GRSJ224: Biopower and Residential Schools

Biopower

Biopower is a term first used by French philosopher Michael Foucault. Simply put, it is described as the State’s ability to administer life and death in a given population.. Historically, this took the form of the sovereign’s absolute right to life and death over its subjects. This is an example of biopower in its most overt and pure form. However, contemporarily, it takes the form of governmental institutions and policies which act on the population to “foster life or disallow it until the point of death”. These policies and institutions take shape in many different forms. Social health policies, labour regulations, reproductive politics and educational reforms, are all manifestations of the State’s ability to exercise power over a given population and can have lasting effects on the population itself. Focault quotes, "Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die."

Residential Schools

In trying to fulfill its constitutional duty, the Canadian Government was required to create educational policies and plans for all those living under the Dominion of Canada. However, the policies enacted were that of segregation, offering different curriculums and opportunities to those of European descent and to the aboriginal people living under colonial rule. The Residential School Program was an educational policy put forward by the Canadian Government in the 1870s. The policies saw that Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes, cut-off from their families at home and prohibited from partaking in any sort of practice related to their culture, including speaking their native language. Around 130 schools were open throughout Canada with the goal of assimilating Native children into the dominant, Eurocentric culture. As Prime Minister Stephen Harper stated in his 2008 apology to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada, “Two primary objectives of the Residential Schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.”Harper's Apology. The policies implemented were a systematic exercise of power. The aboriginal population was deemed culturally inferior and the overt, aggressive efforts to assimilate Aboriginal children have even been considered a form of cultural genocide. .

While the intention of the schools was a death of aboriginal culture, aboriginal students themselves perished in the schools, largely due to poor health standards, inadequate care and underqualified educators. Indian And Northern Affairs Canada The educational curriculum taught was that of basic skills, carpentry, and labour work for the males, and sewing, laundry and domestic skills for the females. Rarely did the children receive higher than a 5th grade education, and often times they were put to work, maintaining the schools themselves as part of a “practical learning objective”, without which the schools would not have been able to function. The skills they learned and were withheld from learning, made it difficult to adapt to life in burgeoning urban areas created by the colonizers, while the removal from their traditional homes and cultures alienated them from their families. Policies were enacted on them to deliberately debilitate them and the conditions they faced in the schools were abhorrent.Indian And Northern Affairs Canada

It is policies such as these that embody what Foucault meant when he said “the power to foster life and disallow it to the point of death.”.. The early government of Canada was making decisions which directly affected the ability for a population to succeed. The power they had with the single stroke of a political pen meant that an entire population was marginalized and disenfranchised and the effects of this are still being felt dearly today, despite the contemporary government’s efforts at reconciliation and reparation.