The Essential Truth of the Residential Schools

 

Greg Piasetzki writes today in the National Post: “in 1946, decades after the first residential schools were built, the Globe and Mail reported that, ‘Of the 128,000 Indians in this country, only 16,000 last year received formal schooling. Of this number, few stayed more than a year and only 71 … reached Grade 9.’”

This simple fact explodes the myth of the residential schools. Attendance was not compulsory--even though school attendance was compulsory for non-native children. Had mistreatment occurred, or “cultural genocide” been on the table, parents could simply withdraw their children. The government, and the churches, were offering a service: education in useful trades, plus, in the case of the residential schools, free room and board.

Eventually, the truth will come out. But we will never be able to recover all the historic churches burned down, the statues pulled down, the heritage lost.

How Far We Have Come in our Treatment of the Indigenous Peoples

 

The traditional image of Tecumseh

One standard element of the wider myth of the North American Indian is the standard claim that, until recently, indigenous Canadians were despised and discriminated against. And they and their contribution was supposedly omitted from the history books.

As fate would have it, I inherited my grandmother’s high school history book, published by the Ontario Ministry of Education in 1914. Ontario High School History of Canada. Price 19 cents. So let’s have a look. Are the Indians left out? Are they treated with contempt as an inferior race?

The first chapter is about the land, the geography. But the second chapter is all about “The Aborigines.” Not “Indians”; “Aborigines.” “Indians,” it is explained, is a misnomer. Sounds pretty woke. 

They are described on introduction as “Men of good features and athletic build.” There is a detailed description of the various tribes or nations and where they lived at first contact. They are referred to a couple of times as “savages.” Our author does not hold the modern prejudice that all cultures must be considered equal on all points. But note, this is an issue of culture, not race. And he goes on to say that the Iroquois, however, “had done something … wonderful,” in forming the Iroquois Confederacy, “and had solved many of the most difficult questions of government.” “Each member of the tribe had great individual liberty.” “No state ever more fully realized Napoleon’s ideal of ‘a career open to talent.’” The author refers to their “political genius.”

That’s at worst, condemning the culture itself with loud praise. 

There may seem to be some criticism of their methods of war: “usually the only fate in store for the captive was torture and death.” But this is no more than a statement of historic fact, as recorded in all the contemporary accounts. And that sentence is immediately followed by this: “Yet, they did not disdain the arts of peace, and all the tribes had lifted themselves more or less above primitive barbarism.” 

Details are then given of Indian arts and culture. Things were done “with great skill”; “with real skill; “well-tilled fields.” The potlatch is praised as promoting hospitality. “To the Coast Indians the potlatch fulfilled the three objects performed for us by a dinner party, a general store, and a bank.”

To sum up, “Freedom marked the life of the Indian from his earliest days…. Nothing was done under compulsion.”

When it comes to Indian spirituality, there is some clear criticism. “His love of inflicting torture was only one sign that his nature was really nervous and hysterical. This we see clearly in his religion.” “Hysterical,” however, to this author, means it involved a lot of dancing and making noise. Presumably he would have the same problem with a Methodist tent meeting or Pentecostal service. This smacks of the Anglican unease with “religious enthusiasm.” A prejudice, perhaps, but not a racial one. 

Of the Inuit, treated separately, our author opines that under the influence of the Moravian missionaries, “They cast their cruelty and love of war aside, and became the peaceful race we know today.”

The story of the indigenous people is then woven through the following two chapters, on the European discovers and the early years of New France: the war between the French/Huron/Algonquin alliance and the Iroquois is described. 

Chapter Five is again wholly about the Indians, “Missionaries and Indians.” The aim of the missionaries, it is explained, “was to establish a native Christianity. They learned the language of their flocks, and made little or no attempt to teach them French. …In order to preserve their flocks from the many vices of European culture,  “They wished to keep their Indian charges in absolute seclusion from all white influence save their own.” So much for the modern claim that the intent was to impose European culture and assimilate the Indians. But this is the historical reality, borne out by the extensive Jesuit Relations.

In subsequent chapters, Iroquois are featured in the “Half Century of Conflict” between England and France. “Renewed Iroquois Attacks” on New France; “The Massacre of Lachine”; “The Three War Parties.” 

A chapter or two later, we read of “Pontiac’s War,” which was “a struggle against the white invader.” No guilt is attributed to the Indians for the uprising.

