Before Confederation and up through the first half of the twentieth century, the policy of the government of Canada towards the First Nations was assimilation. It was thought that the quickest route to “civilizing” and “converting” the indigenous population was to forcibly remove indigenous children from their homes and communities and to place them in residential schools. There was considerable variation in how the schools operated, but in many cases the children were forbidden to speak their mother tongues, their cultures were condemned as barbaric and their spirituality as heathen. By the end of the nineteenth century, a relationship had developed between the government and churches, with the government establishing policy and providing most of the funds for these schools.
Between 1820 and 1969, the Anglican Church of Canada was involved in administering twenty-six Indian Residential Schools. By 1969 the church had withdrawn from the residential schools project and committed itself to building more just relationships with its Indigenous members, as well as to advocacy on behalf of Indigenous people.
To study these residential schools is to enter into an area of Canadian history in which stark issues of good and evil intermingle with complexity, paradox and ambiguity.
First and foremost there is an overwhelmingly negative assessment. There are specific incidents of physical and sexual abuse which can neither be excused nor justified by any standard of civilized behavior.
In a book entitled Shingwauk’s Vision, the first comprehensive study of residential schools, historian J. R. Miller described the inhuman situations they engendered thus:
Many former school workers attempt to answer complaints of harsh discipline with the argument that “we had to have rules” because there were a large number of students relative to the few staff. This is true as far as it goes. But such a legitimate observation does not extend far enough to explain and extenuate discipline with “five belts,” punishment by a heated cigarette lighter, or forcing students who became ill from eating bad food to consume their vomit. These actions were abuse, pure and brutally simple. If it be answered that such evils were perpetrated by an aberrant minority, that observation does not refute the obligation that both churches and government had to protect and cherish a population for which they were doubly responsible. The Inuit and status Indian children who attended residential schools were the legal responsibility of the government because in law they were wards of the crown. The missionary staff operated in loco parentis [“in place of the parents”], incurring thereby a moral, if not a legal, obligation to do better . . . If there are explanations for poor food, heavy workloads, and harsh discipline, there can be no justification of the subjection of young boys and girls to the sexual appetites of the male staff members. The failure of church organizations to take action to weed out sexual exploiters leaves the missionaries open to severe censure.
There is also compelling evidence of pervasive emotional abuse, which many believe was even more damaging than the physical abuse.
A 1994 study of residential schools entitled Breaking the Silence, which was sponsored by the Assembly of First Nations, noted: “Being separated from their world and thrown into a strange and foreign place called residential school disoriented First Nations children. They felt lost, confused and fearful. Residential school deepened this wounding by silencing the children in ways which shamed and violated both the children’s native world as well as the children themselves.”
On the same topic, Miller wrote: “There is a consensus in the testimony of former residential school students that the worst aspects of these institutions were the loneliness and emotional deprivation, the inadequate food and clothing, and the excessive work and punishment.”
Undergirding it all was a system of law and culture which scorned Native identity and values.
“By the time the modern residential school system was established, the prevailing missionary belief was that, to Christianize Natives, it was essential also to remake them culturally,” Miller has written.
Acknowledging all this, there remain layers of complexity in the history of residential schools. One of these is the number of former students who report good experiences. “Too many ex-pupils have spoken positively of the experience as a whole, or of particular school workers who befriended them, or even of the balance for positive consequences that they struck after weighing both sides, to justify ignoring or downplaying such memories,” Miller writes.
To an extent, residential schools represent one piece of a much larger pattern of relationships between Aboriginal peoples and European colonizers:
[T]here are many factors other than residential school, for example, the Indian Act, as well as racism and poverty, which have impacted and which continue to impact on the lives of First Nations people. The life of an individual, family or community is the outcome of a complex web of historical and contemporary events which cannot be reduced to one factor. (Breaking the Silence)
For a number of individual students, residential schools may have presented a positive alternative to the other available choices. In many cases, the food that was criticized as poor and inadequate was still superior to and more plentiful than what was available at home. Similarly, while reporting on the trauma suffered by children at residential schools, Breaking the Silence notes: “At the same time, however, it also became evident that residential school may have been a place which limited trauma for some First Nations children who came from very difficult family situations.”
None of the foregoing is intended to minimize the extent of the harm that was done in the schools. None of it justifies so much as a single act of abuse. Nonetheless, it is part of the record, and necessary to an understanding of context. There were as many as eighty residential schools operating during the period from the late 1800s to the 1960s. Estimates of the number of First Nations children in residential schools vary. Miller estimates about a third of six- to fifteen-year-old Aboriginal children, or about seven thousand students, were in residential schools at any one time.
The federal government, Miller says, “looked to its Native educational policy to bring about Aboriginal economic selfsufficiency, principally through cultural assimilation and vocational instruction. An important underlying generalization about Ottawa’s approach was that it always sought to accomplish this goal as inexpensively as possible.”
By 1883 the government had introduced a per capita grant system by which it hoped to control the cost of schooling for Aboriginal students. A feature of this financing system included the use of students as unpaid labor. Church and government relationships come to the fore in determining questions of legal liability. In a larger sense, though, focusing on the churches and the government misses an essential point–the moral and ethical responsibility shared by all Canadians. Church and state were both in accord with the thinking of mainstream (European) Canadians. The legacy of residential schools, and the treatment of First Nations people beyond the schools, belongs to all of us.
Miller writes: It is fitting that a royal commission operating in the name of the people of Canada has looked into the issue because in a fundamental sense the party that bears most responsibility for the residential school story is the people of Canada. Churches and federal bureaucracy no doubt were the instruments that carried out specific acts or neglected to do what needed to be done in particular cases. But behind both the churches and the government stood the populace, who in a democracy such as Canada ultimately are responsible. In the late 1880s and since, it was, in fact, the enlightened and the progressive few in that society who stirred themselves to volunteer to serve in the residential schools. It was the idealists who became involved in missions and residential schools; the mass of the population was indifferent or hostile to the interests of Native people. Those who today selfrighteously condemn missionaries totally for the damage done in residential schools might well remember that a century ago it was people like them–the people who cared about the Native communities–who staffed these schools.
While broadening the circle of responsibility to include the Canadian public, Miller says bluntly, “Christian churches have not done enough to atone for their share of responsibility for the harm residential schools did.”
The Anglican Church of Canada has acknowledged this harm and is continuing to address its responsibility. Stressing the broader responsibility of Canadians does not limit the church’s responsibility. It does recognize, however, that action on the part of the churches will not be sufficient. Even the resources of the federal government will not be adequate to bring healing to Aboriginal peoples, unless those resources are matched by a change of heart on the part of Canadians.