From the r/AskHistorians mod and flair team:
##Summary of The Recent Announcement
On May 27, 2021 the chief of the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation in British Columbia, Rosanne Casimir, announced the discovery of the remains of 215 children in a mass grave on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School. The mass grave, containing children as young as three years old, was discovered through use of ground penetrating radar. According to Casimir, the school left behind no record of these burials. Subsequent recovery efforts will help determine the chronology of interment, as well as aid identification of these students (Source).
For Indigenous peoples across the United States and Canada, the discovery of this mass grave opened anew the deep intergenerational wounds created by the respective boarding/residential school systems implemented in each colonizing nation. For decades survivors, and the families of those who did not survive, have advocated for investigation and restitution. They’ve proposed national movements and worked tirelessly to force national and international awareness of a genocidal past that included similar mass graves of Indigenous children across North America. Acknowledgment and reckoning in the United States and Canada has been slow.
As more information emerges over the coming weeks and months, Kamloops school survivors, their descendents, historians, and archaeologists will piece together the lives and experiences of these 215 children. Here we provide a brief introduction to the industrial/boarding/residential schools, and how similar children navigated their experiences in a deeply oppressive system. The violence enacted on these children was the continuation of a failed conquest that began centuries ago and manifests today with the disproportionate rates of Missing and Murdered Indigenous People, especially women.
##Overview of Indian Boarding/Residential School Systems
Catholic missions during the 16th and 17th centuries routinely used forced child labor for construction and building maintenance. Missionaries saw “civilizing” Indigenous children as part of their spiritual responsibility and one of the first statutes related to education in the British colonies in North America was guidance to colonizers on how to correctly “educate Indian Children Held Hostage” (Fraser, p. 4). While the first US government-operated Indian Boarding Schools didn’t open until 1879, the federal government endorsed these religiously led efforts through the passage of legislation prior to assuming full administrative jurisdiction, beginning with the “Civilization Fund Act” of 1819, an annual allotment of monies to be utilized by groups who would provide educational services to Tribes who were in contact with white settlements.
The creation of the systems in both countries was predicated on the belief among white adults that there was something wrong or “savage” with the Indigenous way of being and by “educating” children, they could most effectively advance and save Indigenous people. By the time the schools began enrolling children in the mid to late-1800s, the Indigenous people and nations of North America had experienced centuries of displacement, broken or ignored treaties, and genocide. Understanding this history helps contextualize why it’s possible to read anecdotes about Indigenous parents voluntarily sending their children to the schools or why many abolitionists in the United States supported the schools. No matter the reason why a child ended up at a school, they were typically miles from their community and home, placed there by adults. Regardless of the length of their experience at a school, their sense of Indigeneity was forever altered.
It is impossible to know the exact number of children who left, or were taken from, their homes and communities for places known collectively as Indian Boarding Schools, Aboriginal Residential schools, or Indian Residential Schools. Upwards of 600 schools were opened across the continent, often deliberately in places far from reservations or Indigenous communities. Sources put the number of children who were enrolled at the schools in Canada at around 150,000. It’s important to stress that these schools were not schools in the way we think of them in the modern era. There were no bright colors, read-alouds and storytime, or opportunities for play. As we explain below, though, this does not mean the children did not find joy and community. The primary focus was not necessarily a child’s intellect, but more their body and, especially at the schools run by members of a church, their soul. The teachers’ pedagogical goals were about “civilizing” Indigenous children; they used whatever means necessary to break the children’s connection with their community, to their identity, and from their culture, including corporal punishment and food deprivation. This post from u/Snapshot52 provides a longer history about the rationale for the “schools.”
One of the main goals of the schools can be seen in their name. While the children who were enrolled at the schools came from hundreds of different tribes - the Thomas Asylum of Orphan and Destitute Indian Children in Western New York enrolled Haudenosaunee children, including from those from the nearby Mohawk and Seneca communities as well as children from other Indigenous communities across the east coast (Burich, 2007) - they were all referred to as “Indians'', despite their different identities, languages, and cultural traditions. (The r/IndianCountry FAQ provides more information about nomenclature and Indigenous identity.) Meanwhile, only 20% of children were actually orphans; most of the children had living relatives and communities who could and often wanted to care for them.
