It strikes me that it may have been a case of “there’s no evidence and we know that because we destroyed it!” This would be true of the Canadian government as well as the churches that ran the torture houses.
Your soliloquy doesn’t seem responsive to anything I had said, so I find the question and its direction towards me confusing.
Really? I learned about them in first-year history courses in the early 1980s
One wonders what the ratio might be if comparing the death rate of unassimilated First Nation children with the area’s population as a whole. It could be that the RCC might have actually saved children’s lives, by bringing them under the umbrella of nutrition, health care, shelter from the elements, etc.
The same thing should happen to at least the involved parts of the Catholic Church as happened to the Nazis, after the Holocaust. But that’s never going to happen.
All genocides are genocides.
No-one’s “minimizing the horrors of the Holocaust”. That argument only works if you don’t think this set of child detainment, rape, torture and murder camps are horrible. If you do think they’re horrible, and compare them to the Holocaust, then you’re saying the Holocaust was horrible.
Horror isn’t related to statistics like body counts, BTW. I don’t minimize the Holocaust if I compare it to other, smaller genocides like the Nama-Herero one, or the Cambodian one, or the Rwandan one.
I don’t remember covering it in Ontario, then again I switched from Biology to PoliSci after 2nd year so I may have missed the 1st year course.
@DWMarch
I couldn’t agree more! It seems that the Catholic Church only really cares about children from conception until birth. After that they are free game for the sexual predatory clergy and, with this report, to face death and burial in an unmarked mass grave.
Here’s an interesting article on the origins:
And another article about need for broader awareness:
It is a bit dangerous to apply contemporary values to past societies. That said, the above article on the origins was interesting. Providing “education” was seen as important, as it might today in many parts of the world. The assumption that everyone needs to be incorporated into the broader economy was not questioned. The fact indigenous peoples could not vote undermines some of the intentions. The ill-treatment, poor nutrition, stated goal of ending culture and language, lack of parental involvement and consent, excess deaths, poor public records and overwhelming patronage does this much more.
A great deal of thorny questions are raised. People like Ryerson and MacDonald undoubtedly helped build Canada and did many positive things. The question of how much responsibility they face for the totality of their actions is difficult. Educating people viewed as less advanced is seen as important in many places. How should this change? What actions can be taken now by Canada? Are all the changes recommended reasonable? If so, they should be implemented. The responsible thing to do is check all the other schools and have a proper accounting taught to all future Canadian students and make all documentation public.
It’s tremendously sad. I certainly knew these schools were harsh, against parental wishes and that many abuses occurred. I did not fully know the degree of mistreatment. I do not think most Canadians did. I think that is why there is increased anger and awareness.
But I oppose railway line blockades and think protest should be lawful. I think decisions should be made not by mobs - but by leaders reflecting community and Canadian considerations, and looking forwards while remembering the past. I’m not a big fan of public statues. I do not care much what schools or sports teams are called. They changed the name of Langevin and are debating the name of Ryerson University. I don’t much care, but this decision should be made by those affected. The above article minimizes his involvement and I do not know where the limits lie.
This ties into, in my opinion, a problem with how history is understood in modern times. There’s basically two, deeply flawed, ways that I observe most people talk about historical actions and figures. One is “hagiography” where we engage in mindless worship of our forebears, and aggressively resist any critical analysis of their failures. Another is “history by screech” which is where people, outraged by people long dead not living up to modern standards, believe the primary analysis of their lives should be pointing out their failures and dismissing most anything else they ever did. Thomas Jefferson perfectly encapsulates this dichotomy. If you worship Thomas Jefferson, you have a wrong and distorted view of history, and ignore his personal moral failings (some even in the context of his own times), and ways in which Jefferson did not always live up to his own enlightenment principles. On the flipside, if the only way you can talk about Thomas Jefferson is to just yell "He owned slaves!’, then you’re a shit historian, if that’s really all you can learn from someone like Jefferson.
A big issue is these are “pop cultural” schools of historical thought. The real professional historians tend to handle things a lot better. But a lot of society’s view of history is at present defined by mass media, pop culture etc, not by a reserved reading of professional historical works.