A chapter on the War of 1812 tells of Tecumseh, “a brave and chivalrous warrior and a far-seeing statesman.” The Indian role in that war and in its significant battles is covered.

The tale of the Red River Rebellion and North West Rebellion are told in terms sympathetic to Riel and the “half-breed” rebels. It was all down to insensitivity and blunders by the federal government. “It would have been better to give them want they wanted than to drive them into rebellion. Others of their requests, such as those for schools and hospitals, were still more reasonable.”

In sum, while a few of the terms used would, for arbitrary reasons, be considered politi9cally incorrect in acurrent text, the indigenous people are fully reported on and treated sympathetically.  When they clash with Europeans, the story is generally told from the indigenous point of view.

Canadians, and Americans, have always loved Indians, and have always been inclined to give them special treatment.

The Statue of Aboriginality

 

In 1909, there was a serious proposal to build a monument to the American Indian in New York Harbour, fifteen feet higher than the Statue of Liberty. It was serious enough that construction began; with much public support. It ultimately fizzled out when WWI came, causing a bronze shortage. 

I mention this because it shows how fallacious the idea is that American Indians have been historically discriminated against. The truth is the exact reverse: they have always been idealized and idolized. But this has not been good for them. It is rather like what happens when you spoil a child: they become dependent.

It is true that, in the US, encroaching settlement made their traditional way of life obsolete. This has never been true in Canada—only a small  fraction of the actual land mass or hunting area has ever been settled. But even in the case of the US, they face a common dilemma: there is no call for coopers or blacksmiths or telegraph operators any more either. One retrains.

A Blot on Canada's History

 

Not the residential schools--the reporting on the residential schools.

Land Acknowledgements

 

It seems most public gatherings in Canada now open with a “land acknowledgement.” Here are two that showed up recently in my email, prefacing messages:

“The Writers’ Federation of New Brunswick acknowledges that the land on which we live, work and gather is the traditional unceded territory of the Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) and Mi’kmaq Peoples, and we honour the spirit of our ancestors’ Treaties of Peace and Friendship.”

“I respectfully and humbly acknowledge that I live and create on land traditionally inhabited and traversed for centuries by the Piikani, Siksika, Kainai, Tsuut'ina and Nakota peoples, their antecedents and their descendants.”

I understand this is also common in Australia; but not in the US.

I find these “land acknowledgements” offensive and ahistorical. I must always bite my tongue. I fear that, sooner or later, I will myself be forced to read one out, violating my conscience.

They are racist. They assert some special privilege for one racial group over others. That’s especially harmful in a multi-ethnic nation like Canada. They further imply a ruling class, an atistocracy by right of birth. We should all be equal, and advance on merit.

If the point is merely to recall the history of the place, how can they, in the case of New Brunswick, exclude mention of the Acadiens, or the French and British crowns, both of which also declared this their territory at different times.

Is it the claim that the territory was never ceded that makes a difference? 

Granted, the French and British did formally cede their claims to sovereignty by treaty. But so did the indigenous groups: in the same way, by treaty. 

Is the claim that sovereignty was ceded, but not the land itself? That the indigenous groups still  hold property rights, as individual Acadiens might still own their farms under Canadian or British sovereignty? 

But wait. Notice that multiple groups always need to be mentioned. This is because no one aboriginal group had secure possession of any territory; each might pass through. Accordingly, for none of them was it ever “their” land in the legal sense: property ownership requires secure possession, not merely passing through a place, even at regular intervals. Hence the legal doctrine of “squatter’s rights.” 

In fact, the land acknowledgements are inevitably discriminatory among indigenous groups themselves. In the NB acknowledgement, the Passamaquoddy are not mentioned: they too claim NB land as their traditional homeland. There were Iroquois in the Rocky Mountain foothills; yet the Alberta acknowledgement ignores them. Members of almost any tribe might have been almost anywhere at any given time. You can’t tell whom you should name.

Is it about who was here first? We do not know who was here first. All we know is that the named indigenous groups were the ones here at first contact with Europeans. That is an arbitrary point in time. Go back a few centuries further, and we have no idea who was here. We know that indigenous groups moved, expanded, contracted, and disappeared continually. They were, after all, nomadic.