##Similarities between Canadian and American system and schools
When I went East to Carlisle School, I thought I was going there to die;... I could think of white people wanting little Lakota children for no other reason than to kill them, but I thought here is my chance to prove that I can die bravely. So I went East to show my father and my people that I was brave and willing to die for them. (Óta Kté/Plenty Kill/Luther Standing Bear)
The founder of the United States residential/boarding school model, and superintendent of the flagship school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Richard Henry Pratt, wished for a certain kind of death from his students. Pratt believed by forcing Indigenous children to “kill the Indian/savage” within them they might live as equal citizens in a progressive civilized nation. To this end, students were stripped of reminders of their former life. Arrival at school meant the destruction of clothes lovingly made by their family and donning starched, uncomfortable uniforms and stiff boots. Since Indigenous names were too complex for white ears and tongues, students chose, or were assigned, Anglicized names. Indigenous languages were forbidden, and “speaking Indian” resulted in harsh corporal punishments. Scholars such as Eve Haque and Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner use the term “linguicide” to describe deliberate efforts to bring about the death of a language and they point to the efforts of the schools to accomplish that goal.
Perhaps nothing was as initially traumatic for new students as mandatory haircuts, nominally done to prevent lice, but interpreted by students as being marked by “civilization.” This subtle but culturally destructive act would elicit grieving and an experience of emotional torture as the cutting of one’s hair was, and is, often regarded as an act of mourning for many Indigenous communities reserved for the death of a close family member. This resulted in psychological turmoil for a number of children who had no way of knowing the fate of the families they were being forced to leave behind. By removing children from their nations and families, residential schools intentionally prevented the transmission of traditional cultural knowledge and language. The original hope of school administrators was to thereby kill Indigeneity in one generation.
In this they failed.
Over time, the methods and intent of the schools changed, focusing instead on making Indigenous children “useful” citizens in a modernizing nation. In addition to the traditional school topics like reading and writing students at residential schools engaged in skill classes like animal husbandry, tinsmithing, harness making, and sewing. They labored in the school fields, harvesting their own food, though students reported the choicest portions somehow ended up on the teachers' plates, and never their own. Girls worked in the damp school laundry, or scrubbed dishes and floors after class. The rigors of school work, combined with the manual labor that allowed schools to function, left children exhausted. Survivors report pervasive physical and sexual abuse during their years at school.
Epidemics of infectious diseases like influenza and measles routinely swept through the cramped, poorly ventilated quarters of residential school dorms. Children already weakened by insufficient rations, forced labor, and the cumulative psychosocial stress of the residential school experience quickly succumbed to pathogens. The most fatal was tuberculosis, historically called consumption. The superintendent of Crow Creek, South Dakota reported practically all his pupils “seemed to be tainted with scrofula and consumption” (Adams, p.130).
On the Nez Perce reservation in Idaho in 1908, Indian Agent Oscar H. Lipps and agency physician John N. Alley conspired to close the boarding school at Fort Lapwai so they could open a sanitarium school, a facility that would provide medical services to the high rates of tubercular Indian children “while simultaneously attending to the educational goals consistent with the assimilation campaign” (James, 2011, p. 152).
Indeed, the high fatality rates at residential/boarding schools became a source of hidden shame for superintendents like Pratt at Carlisle. Of the forty students comprising the first classes at Carlisle ten died in the first three years, either at school or shortly after returning home. Mortality rates were so high, and superintendents so concerned about their statistics, schools began shipping sick children home to die, and officially reported only those deaths that occured on school grounds (Adams p.130).
