to indoctrinate kids into the chudosphere. Just asking questions, eh?
posted by rodlymight at 12:07 PM on November 26, 2020 [3 favorites]

** In general believing kids is a good idea even if there are isolated cases where things go off the rails - many, many fewer than situations where kids are not believed and supported.

It depends
posted by y2karl at 12:22 PM on November 26, 2020

^ the article you link to quite literally describes abuse of children. I take your point, but it bears mentioning that the interrogation of children to coerce evidence of abuse was, in fact, abusive in many of the examples cited in the article.

what a shitty ol' world we live in
posted by elkevelvet at 12:27 PM on November 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Just pointing out that in Canada, for any slight glimpse of progress in the direction of Truth & Reconciliation we have the constant pressure to dismiss, forget, and refuse to acknowledge. One example: UCP gov't efforts in Alberta to 'depoliticize' curriculum.. Prepare to see the dilution and outright removal of content that tries to address the history of residential schooling.
posted by elkevelvet at 12:30 PM on November 26, 2020 [9 favorites]

When I saw the CBC article I looked at the two sites that they suggested, and it was mostly "well we got fed" (true in some schools) or "they taught us skills", but the articles never mention that the need for these things was caused by colonialism. (I do not think that the residential schools were good, whether or not some individual children had good experiences at some specific schools.)
posted by jeather at 12:32 PM on November 26, 2020

Thanks y2kari, if you had read my comment AT ALL you would have seen that it was about how in the middle of the Satanic Panic there were First Nations Children being abused down the fucking road, also, kids were being abused, adults just turned it into shitty hysterical anti-daycare nonsense which ended up covering up the real abuse.

Maybe think about why you felt like you had to come into a thread about institutional abuse and post that article.
posted by warriorqueen at 12:52 PM on November 26, 2020 [9 favorites]

Two breathtaking podcasts on the far-reaching effects of the residential schools strategy: the CBC-produced Finding Cleo and the Canadaland-produced Thunder Bay.
posted by progosk at 1:30 PM on November 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

The effects of the residential school system as it relates to the Dene is a significant part of Joe Sacco's new book, Paying the Land. For me, it was a very welcome depiction, as it laid out the system in a comprehensive and personal way, taking full advantage of the immediacy of the graphic novel.
posted by Capt. Renault at 1:36 PM on November 26, 2020 [1 favorite]

→ Basically it gives me some comfort to hear the stories where the kids had a good time too.

Because the alternative is the uncomfortable realization that Canada is built on systemic racism.

The kids did not have a good time at the Old Sun school near Glenbow: starvation and disease lead to the Siksika Rebellion which caused a very hasty exit for the missionary administrator
posted by scruss at 1:53 PM on November 26, 2020 [12 favorites]

This is one of those issues that always stops me in my tracks when it hits home how recent it was. I (American) have a Canadian First Nations friend in her 40s and I was flabbergasted to hear that her dad had been at a residential school. I'd definitely thought they had ended "long ago." (Equally shocked to discover, as a teenager, that the parents of my Japanese American bestie had been in California internment camps in WWII.)
posted by BlahLaLa at 2:51 PM on November 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

Maybe think about why you felt like you had to come into a thread about institutional abuse and post that article.

I reacted to the words quoted. 'Believe the children' depended on who was asking what and who was hearing what, moral entrepreneurs in the beginning, the State in the end.

Innocent lives were harmed irreparably in the 80s -- including the children in the cases involved, many who grew up believing they had been monstrously tortured. What good did it do for them ? That was what came to mind.

So it was just that, a reaction to those words and not a personal attack on you.

But it was a derail. The subject was the Canadian residential schools. And For that I apologize to you and everyone else.
posted by y2karl at 3:29 PM on November 26, 2020 [2 favorites]

(They definitely stemmed from heinous policies, but far from all of them were abusive hell holes, although those were around too.) Basically it gives me some comfort to hear the stories where the kids had a good time too.