And if being here before some other group establishes special rights or privileges, how does that work for more recent immigrants? Should those of English ancestry be shown similar deference by Italians or Hispanics? And is that second-class or third-class status eternal, generation after generation?

Stop it, Canada.

No Evidence of Mass Graves

 

The Genocide News

 

Cornwallis

 

In Halifax, they are busily erasing all traces of their founder, Lord Charles Cornwallis. The rap against him is that he put a bounty on local Indians, payable on submission of either the Indian or his scalp. So he is responsible for genocide.

Except that this was in time of war. In a war, it is rather part of the process to kill enemy soldiers. The bounty was supposed to be payable only for killing or capturing Indian warriors. If the means of mustering men to arms was irregular, this was a guerilla war, with no front lines, in a sparsely-settled territory. Every man might need to defend his home. 

It is also worth noting that the Indians initiated the conflict, in violation of treaties; and that the French at Louisburg were offering bounties for British scalps. 

So if Cornwallis is unmentionable, despite his accomplishments, for such an edict, surely so is, say, Sir Robert Borden, given that Canada used poison gas in World War I in response to German use. In war, if your enemy starts using some irregular or unethical means of combat, you must respond in kind or simply surrender.

But the real reason Cornwallis, with so many others, is being erased, is because of the unworthy human instinct for envy. The great are resented by the small for their accomplishments. For every Kennedy, there are a hundred Oswalds.

The Real Genocide

 

In a recent article, unfortunately behind a paywall, Greg Piasetzki, himself legally considered Metis, writes for the Epoch Times that a federal government commission back in 1944, and again in 1948, wanted to close the Indian residential schools. “Wherever and whenever possible Indian children should be educated in association with other children.”

The federal government had never wanted the schools: they were expensive. They were, in the first place, required by treaty. The Indians wanted them. Since some Indian families were transient, and some loving in extremely remote locations, boarding was often necessary.

However, they soon realized they could not close the schools for an additional reason—because too many Indian children had nowhere else to go. The residential schools were in effect orphanages for kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to care for them. “A census taken by Indian Affairs in 1953 found that 43 percent of the 10,112 indigenous children in residential schools nationwide were listed as neglected or living in homes that were unfit because of parental problems.” For others, their parents could not feed them as well as the schools would. The Truth and Reconciliation report cites this as a consideration: if the schools did not feed the children better than at home, the parents would not send them.

The Epoch Times article also notes that there was no drive to force Indian families to send their children to a residential school. School attendance became compulsory for non-native children in Ontario in 1871. It became compulsory for Indian children only in 1920, and even then the law was rarely enforced. “About half of all students who attended between the 1880s and 1950s dropped out after Grade 1, and few students made it as far as Grade 5.” Obviously, they were not being compelled to attend, and if they or their families did not find conditions satisfactory, they left. Those who stayed were largely those who had no place else to go.

The Epoch Times traces the problems of the Indian family to alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome (FASD), which the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report admits is still an epidemic on reserves. “Studies suggest FASD occurs among indigenous children on and off reserves at rates between 10 and 100 times greater than in the rest of Canada.” “Tragically, these problems follow them into adult life and are reflected in high rates of family violence (including spousal and sexual abuse), suicide, and addiction, and often repeat down through subsequent generations.”

Alcoholism is not the real problem, though. It is a symptom. This is due to a general collapse of morale, a shared depression due to culture shock. Charles Darwin recognized in the nineteenth century that whenever Europeans came into contact with a significantly more primitive culture, the primitive culture tends to collapse into a sense of pointlessness, very much like depression on an individual level. Men stopped working; women stopped looking after the children.

The cure, as everyone knows who has gone through culture shock, is to get out there and assimilate. Learn what your new surroundings have to offer. This is now being discouraged as “cultural genocide.” And the, better, ultimate cure is to get a new grounding in the eternal verities and the ultimate purpose of life. In other words, to get religion. And this option too is being systematically removed from the reserves and from modern Indian life, with churches actually being burned down.

In order to shut down the residential schools, officials turned to adoption for at-risk Indian children: the “Sixties scoop.” This is now condemned as another attempt at “cultural genocide.” Still today, “Nationwide, according to the 2021 Census, native children under 14 account for 53.8 percent of children in care, despite representing less than 8 percent of children that age in Canada.” They are simply now no longer adopted, but must remain in long-term care.