When a pupil begins to have hemorrhages from the lungs he or she knows, and all the rest know, just what they mean... And such incidents keep occurring, at intervals, throughout every year. Not many pupils die at school. They prefer not to do so; and the last wishes of themselves and their parents are not disregarded. But they go home and die… Four have done so this year. (Annual Report to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Crow Creek, 1897)
Often superintendents placed blame on the Indigenous families, citing the student’s poor health on arrival, instead of the unhealthy conditions surrounding them at school. At Carlisle, the flagship residential/boarding school for the United States and the site of the greatest governmental oversight in the nation, the school cemetery contains 192 graves. Thirteen headstones are engraved with one word: Unknown.
##Specifics about the Canadian system
We instil in them a pronounced distaste for the native life so that they will be humiliated when reminded of their origins. When they graduate from our institutions, the children have lost everything Native except their blood. (Quote attributed Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin, early advocate of the Canadian Residential School System)
A summary report created by the Union of Ontario Indians based on the work and findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada lays out a number of specifics including that the schools in Canada were predominately funded and operated by the Government of Canada and Roman Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and United churches. Changes to the Indian Act in the 1920s make it mandatory for every Indian child between the ages of seven and sixteen years to attend such schools and in 1933, the principals of the schools were given legal guardianship of the children the schools, effectively forcing parents to give up legal custody of their children.
A good resource for learning more about the history of the schools is the Commission’s website.
##Specifics about the American system
The American system was intended to further both the imperial and humanitarian aspects of the forming hegemony. While Indians were often in the path of conquest, elements of the American public felt that there was a need to “civilize” the Tribes in order to bring them closer to society and to salvation. With this in mind, education was deemed the modality by which this could happen: the destruction of a cultural identity that bred opposition to Manifest Destiny with the simultaneous construction of an ideal (though still minoritized) member of society.
It is not a coincidence that many of the methods the white adults used at the Indian Boarding Schools bore a similarity to those methods used by enslavers in the American South. Children from the same tribe or community were often separated from each other to ensure they couldn’t communicate in any language other than English. While there are anecdotes of children choosing their own English or white name, most children were assigned a name, some by simply pointing to a list of indecipherable scribbles (potential names) written on a chalkboard (Luther Standing Bear). Carlisle in particular was seen as the best case scenario and often treated as a showcase of what was possible around “civilizing” Indigenous children. Rather than killing off Indigenous people, Pratt and other superintendents saw their solution of re-education as a more viable, more Christian, approach to the “Indian Problem.”
##Resistance and Restitution As with investigations of similar oppressive systems (African slavery in the American South, neophytes in North American Spanish missions, etc.), understanding how children in residential/boarding schools navigated a genocidal environment must avoid interpreting every act as a reaction or response to authority. Instead, stories from survivors help us see students as active agents, pursuing their own goals, in their own time frames, as often as they could. Meanwhile, some graduates of the schools would speak about the pleasure they found in learning about European literature, science, or music and would go to make a life for themselves that included knowledge they gained at the school. Such anecdotes are not evidence that the schools "worked" or were necessary, rather they serve as an example of the graduates' agency and self-determination.
Surviving captivity meant selectively accommodating and resisting, sometimes moment to moment, throughout the day. The most common form of resistance was running away. Runaways occurred so often Carlisle didn’t bother reporting missing students unless they were absent for more than a week. One survivor reported her young classmates climbed into the same bed each night so, together, they could fight off the regular sexual assault by a male teacher. At school children found hidden moments to feel human; telling Coyote Stories or “speaking Indian” to each other after lights out, conducting midnight raids on the school kitchen, or leaving school grounds to meet up with a romantic partner. Sports, particularly boxing, basketball, and football, became ways to “show what an Indian can do” on a level playing field against white teams from the surrounding area. Resistance often took a darker turn, and the threat of arson was used by students in multiple schools to push back against unreasonable demands. Groups of Indigenous girls at a school in Quebec reportedly made life difficult for the nuns who ran the school, resulting in a high staff turnover. At a fundraiser, one sister proclaimed:
de cent de celles qui ont passé par nos mains à peine en avons nous civilisé une” [of a hundred of those who have passed through our hands we have civilized at most one].
