I chose to take a deeper look into this section because of my connection to it. As a teacher, I have the ability, more than most, to create positive change inside of schools. I can educate our future leaders about the horrors Indigenous peoples have been faced with and the complicated relationship between Canada and Indigenous peoples. I can also make an effort to actively include Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing in my lessons and activities. Before we take a deeper look into what needs to be done, it is important to understand why it needs to be done.
Why Reconciliation is Necessary in Education:
As many (but not enough) know, Canada’s history with Indigenous peoples has consisted mainly of attempts to assimilate them into white-European culture. One of the methods of this forced assimilation was Residential Schools. These schools were primarily run by Christian churches in collaboration with the Canadian government with the primary goal of assimilating Indigenous youth by minimizing ties to family, culture, and language. Children were forcibly removed from their families and sent to these institutions where they were banned from speaking their language, practicing their culture, and dressing in their traditional clothing. The first school opened in the 1840’s, and attendance became mandatory in 1894. Parents faced jail time if they refused to send their children.
Not only did these schools forcibly remove children from their families, but once these children arrived at the schools, they often lived in unsanitary and unsafe conditions which threatened their health. Investigations into these schools showed that they were not up to safety codes and were spaces allowing diseases like Tuberculosis to spread rapidly, taking thousands of young lives away.
Throughout Canada’s history there were eventually over 130 different Residential Schools opened in every province except for Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island. Many of these schools existed in Saskatchewan, and the last Residential School to close in Canada was in Saskatchewan on Gordon’s First Nation in 1996.
These schools are a part of our recent history, whether we realize it or not, and their impact lives on today, especially through inter-generational trauma. Children at these schools suffered from physical, emotional, and sexual abuse, starvation, malnutrition, forced labour, discrimination, physical punishment, and widespread diseases like Tuberculosis which claimed the lives of many of these children. Children as young as 4 years old were recorded attending these schools, undoubtedly deprived of emotional support that comes from living with their family.
To prove that these schools were made for the sole purpose of assimilating Indigenous children into white-European society, here is a quote from the Prime Minister who helped to create these schools:
‘When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.’
John A. Macdonald, 1879
However, it is not only Macdonald who believed this, Canadian leaders who followed him shared these same beliefs and objectives:
‘I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… 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…’
Duncan Campbell Scott, 1920
(Deputy Superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs 1913-1932)
The “Indian problem” as Scott refers to it, was something a lot of Canadian leaders at the time saw as threatening: they wanted to erase Indigenous peoples as a distinct cultural, political, and social group entirely.
For More Information:
For detailed information on the experience of students in Canadian Residential Schools with evidence and documentation of conditions, read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Final Report here
For an article describing how the treatment of Indigenous children in these schools qualifies as genocide click here
For a short documentary focusing on the Regina Indian Industrial School and its legacy click here
For a brief history of the Residential Schools from the Canadian Encyclopedia, click here