And we pretend to wonder why there are suicide pacts among young people on reserves. And why there are so many “missing and murdered (young) indigenous women.”

We have systematically prevented and then punished any efforts to help them.

The Latest on the Canadian Indian Genocide

 

A new book on the lack of evidence.

Get "Playing the Indian Card" at a Bargain Price

 

I’m excited to announce my book, Playing the Indian Card, will be promoted on @Smashwords as part of their End of Year Sale starting on December 15th! Be sure to follow me for more updates and links to the promotion for my books and many more! #SmashwordsEoYSale

Playing the Indian Card (smashwords.com)

Indian Identity

 

The leader of the Piapot Natin has called on Buffy Sainte-Marie to take a DNA test to see if she really is or is not an Indian. Although she has had contact with that nation for many years.

Question: if you can't tell whether someone is an Indian by looking at them, an you can't tell someone is an Indian by talking to them, how is it possible to discriminate against Indians? You can still discriminate in their favour, yes, but not against. They could always just deny their ethnicity.

Who Is Buffy Sainte-Marie?

 

This is wilder than I realized. Now CBC says they have found Buffy Sainte-Marie's birth certificate. It indicates she was not adopted. She was born in Stoneham, Massachusetts, to two "white" parents. 

Everything else, apparently, was made up.

Following ...

About Those Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls ...

 

The crazy thing is that this was not obvious to everyone all along.

An American View of the Canadian Holocaust

 

Read This Before It is Made Illegal

 

Rugby School--frontispiece to Tom Brown's Schooldays

Some choice quotes from this recent Conrad Black National Post column:

“The Trudeau government has deliberately proclaimed and incited the world to believe that this country has been guilty of attempted genocide. That is a monstrous blood libel on English and French Canadians and as I have written and said many times, it is a betrayal of Canada that should morally disqualify the government from re-election.”

“[I]t is a heinous falsehood to impute to any official policy of any jurisdiction of this country a desire to conduct any kind of genocide against anyone.”

To call feeding, housing, and educating poor Indian children “genocide” is slander, and racism of the worst kind.

A recent piece at True North agrees that sexual and physical abuse were “often rampant,” but primarily at the hands of older students. This is in line with the experience in upper-class British boarding schools, and is actually part of their educational design. The idea was to teach leadership by having the students self-police. One does not learn leadership by being told what to do. And so the school authorities imposed only a light hand.

Inevitably, as in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, this led to some bullying, and some sexual exploitation. “Fagging” developed certain connotations. 

However, here the intention was that the lowerclassmen would band together to defend one another, and learn from this how to organize for the common good.

This is what was supposed to happen. Thomas Hughes, who wrote Tom Brown’s Schooldays, lauded the result in his own case. No doubt it did not always happen; others, like George Orwell, report terrible experiences at boarding school. But it is what the upper classes have long believed was best for their own children.

There was also some abuse by staff, the True North article admits. But, per the True North article, “hardly any was at the hands of clergy.” Many staff members were themselves indigenous. The best protection against abuse, imperfect as it is, is to have such schools run by clergy. And at worst, the average Indian child attending a residential school was safer from abuse, starvation, and disease at school than at home on reserve. Statistics prove this.

Thought Crimes in Canada

 

Our Home on Native Land?

 

Jully Black sang “O Canada” to begin the NBA All-Star game in Salt Lake City recently. She made headlines the world over by changing the lyrics from “O Canada, our home and native land,” to “O Canada, our home on native land.”

According to her version, Canada belongs to the native people, aka “First Nations.” And not to its citizens. 

To understand how offensive this is, imagine she had sung, instead, “O Canada, our home on Spanish land.” After all, the Spanish have a traditional claim, since they “discovered” the Americas, and were assigned them in the Treaty of Tordesillas. I do not believe they have formally renounced this claim.

Unlike the First Nations of Canada, who formally renounced any claim of sovereignty many years ago, and passed it to the British crown in the Treaty of Niagara. And in all the other formal treaties with the British and then the Canadian government.

Or what if Black had sung “O Canada, our home is on French land.” The French once claimed us, and had settled here; the land was taken from them by conquest. The Acadian were actually expelled. Is that fair? By contrast, the ceding of sovereignty from the natives was by agreement and with compensation.