Graduates and students used the English/French language writing skills obtained at the schools to raise awareness of school conditions. They regularly petitioned the government, local authorities, and the surrounding community for assistance. Gus Welch, star quarterback for the Carlisle Indians football team, collected 273 student signatures for a petition to investigate corruption at Carlisle. Welch testified before the 1914 joint congressional committee that resulted in the firing of the school superintendent, the abusive bandmaster/disciplinarian, and the football coach. Carlisle closed its doors several years later. The investigation into Carlisle would form the basis for the Meriam Report, which highlighted the damage inflicted by the residential schools throughout the United States.
While most of the schools closed before World War II, several stayed open and continued to enroll Indigenous children with the intention of providing them a Canadian or American education well into the 1970s. The Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 changed policies related to Tribal and family involvement in child welfare cases but the work continues. These boarding schools have survived even into more recent times through rebranding efforts under the Bureau of Indian Education. The “Not Your Mascot” movement and efforts to end the harmful use of Native or Indigenous imagery by the education systems can also be seen as a continued fight for sovereignty and self-determination.
##The Modern Murdered and Missing Indigenous People Movement Today, Indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada confront the familiar specter of national ambivalence in the face of disproportionate violence. In the United States, Indigenous women are murdered at ten times the rate of other ethnicities, while in Canada Indigenous women are murdered at a rate six times higher than their white neighbors. This burden is not equally distributed across the country; in the provinces of Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan the murder rates are even higher. While the movement began with a focus on missing and murdered Indigenous women, awareness campaigns expanded to include Two-Spirit individuals as well as men.
The residential boarding schools exist within the greater context of an unfinished work of conquest. The legacy of violence stretches from the swamps of the Mystic Massacre in 1637 to the fields of Sand Creek to the newly discovered mass grave at Kamloops Indian Residential School. By waging war on Indigenous children, authorities hope to extinguish Indigeneity on the continent. When they failed violence continued anew, morphing into specific violence against vulnerable Indigenous People. Citizens of Canada and the United States must wrestle with the violent legacy as we, together, move forward in understanding and reconciliation.
##Further Resources and Works Cited
Online archive through Dickinson College for Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Adams, D. (1995) Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928
Bombay, A., Matheson, K., & Anisman, H. (2014). The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma. Transcultural Psychiatry, 51(3), 320–338.
Burich, K. (2007) "No Place to Go": The Thomas Indian School and the "Forgotten" Indian Children of New York.
Child, B. (2000) Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940
Dunbar-Ortiz, R. (2014). An indigenous peoples' history of the United States (Vol. 3). AskHistorians AMA with Jean Mendoza and Debbie Reese, who adapted the book for younger readers
Fraser, J. (21014) The School In The United States: A Documentary History.
Glenn, C. (2011) American Indian/First Nations Schooling: From the Colonial Period to the Present, Macmillan.
James, E. (2011). “Hardly a family is free from the disease:” Tuberculosis, health care, and assimilation policy on the Nez Perce Reservation, 1908-1942. Oregon Historical Quarterly, 112(2), 142–169.
MacDonald, D. B., & Hudson, G. (2012). The Genocide Question and Indian Residential Schools in Canada. Canadian Journal of Political Science / Revue Canadienne de Science Politique, 45(2), 427–449.
Milloy, John S. A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879-1986. Winnipeg: U of Manitoba P, 1999. cited in Young, B. (2015). "Killing the Indian in the Child": Death, Cruelty, and Subject-formation in the Canadian Indian Residential School System. Mosaic: a journal for the interdisciplinary study of literature, 63-76.
