Residential schools: considering intentions and consequences

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 20/01/2025 (257 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like many Manitobans, I have been thinking about the legacy left by the late Murray Sinclair.

He was an honourable man, a statesman, a leader, a visionary. Someone who worked his whole life to bring meaning to the notion of reconciliation — not just the bridging of the gap between people, but the building of meaningful human connections that support that bridge and make it real.

His wisdom was revealed in the kindness of his remarks on substantive issues, even when those issues were contentious or when he disagreed.

Sinclair’s contributions, including the Truth and Reconciliation report itself, have not always been used to promote the kind of reconciliation that he seemed to wish to see.

For some, discussing the history of residential schools elicits the kind of vitriol that Murray Sinclair himself studiously avoided. He refused to call the intent of residential school policy a genocide. Instead, the TRC report referred to that policy as a cultural genocide. As a means of forced assimilation, which it undoubtedly was.

Recently, a private member’s bill was introduced in Parliament which seemed to suggest that anyone not prepared to call residential schooling a genocide should be charged with a crime.

Criminalizing the views of people with different views on the intent and consequences of residential schooling hardly seems to capture the spirit of reconciliation — or honest discussion for that matter. Some people do not seem to want to reconcile the difference between the stated goals of residential schools and the consequences of its implementation. Instead, we commit to a refrain that undermines a genuine discussion.

The word genocide, coined by a Jewish lawyer from Poland in 1944, referred to the systematic killing of millions of Jewish people in what we now call the Holocaust. Genocide refers to a plan to eradicate a whole people based on ethnic and religious divides, as a matter of policy.

Committing genocide originally meant killing people — not the culture, the language, the heritage, but the people themselves.

Even the oft-quoted words of Prime Minister John A. Macdonald referencing the “killing of the Indian in the child” logically and linguistically means forced assimilation. It was not a call to murder Indigenous children.

There was no intent to kill, maim or starve residential school students. Inexcusable things happened and while it may have been the consequences of callous indifference or ignorance, or even individual malice — it was not government policy.

No reading of the signed treaties, the 1884 Indian Act, or the educational policy implemented through residential schools, suggests that it was a genocide.

The fact is, as the TRC report makes clear, the approach that the government pursed was already in practice in the schools established by religious orders across the country.

The religious schools began with the dual purpose of education and indoctrination. The principal intent was to impose a particular religious worldview, but it was also to provide the language and the skills Indigenous people would need to ensure their integration and assimilation into the world they would experience beyond the confines of their own community.

Two things can be true at once: the intention of the residential school policy was understandable, but the consequences were destructive. The parliamentary debate at the time and the correspondence of the bureaucracy, often expressed a clear intent to make Indigenous children like other citizens in dress, demeanour and language. The goal was to provide the language, trade and employment skills that they would need to function in the new reality.

Federal financial and bureaucratic support for residential schools was a clear, deliberate, attempt to ensure the assimilation of Indigenous people into the colonists’ world. It undoubtedly included denying them the right to speak their language.

And it was initially carried out, with brutal efficiency, by largely religious staff. It bears noting, however, that much of the brutality disguised as correction in residential schools was standard practice in private and public schools at the time.

Even caning and the use of the strap as means of student punishment were used regularly in public schools as a means of student punishment until the 1960s. In my rural school, all 25 of my Grade 5 classmates were strapped because a single classmate was not paying attention during roll call — and no one objected.

The fact is corporal punishment was not completely banned in all schools until the Supreme Court of Canada outlawed the practice in 2004.

And, while the ban on the use of Indigenous languages was more targeted and was enforced from the very beginning of the residential school period, it was not substantially different, in effect, from the 1921 Education Act amendments in Manitoba.

That Act banned the teaching or speaking of minority languages — including German, Polish, Ukrainian, Icelandic and Hebrew — in favour of English in all public schools. For non-English speaking people, the impact of that 1921 Education Act was similar — it meant forced assimilation — and the loss of language and culture by government fiat.

An example of the impact of the 1921 Act was felt many years later, in 1956, by my six-year-old schoolmate from a francophone family when he was strapped because he could not count to 10 in English at the teacher’s command.

The criticism directed at anyone who even suggests that residential schools were developed with good, but misguided intentions and not murderous intent, is unwarranted.

The denial that some of the people who promoted and worked in residential schools truly wished the best for their students is unfair and not supported by the facts. No one who has read the TRC reports could defend such a position. The TRC report includes many requests from the institutions themselves, and from bureaucrats, for more funding and more staffing and more humanity in the conduct of residential schools.

Murray Sinclair himself acknowledged that fact in a letter published in the Calgary Herald in 2010. He said: “While the TRC heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care. These experiences must also be heard…”

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission report(s) are indeed a faithful telling of our collective history around the policy of forced assimilation, one that sparked the creation of residential schools and industrial schools across the country.

Understanding history requires us to consider more than just a set of facts. It requires us to think about what people of an era thought and believed to be true. It requires us to consider what they considered acceptable behaviour, viewed from their generation, not our own.

In a speech to Yale graduates in 1962, John F. Kennedy said that every generation has its problems and crosses to bear, but he noted, “Its problems are not our problems. Their age is not our age. As every past generation has had to disenthrall itself from an inheritance of truisms and stereotypes, so in our own time we must move on from the reassuring repetition of stale phrases to a new, difficult, but essential confrontation with reality.”

The unfortunate and tragic history of residential schools is a history that needs to be discussed without unnecessary virtue signalling and scolding from people on one side of the story or the other. It needs to be discussed, as it was written, by the Hon. Murray Sinclair.

Jerry Storie lives in, and sometimes writes from, Winnipeg.