Romeo Saganash put it this way: "The rationale here is it wasn’t so bad? Kidnapping kids of one culture to transfer them to another? Called genocide under the convention on genocide’s Article 2, paragraph (e) #GoRead"
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 6:47 PM on November 26, 2020 [7 favorites]

I just want to say again that while what happened for a historical nanosecond in the 90s was of course terrible, the much longer course of history is that children are not valued or believed, particularly indigenous children or children of colour in the colonial West.

The fact that we currently fixate on, frankly, a couple hundred generally white children in the 80s and 90s - for whom I feel, I was a white child in the 80s, although I was an actual victim of sexual and ritualized abuse, no question at all there as my abuser confessed - it's so. fucking. weird. that this is what's left, even to the degree that someone felt they had to come into this thread to assert the LACK of abuse in the 1980s.

Which is what I was trying to say. Residential schools were running at the same time. And yet their history is erased. When you think of "abuse in the 80s" you think of Oprah and the FBI "where are the bodies" reports and these other things.

And it's absolutely not just sexual abuse or physical abuse. Maybe you don't understand what happened:

- children were forcibly taken -- the "60s scoop" being one example - from their families
- they never were reunited
- they were severely physically punished for speaking their own language or telling their own stories
- many died of abuse and neglect and illness; they were medically experimented on
- the deliberate policy of the Canadian government was to eliminate their culture
- this was a cultural genocide: "In all, about 150,000 First Nation, Inuit and Métis children were removed from their communities and forced to attend the schools."

So just to be clear, my point is that a few dozen, maybe a few hundred, wrongly accused adults have defined abuse in the 1980s and 1990s in popular culture while this history has gone unrecognized until lately.
posted by warriorqueen at 7:09 AM on November 27, 2020 [17 favorites]

Even the CBC struggles to accurately contextualize, describing residential schools as persisting "well into the 20th century", which isn't strictly inaccurate, but when these schools persisted for 96% of the century it's a revealing choice of words.
posted by simra at 8:11 AM on November 27, 2020 [4 favorites]

One of my grandmothers (or Kye7e in her "native" tongue) was in a residential school near Williams Lake, British Columbia. Whenever this "what about the good things" stuff pops up, I think about her. Because for years she told me she didn't think it was so bad, and they taught her some useful skills.

But then one time I sat with her at her dinner table and got her to speak more on the subject. After about an hour, what started with "wasn't so bad, thought they worked the boys a bit too hard" had become quite bitter. I remember saying something like, "Gramma, this sounds really bad, not not so bad." And her reply was, "I could tell you things you'd never believe."
posted by house-goblin at 4:46 PM on November 27, 2020 [16 favorites]

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has a website encompassing many aspects of the native residential school system and its abuses. The survivors tell their stories themselves in depth in the book The Survivors Speak (full book downloadable as PDF)
posted by zaelic at 3:53 AM on November 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Mod note: Just want to acknowledge this thread has seen some examples of how it's possible in offhand comments to derail or downplay severe abuses, which surely was not the intent but it can end up being the effect. And the thread has had a number of detailed responses that explain why that's a big problem. I'm leaving the comments and the replies, and it's a good reminder for people from dominant groups to take extra care and reconsider the need for your comment before commenting on painful topics like this. Thank you to the people who took the care to point out the effect and how it's part of a bigger pattern.
posted by LobsterMitten (staff) at 9:07 AM on November 28, 2020 [6 favorites]

My mother, her 2 younger sisters, 3 brothers, a half-brother, as well as many cousins were all forced to attend Indian residential school during the 1940s and 50s. The school was located in Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia, and served the entire Atlantic Canada region.

The school was cold and overcrowded; the children were poorly fed, with rampant malnutrition, poor sanitation, and they faced harsh discipline (including corporal punishment) for the smallest of infractions. For a school that was built for a maximum of 125 students; by the time my mother and her siblings attended, the school was crowded with anywhere from 150 to 175 students, depending on the year. The school was originally overseen by the Roman Catholic diocese and later the Missionary Oblates -- who, of course, did not allow the students to follow their traditional cultural beliefs/religion, and forced them to follow the beliefs and traditions of their own organized religions (usually Catholicism).

