Peace Pipe Dreams by Darrell Dennis

Author:Darrell Dennis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Douglas and McIntyre (2013) Ltd.
Published: 2014-10-18T00:00:00+00:00

The Indian residential schools were established before Confederation but became commonplace after the Indian Act was passed in 1876. The schools were funded by the Department of Indian Affairs and were run by Christian churches, especially the Catholic and Anglican Church. By 1931 there were eighty residential schools across Canada and the last residential school didn’t close until 1996. The total number of First Nations children that passed through the residential school system is estimated to have been around 150,000.

Over the years there has been much debate about the conditions experienced by the students in residential schools. However, in the early twenty-first century it was officially recognized that residential schools did significant harm to Aboriginal children by snatching them from their families and communities, banning their languages, and forcing them to endure physical and sexual abuse by staff and other students. A primary goal of the schools has been described as “killing the Indian in the child” or more specifically, cultural genocide.

The residential school system was born out of the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act and the 1869 Gradual Enfranchisement Act. Both these acts were created to assimilate Indians into Christianity, training them to become farmers and wiping out Indian languages so they only spoke English. As these laws were being enforced, Native leaders fought like crazy to have them overturned, despite recent attempts at revisionist history that suggest these policies were widely embraced by Native people. Further laws also allowed the residential schools to perform compulsory sterilizations on Native students in a number of provinces. It’s interesting to note that around this time Canada went to war in Europe to end Nazi atrocities that included similar forced sterilization on Jews in concentration camps. So, in other words: European sterilization—bad; Indian sterilization—government-funded policy.

Since the schools operated in relative isolation and were largely unmonitored, acts of physical and sexual abuse reached epidemic proportions. Students were severely punished and often beaten for speaking their languages and practising their religions. Corporal punishment was excused as the only viable way to “civilize” the savage or punish runaways. Inadequate living conditions and practically non-existent medical services led to astronomical rates of illness and death by influenza and tuberculosis. Over the course of the century, reports by physicians reported disturbing rates of tuberculosis among students and death rates in some residential schools of up to thirty to sixty percent. To put this in perspective, imagine enrolling your child in grade one and by grade five up to sixty percent of your child’s classmates had died—maybe even your own child among them.

Recent published findings have revealed that during the 1940s malnutrition experiments were carried out on approximately one thousand hungry Aboriginal children in six residential schools. These schools cut back milk rations, withheld vitamins and supplements, and even tried out a special enriched flour that couldn’t legally be sold anywhere else in Canada. So for those of you who abhor the amount of cruel animal testing they used to do back in the day, you can take some comfort in knowing that sometimes animals were spared in favour of cruel Native child testing.

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