The residential schools in both the United States and Canada were best understood by actually understanding the thinking of the times. While it seems alien to us now, in many respects these schools represented a progression in thought by white men. The previous school of thought was largely that the indigenous peoples were incorrigible savages, and this informed much of white policy towards them. The more “enlightened” view that came later, was that the native is no more incapable of “civilization” than is the white man. But it would require the native to be white in how they were educated and raised.
So while it may be hard with modern views to view this as “progressive” in many ways it was. The old prevailing thought was that these were inferior humans, cursed with a lack of capacity. The newer school of thought is they just had an “inferior culture” but as human beings they were capable of greater things. Of course the modern view is that their culture was not “inferior” but simply due to a long chain of events, many of which were simple accidents of history, they were less technologically advanced than Western European society. The view at the time these schools was established is that God had endowed the white man with a more enlightened and civilized culture, hence why white men had developed steam power, factories, written language, “modern” medical treatments, things of that nature. Recognizing that the indigenous people were not biologically inferior lead to a belief that they had an obligation to “raise them up” to the standards of white men. Since they viewed white society’s technological advances being directly tied to the cultural tenets of Western society, it was believed the only way you can achieve your goal is to, bluntly, make the Indians white. That means suppress their native language, suppress their native religion, suppress their native cultural practices, suppress their native forms of societal organization and governance, replace them with Western forms and teach them of their innate superiority.
The reality is, while this is rightly seen as a form of monstrous cultural genocide by modern times, it can’t be entirely denied that it also lead to some positive outcomes for native children that were denied previous generations–specifically certain educational opportunities. Education, the acquisition of literacy, competence at mathematics and formal logic have a lot of benefits for a person’s life, even if it is mixed with other, bad things. If you’re of one of those two flawed schools of pop-cultural historical thinking I outlined above, you might argue that “hey, we educated and improved their lives in many respects, and arguably they had things better than their forebears.” If you’re of the other school of thought, you might argue “white men did this because they were evil and no good came of it.” In my opinion neither view is accurate. Instead I think the white men involved genuinely felt they were reformers, but their views were massively informed by bigoted ideas of white superiority that ended up being very culturally destructive. This was something we did not properly recognize as a “problem” until much later, which is something people should seriously reflect on and bring to attention.
Ya gotta break a few eggs if you wanna make an omelet amirite.
Some people call it “educational opportunities”, while others call it “being forced into indoctrination camps at gunpoint”.
Po-tat-o, Po-tah-to, amirite?
Although I don’t agree with everything you wrote here, this is a good summary.
A couple of things I would add:
I believe there were a lot of blind eyes about the methods the churches were using to “whiten” these children. It went far beyond the usual corporal punishment typically used on other children of the day. People in power knew about what was going on in these schools, and the sadistic bastards who worked there. And they didn’t really care.
Also, i think that the “education” part was really just a fig leaf for the genocide and cultural destruction. That was the actual goal, and the “education of the poor Indian” was the excuse they used so that decent people could look the other way. In other words, the evil intent was papered over in order that they (people in power) could accomplish their goals without a backlash from the public.
I agree that the cultural genocide portion of residential school looks very different when viewed through the lens of the times from how it looks by modern standards. But while this aspect of the residential school program is in some ways simultaneously the greatest crime of the whole affair and the most forgivable aspect of it, this take on the motivations and intentions of the government and church overlooks a couple significant things.
First and foremost, at all points during the time the residential schools were in operation, the rape, torture, starving, and neglect of children where horrifying crimes. There is no way to sugarcoat this. While harsh corporal punishment as discipline was widely accepted a century ago, sexual abuse was not. Withholding food to the point of starvation was not. Not bothering to inform anyone that children in your care had run away and died of exposure was not.
Second, the idea that someone like Sir John A Macdonald was motivated primarily by wanting to improve the lot of the First Nations by turning them into white folk is belied by his other actions towards them. He intentionally used the prospect of starvation due to the collapse of bison herds as leverage to negotiate treaties with the First Nations that were worse for them. His government used various forms of skullduggery to cheat the First Nations out of what they were entitled to in those treaties, such as waiting till hunting parties had left a community to come in and do a census of it to determine how much land should be included in a reserve. He waged literal war on the Metis who had already settled a few small portions of Saskatchewan and Manitoba when they wanted to retain title to the land they had been living on.