The children were used for forced farm and agricultural labour on the attached gardens and fields. The children were often starving and chronically malnourished, with minimal to no health care; which caused long term health issues for some of them (influenza, tuberculosis, undiagnosed diabetes, etc.).

I remember my Mom recounting stories about how her older brothers and cousins would risk severe beatings to try to crawl on their bellies between the rows, to the far sides of the gardens, in order to try to steal scrawny carrots for them to eat and share with the younger ones.

All the children were forbidden to speak Mi'kmaq; under penalty of punishments and even beatings. If caught, it was not unheard for children to have their mouths washed out with soap, or large wooden blocks placed in their mouths for an hour or more.

This caused tremendous stress on some of the youngest children (6 years old) who arrived and could speak only Mik'maq. They were understandably scared, confused and overwhelmed because they couldn't communicate with anyone, and couldn't understand the nuns yelling at them in a language they didn't understand. Can you begin to imagine the absolute terror of these poor little kids? After being torn away from their parents, brought to a strange place that might be hundreds of miles away from home, and not understanding a thing being said to you?

My Mom and her siblings would try to speak their language amongst themselves only when hidden or the nuns couldn't hear them. These surreptitious conversations were also the only way to try to calm down the little ones who arrived not speaking any English, and to explain to them how to behave and survive.

My Mom also told me how over the years, the children at Shubie also created a form of secret and subtle sign language, so that they could communicate secretly from the nuns, in order to avoid punishments.

My Mother and her siblings were "lucky" in that they got to come home once or twice a year -- usually during the winter holidays and during the summer. But not all children were so lucky, and some ended up staying there year-round, and became virtual strangers with their parents. Not that many years before my Mom's time at Shubie, *none* of the children were even allowed to go home for holidays or the summer; despite parents who were willing to pay the transportation costs. Not even the kids from the nearby reserve in Shubenacadie only a few miles away! There are records of some children being away from their parents anywhere from 8 to 10 years!

My Mother, Aunts and Uncles were fortunate that their parents already spoke and understood English, as well as Mi'kmaq. They managed to retain their native language, and the ones that are still living still speak it to this day.

However, many children totally lost their native language from being forbidden to speak it for so long and from such a young age; and when they eventually were able to return home, they couldn't even communicate with their parents and family.

There's a semi-derogatory term that is used for Natives that have forcefully lost their language and culture in this way, or were removed/placed into foster care or adopted out to a white/non-native family -- an "apple" -- meaning "Red on the outside, but White on the inside".

There are so many Mi'kmaq people from my Mother's generation who developed PTSD, anxiety, depression, and a variety of other mental health issues from the psychological and physically abusive conditions (including sexual abuse) during their extended stay at residential school. Not surprisingly, many ended up turning to drugs and alcohol to try to cope/deal with it somehow, and some even turned to suicide. The aftermath of this historic trauma has had long-term effects that continue to affect the younger generations that followed, in a multitude of ways.

Residential schools didn't just "hurt" some Indians. The residential school systematically inflicted atrocities upon, and mentally and physically abused generations of innocent children; and did it's damned best to deny and steal them of their language, culture, religion, family traditions, and personal identity, as well as their community's spirit and cohesiveness.

To this day, whenever I've driven by the hill upon which the now-demolished school was located; I cannot help but shudder at the thought of the horrors and conditions that were inflicted upon my Mother, her siblings and the many hundreds of children that were forced to stay there against their will and those of their parents.
posted by Jade Dragon at 9:47 PM on November 28, 2020 [78 favorites]

Defenders of slavery always try to say the same thing: that not all the slaves were starved or beaten or mistreated in the typical ways we all think of. I don't see how that matters; for one thing, a system that allows so much authority over its victims that those kind of abuses are possible is a bad system. And taking people from their homes and putting them in a place they're not allowed to leave is evil enough in and of itself, even if you don't beat or starve them.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 7:06 PM on December 3, 2020 [2 favorites]