Colonialism, Cultural Genocide & First Nations Children: The Horrors & Lingering Effects of Canada’s Residential School Program

Colonialism, Cultural Genocide & First Nations Children: The Horrors & Lingering Effects of Canada’s Residential School Program

OVERVIEW

When the first residential schools were set up under by Prime Minister John A. McDonald’s government in the early 1880s, it was the start of a tragic period in history for Canada’s First Nations people. An estimated 150,000+ Indigenous children were forced by the white, male-dominated Canadian government to leave their homes and native communities to live, study, and train in remotely-located residential schools. They became innocent young victims of this country’s shameful cultural genocide agenda aimed at answering or eliminating the “Indian question”. This racially motivated residential school policy reveals how, for over a century, the nation’s dominant white colonial society tried its best to impose its cultural beliefs on the First Nations people by indoctrinating their children in institutions far from their native supporters. These victims of intersectional oppressions were mostly young Indigenous students from poor families, considered highly vulnerable to racially motivated state manipulation, and belonging to voiceless, despised, marginalized First Nations people. For foreigners and Canadians never taught about residential schools, what is now known about the abuse, suffering, and undocumented deaths of innocent native children as a result of this highly racist policy is shocking and disturbing.There are an estimated 80,000 survivors, many of whom have grown up learning minimal parenting skills, have little idea how to cope with their abusive childhood memories, and are living at or below the poverty line. Tragically, thousands died in residential schools and most survivors feel socially isolated because they never learned their native languages or cultural traditions yet are not accepted by Canada’s dominant white society as social equals.

Colonial Government’s Justifications & Racist Agendas

In the January 1879, the Prime Minister sent out his trusted aide, Nicholas Davin, to the United States to travel to the newly organized industrial schools set up by the American government as a way to assimilate their native peoples. When he returned from this crucial fact-finding trip, this politician/author wrote his infamous The Davin Report (1879) recommending Canada should copy the US industrial schools program. The First Nations people posed significant problems for the federal government who were unsure what to do with the original inhabitants of the lands and territories Euro-Canadian colonizers now claimed for themselves. The European colonizers brought to Canada their cultural arrogance and innate racism towards all native peoples. As had happened in their colonies around the world, the dominant Euro-Canadian colonizers believe Canadian Aboriginals to be uncivilized, uneducated barbarians with un-Christian beliefs and incomprehensible cultural traditions. There was also fear that eventually native tribes who did not sign treaties ceding their traditional lands to white colonial authorities would eventually demand control of their territories back. Therefore, Prime Minister MacDonald’s government sought to “kill the Indian in the child” as a way to deal with Canada’s “Indian Question.” By assimilating the Indigenous children, they believed they were “civilizing” the First Nations and that over time, there would not be any “real” native peoples, communities or leaders left to make land claims against the government. As Deputy Superintendent-General Duncan Campbell Scott infamously told the 1920 Special Committee of Canada’s House of Commons, “Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”

Residential Schools

The government, therefore, worked closely with several religious organizations, notably the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, United, and Presbyterian churches to set up and staff the 125 remotely located residential schools. They wanted to isolate native children from any outside native influences, so children were generally sent to distant schools rather than ones near their homes. The colonial governments believed residential schools as the ideal program for expanding their cultural genocide agenda against Canada’s native population. Cultural assimilation of First Nations children into white society, the government believed, would make the Indian Question go away. Assimilated native children would be civilized and forced to abandon their “barbaric” cultural roots. The residential schools’ instructors and religious leaders were charged with ensuring this assimilation program succeeded as a way to reduce the numbers of Aboriginal individuals and communities over time, but also to provide a source of low-cost workers for white businesses and farms.

Suffering of Indigenous Children

In 1920, the government changed its residential policy to make attendance mandatory, panicking many native families to attempt desperate measures to keep their precious children out of these schools. Stories about physical, verbal and sexual abuse at these hated residential schools were being heard by already fearful native parents. These rumours and stories of abuse only made native families more desperate and determined to keep their own children out of the government’s residential schools, even if it meant hiding their sons and daughters in remote wilderness areas far from the RCMP and other government agents. Aboriginal students who ended up at one of the 125 residential schools set up across Canada, with 21 here in BC, has to study basic English, mathematics, Western religious teachings, and other courses determined the colonial government and their religious partners. They were also forced to develop skills to prepare them for a future as low-wage laborers, but without the knowledge, skills or qualifications to compete with white workers for better-paying, higher status jobs. At the same time, native students were cruelly punished for such minor infractions as speaking their native language, practicing their native cultural ceremonies, or discussing their native beliefs. Tragically, several thousand Indigenous children died at the schools as a result of malnutrition from the poor quality food, communicable diseases like tuberculosis, and unimaginable physical and sexual abuse from their white “caregivers”. Of the 150,000+ residential school students, approximately 80,000 survivors remain alive.  

Survivors’ Stories

Although BC’s last residential school was eventually closed in 1984, there remains a terrible legacy of suffering among the thousands of survivors, most of whom had been abused and taught that their native cultures were inferior to those of the colonizers. Without being able to compete for decent jobs, survivors almost always lived at or below the poverty line. Their childhood was spent being abused at residential schools so most survivors had few parenting skills or knew how to build and maintain caring, nurturing, loving relationships. Interviews of survivors find that large numbers have been trapped in “continuing cycles of emotional, physical and sexual abuse, as well as addiction, suicide and other markers of intergenerational trauma.” The real tragedy revealed from countless survivor stories is that the personal traumas and cultural genocide harms happened to several generations of innocent First Nations children, so in many cases, parents and grandparents have neither the parenting skills nor the cultural knowledge to help younger victims deal with what happened to them at the schools. Children of survivors often suffer from neglect or abuse simply because their parents never experienced or learned how to be good parents themselves. Thousands of survivors have expressed how losing their cultural identity and not accepted by their native communities, yet remaining unaccepted by white society, left them feeling lost, depressed, and as if they do not belong anywhere. Sexual abuse “loomed like a dark cloud on the horizon” and one survivor tells how “they pushed sewing needles through his tongue” for speaking his native language. Many have turned to drugs, alcohol, and other forms of substance abuse as coping mechanisms for their childhood victimization at the hands of the Canadian government. Anybody passing through Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside will see tragic examples of the human cost of Canada’s residential school program. Although recent governments and Prime Ministers have apologized and promised to negotiate fair truth and reconciliation agreements with the First Nations peoples and residential school survivors, tragically, for tens of thousands of victims, it is too little and too late because they are dead.