His was not a government that wanted what was best for the indigenous peoples of Canada.
I think it’s generally a mistake to assume a single motive for any historical event. Typically, things happen because lots of people, who have a diversity of opinions, are pulling in concert. In this case, there were likely some who honestly believed they were helping the individual children of the first nations, and others who honestly believed this was a convenient way to destroy the strength of the first nation tribes and so make it easier to force them off land, etc.
But I think we can agree that the rapes, starvations, ignoring children who were found tied up with ropes around their wind pipes, failing to report the deaths, etc. were done be people who were bad people by any standards, including the standards of the time. And a lot of people helped to cover that up.
So maybe I am walking back my “it was driven by the government” position, and I’m leaning more towards “holy shit, the Catholic church covered up THIS, TOO?!”
I’m frankly a little skeptical of that, if only for the reason that especially in the United States they’d already fucked these people over and dispossessed and killed so many of them quite openly, that given when the residential school system started I don’t really know that there was any actual reason to “pretend to care.” I do think they actually cared, at least speaking from what I’ve read about the U.S. Indian boarding schools. I’m unfortunately very, very ignorant of comparative Canadian history, and to a degree I’m loosely assuming some of the same forces were at play due to the two country’s similarities and the relative synchronization as to when both countries started programs like this, this “form” of Indian Education started up around the late 1870s/early 1880s in the U.S.
We were still actually outright massacring them at that point, and a huge portion of the American voting public (i.e. the only people the power brokers cared to hear opinions from at all) outright viewed Native Americans as little more than demons and monsters, deserving of anything and everything that could be brought to bear against them. If anything some of these programs actually are more liberal than what the extremely racist anti-Indian populist sentiment was among the population at large.
That being said you don’t get a participation trophy for having good intentions but doing a really bad thing. I just think that there’s an actual historical value in recognizing the effects of toxic paternalism, which is obscured in my opinion if we don’t look to the real motivations of the people involved. Richard Pratt who is massively famous in this area (he ran the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania), is known in modern times for the infamous (now) quote of “Kill the Indian, save the man.” But Pratt was also much more progressive than most Americans of his day, he was vehemently opposed to racial segregation for example, and in most respects was seen as an advocate for the Indians during his lifetime.
This isn’t necessarily an impossible thing to reconcile. Lots of antislavery activists before the Civil War were inveterate racists and white supremacists, a lot of modern people struggle to understand this, but there’s actually a whole body of thought on it that has “logical consistency” within the thinking of the time. Some of this gets difficult because of the tendency to focus only on condemnation. White supremacism is always bad, for example, so the simplistic view of completely defining a historical figure based on their worst aspect, creates “difficulties” in reconciling famous abolitionists who were likewise white supremacists of the worst kind. If you don’t at all attempt to understand the entirely different cultural and rhetorical context, it becomes, in my opinion, all but impossible to have a real understanding of these periods of history.
Something else I think is worth mentioning, and I think we’ve “lost” our popular understanding of it, is just how serious religion was back in this time. This message board, and frankly most collections of people even interested in discussing things like this are dominated by people like me–atheist/secular people, or when religious people are involved they tend to be very liberal Christians. In this cultural context it is difficult to understand that religion wasn’t just something these people did on Sunday, for a very large percentage of people before the 1900s, religion was the central element of their entire lives. From their earliest memories as children til the day they laid down on their death bed. Religion formed the moral framework that they lived by, that they raised their children by, that they sanctified their marriage by.
I often see people skeptical of Christianization, there is a belief almost that these people didn’t really care about it philosophically, but instead it was just a way to serve more utilitarian self-serving ends. But the reality is a huge portion of people prior to very modern times were extreme true believers, and they viewed conversion as one of the greatest acts of service to God anyone could perform.
What part of Christianity, even as it was applied back then, excuses what was done to those children?