Spring, J. (2007) Deculturalization and the struggle for equality: a brief history of the education of dominated cultures in the United States
Trafzer, C. and J. Keller, eds. (2006) Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences
Podcast recommendations:
All My Relations‘s episode, Protect Indigenous Women
“Stuff You Missed in History Class” episode, Basketball comes to Fort Shaw Indian School
Thank you greatly to everyone who worked on this. Its been an incredibly tough and brutal subject to talk about here in Canada, and news like this just shows both how long and how recent this history is. My heart goes out to everyone who suffered through the brutality of the residential schools, and all the other terrible things that were done. This is stuff that needs to be confronted and talked about.
I know this is really terrible for people to read, but this is just the beginning of a reckoning.
The existence of mass graves is no surprise to people in Indigenous Studies in Canada. The recent news is only the confirmation of the number of bodies in this one site through radar. This inquiry in 2008 identified 28 suspected child mass grave sites across Canada that needed to be investigated (including the Kamloops site).
The recent news is only really "new" in the sense that they were able identify the number of children at the site for the first time and found a higher than expected number of children in the mass grave, and surprisingly young skeletons.
(Sorry, this gets indelicate.) In places with as high rates of sexual abuse such as these religious and government institutions subjected the children to, there are pregnancies. The report that children as young as 3 were found at the Kamloops site is surprising (to the wider public) because that is younger than expected. As noted above, legally children only had to go to school from 7-16. Unfortunately, there are many accounts of baby and infant graveyards at residential schools. Kamloops is no different in this regard, and there are many accounts of pregnancies and abortions. This one is from Kuper Island in B.C.:
"We regularly hear stories from our people about all the children who were killed at Kuper Island. I mean killed, not just died. A graveyard of these kids is just south of the old school building. The priests dug up part of it when they closed the school down in 1973. There are not only children but fetuses in there, aborted by the nuns themselves whenever a girl got pregnant by staff or the priests. Often the young mother would die too and get buried right next to their child."
This account can be found Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust (3rd edition) by Kevin Annett which is free online if anyone wants nightmares, or to reckon with the true past and ongoing struggles of Indian Residential Schools.
(edit: I added the Kevin Annett link because it is free online, but I understand he is a controversial figure due to his past connection to the church.
Behind Closed Doors: Stories from the Kamloops Indian Residential School by the Secwpemec Cultural Education Society is a great resource. When I was in school we watched Kuper Island: Return to the Healing Circle by Christine Welsh which is available on youtube. So is Death at Residential School by the CBC: "The numbers [of deaths] are much higher, perhaps 5 - 10x. It's because the records are so poor. They just didn't bother keeping track of children who died.")
That's all I wanted to say. As someone who studied this stuff in school, it grinds my gears wrong how everyone in power in my province/country are all "This news is shocking!"
There was always a mass child grave there. It's just no one wanted to deal with digging it up until now.
Edit: Resources in Canada/BC
A National Indian Residential School Crisis Line set up to provide support for former students and those affected. Access emotional and crisis referral services by calling the 24-hour national crisis line: 1-866 925-4419.Within B.C., the KUU-US Crisis Line Society provides a First Nations and Indigenous-specific crisis line available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It's toll-free and can be reached at 1-800-588-8717 or online at kuu-uscrisisline.com.
There's also a problem with Native American women going missing more recently.
Honest question: what does reconciliation look like?
How do we repair a relationship in which one party (the Government of Canada, or of the United States) financed the attempted destruction of a generation’s cultural identity, and through wilful negligence directly caused the deaths of (at least) hundreds of children [edit for clarity:] belonging to disparate faith and language groups?
I’ll add that I was initially surprised by the news report, but thinking about it, the existence of mass graves intuitively makes sense if you bear in mind that the children were not seen as worthy of love or recognition as people. Shameful.
When the news broke, I was devastated. It was harrowing to read the words “mass grave” from CBC in reference to a modern find in this country. I appreciate the effort displayed here.
As a partial aside, given the increasing uptick in editorials from the moderator team, has there been any effort to produce pieces which shine light on an issue which isn’t North American or European in nature? Every post in the past few years has either exclusively or mostly involved North America and Western Europe.
Thank you.
