Jean Chretien on the Residential Schools

 

Jean Chretien circa 1970

Former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien is being criticized for saying recently that, when he was Indian Affairs Minister from 1968 to 1974, he never heard of any problems with the Indian Residential Schools, now commonly held to be genocidal.

Chris Selley, in the National Post, lists specific complaints of abuse that were actually sent to the Department of Indian Affairs while Chretien was minister. How could he not have known?

But this misses the point. In the same interview, Chretien acknowledged that sexual abuse was going on at the Quebec boarding school where he was once a student. Abuse was par for the course. The reality is that, until recent decades, we simply assumed that a certain amount of sexual abuse and bullying was going on at any residential school. This was regrettable, but unavoidable. Welcome to real life. Was one going to close the schools? The question was, and remains, whether the Indian Residential Schools were any worse than any other residential schools. Or, for that matter, than the typical home, on reserve or in the general population.

We do not really know, because nobody has ever done a study with proper controls. It is often noted that in the great majority of reported cases of child abuse, the perpetrator is a close relative.

I recall Robertson Davies’s novel Fifth Business, published in 1970—in the middle of Chretien’s run at Indian Affairs. In it, the protagonist, a teacher at a private school, is accused by his good friend, a school trustee, of regularly buggering the boys, and warned that if he did not stop, he would never make headmaster. 

There was no question of his being fired; no question of this affecting their friendship.

John Addington Symonds wrote in the 19th century of his experience at Harrow, among the most prestigious of British public schools,

“Every boy of good looks had a female name, and was recognised either as a public prostitute or as some bigger fellow's 'bitch.' Bitch was the word in common usage to indicate a boy who yielded his person to a lover.”

C.S. Lewis seems to take pedophilic homosexual activity for granted in his 1955 school memoir, Surprised by Joy. 

Child abuse in institutions became an issue only recently, and pretty much still only when it comes to institutions run by the Catholic Church.