Where were you when you heard about the 215 children found in an unmarked grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School?
I had just logged off a graduation ceremony hosted by the First Nations Centre at the University of Northern British Columbia. Since it is conference season for me, I had been on numerous Zoom meetings that day and immediately before the celebration had been part of a panel with former colleagues at the University of Alberta talking about best practices when it comes to community-engaged/community-based research. The chair of the panel was my friend archaeologist Dr. Kisha Supernant, who among other things has used ground penetrating radar to look for the remains of Indigenous children at residential schools. To put it mildly, this news changed everything and the next two panels I presented on under its shadow.
We know that Indigenous children died at residential schools. In the fall of 2019, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation and Aboriginal People’s Television Network unveiled a red scroll 164 feet in length that contained the names of 2,800 students. What many people did not know is that those 2,800 children were simply those whose name we have. Another 1,600 individuals remain unnamed, although there is hope that with additional research this number will decrease.
Even this number is misleading since there were many more children who simply disappeared into the system and whose fate is unaccounted for. The 266-page fourth volume of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is all about missing children and unmarked graves. It estimated that it would cost more than $1.5 million to conduct a thorough investigation on the matter and notes that despite a desire to do so on their part in December 2009 the federal government refused to allocate these funds. As such, it has fallen to individuals, individual nations and researchers to fund this research and the bad news is that it is highly unlikely that these 215 children will be the last to make the news in this manner.
The Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, was the “first” residential school in Canada. Established in 1828 as a day school by the Anglican missionary Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in New England and the Parts Adjacent in America, it become a residential school a mere three years later. Strictly speaking, it predated the official residential school system in Canada, but it also heavily influenced the federal government when they started said system in the 1880s. So too did the American Indian boarding school system, although in the US it was the military and not various churches that operated them.
By now, I like to think that at least at a basic level we are familiar with residential schools, so I will not labour the point. It is important, however, that from the start the system in Canada was built on two things: the belief that Indigenous peoples were categorically inferior and the desire to spend as little money as possible on dealing with them. Rather than ask the relatively small Canadian military to operate the schools, the federal government asked all of the well-established churches in Canada to run them.
I say asked because the federal government did not force any of them to take on this role and indeed many of the churches already had their own version of the system. I say well established because almost no churches that emerged during the Second to Fourth Great Awakening were asked to run a school. Similarly, the various Lutheran churches were too heavily associated with ethnic minorities and therefore not asked, although it should be noted that they operated similar schools for the Samí in Scandinavia. For the most part, these churches were paid per student, with no requirement that students actually receive an education.
Only around a quarter of students graduated and most, if not all, survivors left the schools having lost their language and culture, disconnected from their community, and/or uneducated/under educated. It is this last part that makes many people question whether we should even call them schools as education was secondary to assimilation and cultural genocide.
It is by now well known that sexual abuse is a problem in the Roman Catholic Church and residential schools were no exception. Factor in that from the federal government’s perspective they were the legal guardians of status Indians and were in essence handing this over to the churches, and it should come as no surprise that when abuses happened, they were more often than nought unreported.
As their quote unquote legal guardians, the federal government and churches agreed to allow researchers to conduct medical experimentation on the students ranging from how the human body handled malnutrition to the treatment of ear infections and had not legal responsibility to report these activities, or anything else, to the actual parents. Even if we exclude abuse as a consideration, the desire to run residential schools for as little money as possible meant that they were often in poor condition, overcrowded, and rarely attracted good instructors. Disease easily ran rampant. Furthermore, as the provinces all moved to professionalize teaching, more and more of those who taught in residential schools were unqualified to teach by provincial standards. (For their part the provinces did not care since status Indians are a federal responsibility and therefore so too is their education). As long as the church liked you, you had a job. At various points in time the Kamloops Indian Residential School was the largest in Canada, and as such it contained students from all over Canada. After all, if they do not have to go home during the school year it does not matter where you send them.
Today, the most popular residential school in public discourse is Hogwarts. A total of 158 people die in the Harry Potter books and that is a residential school were most of the students are being raised in their language and culture and where many of the instructors are good and do not consider their students to be inferior. It is easy to point at Hogwarts or a real boarding school like Eton College, and imagine residential schools were similar. Nothing could be further from the truth. Indigenous peoples soon learned that residential schools were horrific places where they did not want to send their children. A lot of people talk about the 1920 amendment to the Indian Act that made attendance mandatory. This date, however, is misleading as prior to this date Indigenous parents had actively resisted sending their children only to be forced by Indian Affairs. What changed is that in the early twentieth-century Indigenous parents began hiring lawyers. It is also the reason why the Indian Act was amended in 1911 and 1927 to restrict the right of status Indians to hire lawyers.
And this fact is one of the great divides that exists in Canada. Indigenous peoples have always known about the horrors of the residential school system and it is revealing that as soon as many restrictions were lifted with the 1952 amendment to the Indian Act that many nations took steps to either run their own school or have their children attend provincial schools. These 215 children all have families who are still wondering what happened to them. As such, this announcement opened up this wound and many families are hopeful they will finally have an answer. For many non-Indigenous peoples, however, it was not until the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that they heard anything and even then, many bristled at calling the residential school system a genocide.
Now they have to deal with the bodies.
- Prof. Daniel Sims is the chair of the First Nations Studies department at UNBC and a member of the Tsay Keh Dene First Nation.