Australia shares some deep cultural similarities with Canada and the US, given its white Anglophone Christian cultural background, and given its history of the dispossession of indigenous peoples across, basically, the span of an entire continent and over a long period of time. Unsurprisingly, during a fundamentally similar time period to the residential schools described here, Australia also had a similar practice with children of Aboriginal origin being placed in residential schools usually called Missions, with a similar objective: the 'civilisation' of Aboriginal peoples. As in the Residential School in Canada, the missions in Australia were often run by religious groups, to whom Australian governments were happy to pawn off their responsibilities.
Australians will be aware of Kevin Rudd's apology to the Stolen Generations in 2007 - there's plenty of heartbreaking stories in the 1997 'Bringing Them Home' report of children being forcibly removed from their families and often put in missions. Younger Australians will often have studied literature and music in school which artistically represents Aboriginal peoples' feelings at the situation, such as Archie Roach's 1990 song 'Took The Children Away'. Roach sings about how:
...they fenced us in like sheep.
Said to us come take our hand
Sent us off to mission land.
In the second verse, Roach sings a blistering indictment of the practice:
The welfare and the policeman
Said you've got to understand
We'll give them what you can't give
Teach them how to really live.
Teach them how to live they said
Humiliated them instead
Some might have also come across the Mission Songs Project, which perform (secular) songs associated with the Missions - the 'songs sung after Church'.
In regards to what happened in Australia versus what happened in Canada, a 2002 paper by Antonio Buti directly compares the removal of indigenous children in Canada and Australia, finding them to be fairly similar on several levels, including the level of care and abuse in the Missions/Residential Schools:
[a survey] conducted by the Aboriginal Legal Service of Western Australian (ALSWA) gives further support to the sub-standard treatment and abuse many Aborigines placed in missions and other institutional care suffered. Out of a survey response of 483, of whom 411 spent some time in a mission, 81 percent experienced physical abuse and 13 percent experienced sexual abuse during their mission stay.
And like in Canada and the US, as others have so vividly depicted in the post you've already read above, the point wasn't education, but was a removal of indigeneity if possible (in Australia, with special emphasis on civilising those Aboriginal children who were potentially light-skinned enough to potentially pass as not-indigenous). This is a quote from an person who spent time in the mission from interviews conducted by the ALSWA published in 1995, and quoted by Buti:
We were inculcated into a Christian religion and my Aboriginal culture or history was non-existent. That was completely irrelevant to our lifestyles at that stage. It was really an understatement to say that we were not taught anything about our Aboriginal culture or history. The fact is that our Aboriginality was never mentioned, it was never a consideration.
Rosalind Kidd's 1997 book The Way We Civilise is focused on Queensland in particular, and sees the Missions as being part of a wider project to civilise, rather than being focused on the Missions, but she portrays further detail of the practices that ultimately left generations of people traumatised (Beverley Raphael, an Australian psychiatrist specialising in intergenerational trauma responses, has compared the trauma response in many Aboriginal families as a result of this process to that in Holocaust survivors). Kidd especially focuses on the endemic health problems in the Missions resulting from, at times, malnutrition, but more commonly poor livings conditions, and...a lack of caring/official will to fix poor hygiene practices in the Missions (rather than a lack of understanding of the issues), which resulted in regular deaths. And probably isn't a surprise to anyone who read the post on Canadian and US practices above.
There are also mass graves in Australia associated with the Missions (e.g., this news article). Given everything that's come out about the mistreatment of First Nations people in Canada, and the similarities in practices in Australia and Canada discussed by Buti, I would not be surprised if there are some similarly horrific secrets buried in mass graves in Australia.
History, no matter how disturbing, must never be hidden or ignored.
Wow, my stomach twisted with the detail about the schools cutting the childrens’ hair and the association of cutting hair with mourning. Thank you for sharing.
The surviving perpetrators of this genocide should be held legally accountable
And then there are the "Starlight Tours" where police would drive Indigenous people out of town and abandon them in freezing weather.
