Residential+Schools

=Residential Schools in Canada=

Read Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology for residential schools: http://www.pm.gc.ca/eng/media.asp?id=2149 Note: the term “residential school” was introduced in 1929. Prior to this, various names were used such as Indian boarding school and industrial school.

//Where are the Children? //is an interactive Internet site exploring “What were the residential schools actually like?” Created by the Legacy of Hope Foundation, Aboriginal Healing Foundation and Library and Archives Canada, the site includes invaluable research, individual experiences and many family and school photographs. It addresses issues such as the disappearance and/or death of a high percentage of students. [|Where are the children] This site reads the information to you.

 This is a link to a CBC Archives site that has 14 video and radio clips about residential schools. It is interesting to compare the way the media portrayed the residential schools in the first video "A New Future" to the memories of a former student in clip 5 "For survivors, the hurt comes back." []

An example of a day at residential school:
6:00 a.m.wash, dress and clean up the dorms. 6:30 a.m.to the chapel for Latin mass then morning chores. Class timeconsisted of religious training (1 hr), reading, writing and mathematics (2 hrs). Non-native schools had 5 hrs of instruction. After lunch, native children would begin their "civilization" training: farming, gardening, cooking, sewing and cleaning. They would have one hour of study time in the evening, supper, clean-up, supervised recreation, prayer and bedtime. The children were not taught enough to enable them to realize any dreams of becoming professionals like doctors, teachers, or business owners. Native children in residential schools were taken away from their culture, language and teachers and did not go through their proper rites of passages. Rites of passage are events or celebrations that mark a certain part of a child's life. For example, today, one of your rites of passage is to take a driver's test and get your license. Back then a boy would have been learning from his elders how to provide for his family and there were different types of events and celebrations. If a child does not go through the stages of growing up or suffers some kind of abuse during that time, the person suffers and may never be able to get over the suffering. When the residential school children became adults and Elders, they often passed on the abuse or emotional damage they experienced in residential schools to their own children and families, beginning a cycle of abuse.

Adapted from: Kuran, Heidi. (2000). Residential Schools and Abuse.Retrieved from:[]

=Indian Residential Schools - Surviving with Hope= Aboriginal children were the only children in Canadian history who, over an extended period of time, were statutorily designated to live in institutions primarily because of their race. Large numbers of school-aged Aboriginal children, at times up to one-third of them, were sent to residential schools. In some communities, this institutionalization continued for decades, and affected many generations." //Restoring Dignity: Responding to Child Abuse in Canadian Institutions//, Law Commission of Canada Report, 2000. //page 56.//

An Aboriginal woman recalls her childhood residential experience in the following words: "I knew I couldn't stay home. I knew that. But the times that really, really get to the bottom of my soul: the first day back [after being home for the summer holidays]...You're feeling pretty lonesome, suddenly go to bed and in the morning, you wake up and you see this white ceiling. You may as well have a knife and stab me through the heart... You know where you are and you got to survive and you just cover it over, seal it up for ten months." // C. Haig-Brown, Resistance and Renewal (Vancouver: Tillacum Library, 1988), page 95. // This pain of separation was felt by all those children who attended residential schools. It is important to look at the history of residential schools to understand the scope of the harm suffered. This section discusses the nature of abuse in Indian residential schools and the responses that have been made to the abuse.

History
"After a lifetime of beatings, going hungry, standing in a corridor on one leg, and walking in the snow with no shoes for speaking Inuvialuktun, and having a heavy, stinging paste rubbed on my face, which they did to stop us from expressing our Eskimo custom of raising our eyebrows for 'yes' and wrinkling our noses for 'no', I soon lost the ability to speak my mother tongue. When a language dies, the world it was generated from is broken down too." //Mary Carpenter//, 1995

Before 1971, the Canadian government saw Aboriginal people and their cultures as worth less than the European culture. This idea led to forming policies for educating Aboriginal people. It resulted in creating, designing, and operating Aboriginal residential schools. It was thought that forcibly removing First Nations children from their homes and putting them in residential schools was the quickest way to "civilize" the First Nations. First Nations were seen as "heathen" and "barbaric."

