No place in public schools — or anywhere else — for attempts to rewrite history

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This article was published 24/05/2024 (548 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Hanover School Division was forced to apologize after one of its teachers asked students to name two positive aspects about residential schools.

The teacher at Steinbach Regional Secondary School asked students last month to “make a list of what you think are two positive and two negative effects of residential schools.” It was supposed to be an assignment to help students learn about the legacy of residential schools.

The school division’s superintendent has since apologized for the content of the assignment, saying it came from an outdated provincial course package.

One might ask the question: what is wrong with learning about both the negative and positive aspects of residential schools? After all, isn’t it the goal of schools to teach students how to assess all aspects of an issue before drawing conclusions about it?

The answer in this case is fairly simple: any positive stories associated with residential schools are not only irrelevant, focusing on them distracts — usually deliberately — from the stated objective of the institutions, which was to eradicate Indigenous culture, language, religion and way of life.

If you dig deep enough, you’ll find some positive aspects of Canada’s residential schools, attended by an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children over more than 100 years. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard from thousands of residential school survivors, found that some students (they were more like inmates than students since most were essentially kidnapped from their parents) had positive experiences, including forging lifelong friendships.

“The residential school story is complicated,” the commission wrote in its report. “Stories of abuse stand in sharp contradiction to the happier memories of some survivors.”

So why don’t we consider all aspects of residential schools when learning about them, including the positive stories where, in some cases, students excelled and went on to lead successful lives and careers? Because that was neither the stated goal of the institutions nor the experience of the vast majority of Indigenous children who attended them.

The overwhelming experience in residential schools was one of sexual, physical and psychological abuse, unsafe and unsanitary living conditions, hunger, racism, neglect and forced child labour. Those experiences caused generations of trauma and have contributed to the economic and social disparities we see today between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Any happy stories that may have come out of residential schools were incidental to the horrors that took place in them.

“Regardless of the different individual experiences that children had as students in the schools, they shared the common experience of being exploited,” the TRC report goes on to say. “They were victims of a system intent on destroying intergenerational links of memory to their families, communities, and nations.”

By asking students today to list two positive and two negative effects of residential schools is to assume equal parts of both existed, which is inaccurate. It advances the false narrative that government and the churches that ran the institutions were merely doing their best to provide Indigenous children with an education to prepare them for the outside world.

They weren’t.

The stated objective of the schools was to assimilate Indigenous children into white, Christian culture by demonizing their language, culture and way of living. That is the well-documented story of residential schools. Any attempt to distract from that by focusing on unintended benefits is designed to sugar-coat government’s genocidal policies. It runs counter to the goals of reconciliation, which includes teaching the truth about Canada’s assimilative policies and their impact on Indigenous people.

Attempts to rewrite history by making false claims that residential schools had a legitimate education component, and that there were both happy and sad stories associated with them, is the work of residential school deniers. Their goal is to disseminate false information about residential schools by misrepresenting government’s stated objectives and by disproportionately emphasizing the institutions’ unintended benefits.

That has no place in the public school system. It has no place anywhere.

If governments of the day were truly interested in providing Indigenous people with an education, they would have supplied First Nations with well-maintained, properly funded schools in their communities (which are treaty rights) — like they did for non-Indigenous people — without trying to eradicate them as a people. They did the opposite.

That’s what should be taught in schools and elsewhere, not some fantasy version that the institutions had both a negative and positive aspect to them.

tom.brodbeck@freepress.mb.ca