"The practice was known as taking Indigenous people for "starlight tours"[3] and dates back to 1976.[4] As of 2021, despite convictions for related offences, no Saskatoon police officer has been convicted specifically for having caused freezing deaths."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatoon_freezing_deaths
My mom went to a residential school in the Northwest Territories, Canada. Thankfully she lived and was able to have children who had the freedom to attend public school and not have their human rights transgressed.
Thank you to all who want to bring peace.
canadian here. my teacher mentioned this this morning, its so disgusting. this is a great read, thank you for informing everyone
I have a three year old, started crying at the beginning and it didn't end until the end. Justice must be served.
The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996. What were residential schools like in 1980s-90s?
Prior to the first school opening in 1878, Prime Minister John A. Macdonald commissioned a report on Indian Industrial schools in the United States. This report is called the Davin Report and recommendations in this report are the basis for Residential and Day Schools."Halfbreed" children were recommended to go to a day school because they were more "civilized".
There are almost 700 day schools that over 200,000 Métis and non-status First Nations attended that have not been as investigated as Residential Schools. There was a lot of trauma and abuse in Day Schools as well.
Sources:
Davin Report Summary: http://rschools.nan.on.ca/article/the-davin-report-1879-1120.asp
Full Davin Report - It's a hard read. https://archive.org/details/cihm_03651/page/n3/mode/1up?view=theater
Day Schools https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1552427234180/1552427274599
There is now a movement to find all the bodies and bring them home.
I read this article years ago and I am still horrified. Trailer park over where they know there are graves.
From the article:
"Researcher Katherine Nichols estimates that 51 children died between 1895 and 1911 at the Brandon Residential School, which was an incubator for scarlet fever, pneumonia,
tuberculosis and typhoid. These children came from 12 communities in Manitoba. Many children were buried, some with headstones, down the hill near the Assiniboine River.
....
One remarkable man resisted the deliberate amnesia. Alfred Kirkness attended the school until 1908, a year in which five students died, and later watched as “the cemetery was destroyed little by little each year, until one day, I saw picnic tables, benches and barbecue stands, placed over these students’ graves,” he wrote. “It saddened my heart to think
the White Society would keep right on tramping over these graves, when they were told of the cemetery, and its location.
...
Today, things look different. The memorial cairn disappeared years ago – due to serious flooding, it seems. In its former resting place, if old maps are any guide, there now sits a parked RV with a satellite dish. There is a new fence to provide the RV with a measure of privacy. The fully serviced lot costs $600 a month during the summer."
Can you please provide the source for the quote attributed to Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin (block quote above)? I have seen this making the rounds, but I cannot find a direct source in order to verify it.
While all accounts do not deny Grandin's advocacy for the residential system, I just want to make sure that quote is accurate.
Anyone?
Is it possible to get a bit of history of how this is taught in the US? Or how it isn't taught? I grew up in the US and did all school but grad school there- I knew there were Indian schools, there was one near my home recently converted into condos. My dad had stories about playing against their school in football in the 70s. I had no idea there was anything particularly abusive about them until I moved to Canada for grad school.
I guess I benefited heavily from the Truth and Reconciliation movement at University- there was an art exhibit on campus about residential schools that made a huge impact on me and introduced me to the concept. My first college roommate was a librarian at the indigenous studies library, and I made several first nations friends in my first couple of years. I understand that a lot of Canadians attending school in th 90s didn't learn about residential schools at all, but it's a major part of the curriculum now (in BC at least)
I think the linked Al Jazeera article is a good illustration of the stark difference I'm feeling- nearly as large a mass grave as found in Kamloops and it wasn't even national news, and they're planning to build a highway next to the site. Why, in the US, don't we talk about this? Is it simply a case of being too large a nation, with too many atrocities to fit them all into a public school curriculum? Is it the way our media is structured that doesn't prioritize the problems of minorities? I'm at a loss. I know Canada has a lot of work to do, as a government and a citizenry, but I'm disgusted the US doesn't even seem to pay lip service.
