Getting Schooled on Residential Schools

 

Egerton Ryerson statue once standing in front of Ryerson University

Friend Euripides sends this New York Post piece to me from Korea. Word of the failure to find any evidence of the Canadian genocide is getting out.

I see the slogan in the video on Egerton Ryerson’s statue: “No child forgotten, no child left behind.”

Here in Saint John, I go into the Dollar Store, I go into WalMart, I go into Giant Tiger—all have prominent displays of orange T-shirts on sale with the slogan “Every Child Matters.” These are a protest against the residential schools. Uptown, I see two pedestrian crossings painted orange with stencilled feathers—again a protest against the residential schools. At the Art Gallery of Ontario, when I visited a year ago, there was a big display in the atrium of children’s shoes arranged in a circle, to represent the supposedly murdered children.

There has been a wave of arson attacks on churches across Canada--up to 83 now. Including to my mind the most beautiful building in Alberta, St. Jean Baptiste in Morinville, a perfect French Canadian church sitting incongruously in the middle of the prairie. Burned to the ground. Another uniquely beautiful and historic church in Fort Chipewyan, Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Burned to the ground. Canada, especially Western Canada, has too few historic or architecturally interesting buildings. And the authorities did not seem to care. Trudeau spokesman Gerald Butts said the attacks are “understandable.” 

That statue of Egerton Ryerson that is shown in the video splashed with paint has been taken down. He was the founder of the Ontario public school system, but he is now condemned for having advocated the residential schools for Indians. Ryerson University, named after him, has now been renamed “Toronto Metropolitan University.” This hits close to home, since both I and my grandmother are graduates. The statue of Sir John A. Macdonald in Macdonald Park in Kingston, his hometown, has been taken down. He is the founder of Canada, but his government also funded the residential schools, so he is now a villain. My ancestors, my family, are from Kingston, and would have known him.

In June, government official Kimberly Murray suggested it should be made a crime to deny that there was genocide in the Indian residential schools. Justice Minister David Lametti said he was “open to the suggestion.”

It’s all a hoax.

The original report of a “mass grave of indigenous children” came from the reservation in Kamloops. I have lived in Kamloops; the story immediately sounded impossible. The residential school is right across the river from downtown Kamloops. If large numbers of children had gone missing in this, or any other urban school, you can be sure it would have been noticed. The tribal government would have been on the case, the Kamloops police would have been on it, the provincial and federal governments would know about it; not least, the child’s family would notice if little Tommy did not come home for Christmas or summer vacation. There would of course have been records of all students entering and graduating, and any deaths. If nobody noticed at any level, the problem must have gone far beyond the school.

During the public announcement by the Kamloops band of a “preliminary indication” of unmarked graves, the one that spread the story of mass graves and genocide across the world, they promised to follow up soon with a further investigation. Other tribes soon followed suit with their own magnetic imaging and their own announcements. They were given federal money for said further investigations. And yet after two years no excavations have been made.  None are scheduled. This suggests strongly they have known all along there were no unmarked graves.

After two years, Pine Creek is the only band who has been naïve enough to excavate. The rest are apparently all hoaxing the public for more funding.

“The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time,” the NY Post piece explains. That is, at best, overdramatized. There was as now a legal obligation to send your children to school in Canada. In the case of Indians it was actually rarely enforced. Most Indian parents had the choice of a residential school or an ordinary day school; most Indian children attended day schools. Residential schools were available for parents too remote to have a school nearby, or families who did not want or could not bear the expense of supporting their own children. Most attendees in many schools were orphans or wards of the state.

The piece goes on: the schools “forbade them to acknowledge their Indigenous heritage and culture or to speak their own languages”

Think about it. If the plan was to separate Indians from their heritage and integrate them into the larger culture, the thing to do would obviously be to send them to the regular government schools with everybody else. The very existence of separate indigenous schools proves an intent to keep the Indians separate and distinct. They had a separate curriculum which featured elements of Indian culture, along with their reading, writing, and ‘rithmetic. The use of indigenous languages was sometimes restricted; for two reasons. First, for the same reason language schools usually  prohibit speaking L1 (the students’ first language) in class—because immersion is the most effective way to learn a language. Second, because most schools had students with a variety of first languages. The only common language was English or French. Using another language was excluding classmates from the conversation.

The official policy of at least the Catholic Church, which ran most of the schools, was not to restrict use of the original language outside of the classroom. Many staff members were themselves aboriginal, and would address students in their own shared language.

Conditions at the schools might sound harsh in modern terms, too much macaroni and cheese and not enough fresh fruit in the cafeteria, perhaps, but we were all poorer then. The schools were sometimes not well-funded. However, conditions had to be better than the children would experience at home, or their parents could and would pull them out of the schools. Administrators worried about this—showing, of course, that parents had that choice.

This is not, of course, to deny that school is hell. That goes without saying.