But either of these phrasings, surely would be intolerable. They would sound like treason. Like the Poles singing “Our home on German land.” Or the Americans singing “Our home on British land.”

If we leave aside racial prejudice, Black’s version of the anthem sounds just as treasonous.

As are the interminable "land recognitions" now found at almost every public event.

In a video interview, Black complains in explanation that aboriginal history was not taught to her in school, that the Indians had been “erased.” 

This is not true. Any check of old Canadian school texts—many are available online at the Internet Archive—shows Canada’s Indians have always been prominent in the curriculum. Unless Black went to some uniquely bad school, she seems to be thinking specifically of the supposed horrors of the residential schools.

This was not taught, of course, because until recent years it was not known. No prominent historians supposed there was anything especially wrong with the residential schools. Maybe a bad policy; maybe not. Not especially worth teaching about, any more than the history of denominational schools in Newfoundland, or Canadian orphanages.

And what is currently taught about the residential schools—and, I warrant, in every school in Canada—is not true. They were mostly just schools like any other, with some lousy cafeteria food. 

The notion of “genocide” in the residential schools is, in the end, a moral panic like the witch hunts of Renaissance Europe, or the Medieval dancing hysteria.

I hope we awaken from it soon. And without, say, selling Canada down the river.

What Genocide Looks Like in Canada

 

Students at Carlisle Indian Residential School, US, circa 1885. 

This SubStack article written by a former Indian residential school teacher points out a few salient facts, although he tends to bury his lede:

- The death rate from tuberculosis in the residential schools in the period 1930 to 1950, according to the Truth And Reconciliation Commission’s own data,  was many times lower than that on reserves generally. “TB mortality in the residential schools was consistently much lower than among the general First Nations population.”

- The Indian Residential Schools were brought “up to code,” so to speak, to conform with expert opinion on preventing tuberculosis, at least sixteen years earlier than the public schools of Toronto.

- A 1909 survey of kids at the residential schools found that “only 60% of the fathers of residential school students, and 70% of the mothers, were still living.” They served primarily as orphanages, taking those whose families could not care for them. Closing them may not have helped these children.

- At the same time, 1909, death rates for children on reserve were 25 to 50%. It should not be surprising if some children died at residential schools as well. Nor is it likely to be entirely the school’s fault.

- Young people living on reserve even today, with all our medical improvements, have a higher death rate than in the residential schools any year since about 1950. Child and youth death rates on reserve today are three to five times higher than among the general population.

- “By several key measures, residential school students fared better as adults than their peers who did not attend.” Only one third of Indian children attended the residential schools, as opposed to regular day schools. This select group were more likely to earn a diploma or degree, more likely to be employed, less likely to be on welfare. They were taller on average and less likely to be obese. This despite the fact that they were, commonly, orphans or from the most impoverished families.

So what is the solution to the sufferings of our “First Nations”? Don’t close the schools. Close the reserves.

Stick a Feather in Her Cap

 

Somewhere deep in the forests primeval, another unicorn dies.

Posthumously, we discover that yet another famous Native American is not. Her sisters have revealed that Sacheem Littlefeather, the Apache princess who famously declined Marlon Brando’s Oscar for The Godfather to protest the treatment of American Indians, did not have Indian blood. She was of Mexican, specifically Spanish, ancestry. She was putting on the buckskin in vain hopes of getting work as an actress.

And so she joins the long parade of other bogus Indians: Grey Owl, Iron Eyes Cody, Elizabeth Warren, the ahistorical Chief Seattle of the famous speech. “Pretendians” has its own Wikipedia entry.

What does this tell us?

That there is no discrimination against, or oppression of, native Canadians or native Americans. Just the opposite; it is advantageous to one’s career to claim to be Indian. People will always give an Indian the time of day and the benefit of the doubt. Nobody was falsely claiming to be Jewish in Nazi Germany. 

What about blackface? Weren’t blacks oppressed; yet aren’t whites oftgen caught pretending to be black?

Not really. Nobody was ever really fooled here. Blacks sought to “pass” as whites; except on the stage, whites were not trying to pass as blacks. 

Being black was, however, advantageous in a certain context: as entertainers. Blacks were preferred as entertainers. They supposedly sang better, danced better, were better musicians, and better comedians. Contrary to contemporary popular opinion, stage blackface was not a matter of mockery, but of admiration.