In 1920, the Indian Act made it a law for Aboriginal parents to send their children to Indian residential schools. The parents had little choice. "How did I get to residential school was by Indian Agents. I remember them pulling me away from my mother. I was six years old. . . They couldn't stop me from crying. . . I just kept crying for my mommy ‘cause they just pulled me away from her. They told my mum if I didn't go, she could get into trouble." -Residential school survivor //Breaking the Silence: An Interpretive Study of Residential School Impact and Healing as Illustrated by the Stories of First Nations Individuals, Assembly of First Nations, Ottawa, 1994.//

The children were sent to school where they worked half the day and attended class for the rest of the day. An acceptable standard of education was considered to be Grade 3. In many cases the children were forbidden to speak their language. T hese policies harmed the root of the Aboriginal way of life- the family and the community. The policies destroyed family life by removing the children from their parents and extended family. In Aboriginal nations, family is the core institution where the child is nurtured and sustained. It is the circle of comfort from birth to death. Within this circle the values of the nation are taught and passed on.

Facts and Figures

 * As early as 1874 the federal government started to take a role in educating Aboriginal children. Most residential schools were operated in partnership with religious organizations such as the Anglican and Catholic churches.
 * The last federally funded residential school was closed in Saskatchewan in 1996.
 * A census done in 1991 showed that about 105,000 persons attended these schools. It is thought that 90,600 of those persons are still alive today. The number of residential schools reached its peak in 1931 with 80 schools operating across Canada.
 * Up to 130 schools operated over time. It is thought that 100 of those could be involved in claims.
 * There have been 7200 claims for over 12,000 people who attended residential schools. There have been 11 court judgments and 630 settlements.

Nature of the Abuse
"Residential schools were total institutions whose purpose was to re-socialize the children by instilling them with new roles, skills and values. Once the child entered, willingly or not, almost every aspect of his or her life was determined and controlled by the institution." //Restoring Dignity: Responding to Child Abuse in Canadian Institutions. Law Commission of Canada//, 2000, p. 56. Children were removed from family and community. They had no power to change what was happening to them. They were physically degraded, mentally humiliated, and emotionally beaten down. It was especially difficult for a child to complain about the abuse that was being inflicted. These conditions made it easier for the abusers to continue abusing the children. As well as the physical and sexual abuse that was forced on the children, other factors affecting Aboriginal children included:

Separation from Family and Home

 * Separation from key caregivers, siblings, extended family, inter-village family networks, and familiar areas
 * Initial shock and feeling of desertion

Physical Conditions

 * Changes in clothing, diet, and sleeping quarters
 * Institutional setting was very confining
 * Lack of freedom

Loss of Native Language

 * Totally cut off from others upon arriving at school
 * Made fun of for speaking their mother tongue
 * Forced to speak English and punished for not doing so
 * When children returned home 10 months later, they felt like an outsider in the community because they could not speak the mother tongue

Loss of Native Culture

 * Child was cut off physically and culturally
 * Child was separated from family traditions
 * Lost their seasonal mobility and freedom
 * Children were handled by strangers, made to cut their long hair, to eat non-traditional food
 * Native beliefs were constantly put down. Speaking any native language was forbidden
 * Children were forced to compete with their own relatives instead of cooperating with them
 * Children lived in a military-like atmosphere with low self-esteem, believing that they were inferior to whites and something less than human

Child labour

 * Children worked at least half a day and were not paid
 * Children were a source of cheap labour year after year
 * Children performed very hard work for an adult, much less a child
 * Loss of Self Respect
 * Children had poor opinions of self
 * Children had low expectations for self which would affect any success they could possibly have in school activities

Lack of Good Education

 * Standard of education was Grade 3
 * Institutions did not prepare children to succeed
 * Children’s ability to learn at all was seriously affected by a loss of self respect as the abuse put them in a place of fear

What was Learned at School?

 * Native customs and languages are bad
 * Submit to the authority of whites
 * Children must be perfect
 * Maintain power and control in social relations
 * Expect military-style discipline
 * Go against all authorities in home community

Returning to the Community

 * Unable to cope with freedom
 * Inappropriate behaviour patterns
 * Unable to understand own families’ language
 * Unused to traditional native diet
 * Disrespectful of "ignorant" parents
 * Disrespectful of family and village customs
 * Unaware of social position in community
 * Out of touch with culture
 * Lack of parenting skills

Spiritual Abuse

 * Traditional beliefs not respected
 * Traditional beliefs ridiculed
 * Children came to fear cultural beliefs and practices
 * Students forced to attend church
 * Constant instruction in Christian dogma

Adapted from: Justice Educatio of BC. (2010). Surviving the Past - Options for dealing with abuse. Retrieved from:[]