Thank you
I don't know if anybody has mentioned this already, but there are two fantastic podcasts related to this subject by reporter Connie Walker, in which she investigates the deaths of Alberta Williams and Cleo Semaganis Nicotine. These podcasts focus heavily on giving a voice to the victims and their families, integrating explorations of First Nations history and intergenerational trauma. Residential schools play a big part, direct and indirect, in both podcasts. Just a note: These podcasts are absolutely gut-wrenching. But they are also so important.
Great post, as expected! I have a follow up question.
The conditions of the school as described were horrid by my standard. But I don't have the context of the time and era. What was orphanage for white people was like? Or school for white people for that matter?
Something that I don't understand about these schools is why were they so, half-assed? Putting aside the horror and immorality of forcing students to destroy their cultural heritage and familial bonds, these schools give me the impression of being persistently underfunded and poorly managed. 'Students' didn't learn much practical, useful skills, mortality was shockingly high, and corruption and abuse were rampant. It seems that even from the perspective of those who thought of these schools as an 'uplifting' and positive experience for FN children which would 'civilize' them, they were abject failures completely incapable of preparing them for any sort of meaningful integration into white society.
An excellent albeit heartbreaking post - thank you.
I hope this doesn't come across as too inflamatory a followup question; Is there any emerging movement within the historian/academic community to characterise these institutions as being, or being similar to, concentration camps?
Forced labour, poor food, poor shelter, extremely high rates of disease-related mortality - the comparison would appear to be invited - from my layperson's perspective at least. Would be interested to hear if that's a valid take or not.
This was a rough read, and I am Australian...
This is an amazing write up.
I have a question that might be incorrect in its premise, but here goes. Why does it seem like so much of Indigenous justice coverage is centered on Canada?
This is just compared to the United States or Mexico. I'm in the USA, so I'm not as confused why geographically distant areas that have the same settler colonial history aren't as prevalent in my social media feeds. However, I've noticed that much of the social media organizing I've seen is very much centered on Canada. This is very much subjective, but it seems like most social justice social media coverage (wish there was a less awkward way to phrase that) focuses on issues of police brutality against Black Americans in the USA and primarily on Indigenous rights in Canada, despite the fact that both countries have (to my mind) mostly the same structural injustices and history.
Perhaps that premise is wildly inaccurate and I own it is certaintly a subjective impression. But it's one that I've noticed across a wide variety of content creators.
Im hoping someone can answer for me, and i mean no disrespect. Ive been googling and searching and not finding an answer.
Why did they bring in the ground radar? Like what made them search to begin with and result in finding 215 bodies? Like did they have plans to dig there and used ground radar first because its first nations land? Did someone know there was a grave there? Like i just dont understand (and im trying to) why they brought ground radar in, in the first place!
One question has always bothered me.
If we give the organizers a massive undeserved benefit of the doubt and say that schools adopted children, raised them with love, gave them a good public school education. So that upon graduation they are happy, healthy people motivated to work hard and start a family. They speak like a white Christian, they dress like a white Christian, they style like a white Christian, white Christian values, morals and culture are all they know.
What about racism when they graduate? They would still have indigenous skin tone and facial features. They would face hatred and prejudice when they try to live a white Christian life, and never really be able to.
So what plans did proponents of residential schools have to counter racism in greater white Christian society?
I still don't know enough about these institutions to know what the existence of this mass grave implies. Not a dumping ground for murdered, troublesome children? Was it a cemetery never properly marked as such, but where actual funerals would have been performed? Was it something secret and hidden, because they didn't want the dead buried on tribal land, marking them as "missing"? Was it merely about fudging TB death numbers? Is 215 remains proportionately greater or less than graves attached to similarly old missions/schools, when added to the toll of the recorded dead? What exactly should I be picturing happened here?
Does this constitute a genocide? You talk about a "genocidal environment" but does it actually constitute a genocide?