Residential Schools Term Analysis

If every Indigenous child was absorbed into Canadian society, their ties to their language and their culture would be broken. They wouldn't live on reserve lands; they'd live and work among other Canadians and there would no longer be a need for treaties, reserves, or special rights given to Indigenous people. The single purpose, and simple truth, of the residential school system was that it was an act of cultural genocide. If the government of Canada managed to assimilate all Indigenous kids, it would no longer have any financial or legal obligations to Indigenous people.

For the next decade, the children continued to be abused at the school, but now they were far away from home. By the 1940s and 1950s, the government knew the residential school system was an absolute disaster. The Indigenous people were not seamlessly assimilating into Canadian culture and society; in fact, they were actively resisting assimilation.

Regardless, from the 1940s until 1952, Canadian scientists across the country worked with bureaucrats—who were in charge of the care of Indigenous children—and top nutrition experts on what have become notoriously known as starvation experiments using students at six residential schools as their subjects.

What the statistics don't tell you is how some of the older children would form their own abusive circles, preying on the younger, more vulnerable kids. The abuse suffered at the hands of adult supervisors took its toll on the students. They became further disengaged from the classroom, angry, and in need of someone to take their rage out on. For some of these kids, the younger children were easy victims.

This is the life Chanie ran from.

"When I am alone at home, I think about my brother. The drive to go home was so strong. I don’t want his death to be in vain[.] […] As a residential school survivor, you can feel it all over again, what these students felt. Yes, you can feel it."

The one problem the educators couldn’t foresee was that every single one of those children brought the ghosts of the past with them. Some of the kids were leaving an idyllic family life, but most were not. Many came from homes touched by the horrific trauma of residential school—abuse, addictions, extreme poverty, and confused minds.

Intergenerational trauma from the residential school experience is entrenched in Pikangikum. One hundred years of social exclusion, racism, and colonialism has manifested as addiction, physical abuse, sexual abuse, and lack of knowledge on how to parent a child. Few of the kids discuss the sexual abuse they've suffered, yet more than 80 percent of the children and youth in Indigenous residential treatment centres come from homes where they were sexually abused.

Alvin thought about the abject poverty most of his people lived in and the addictions they suffered in the hopes of making all their misery go away.

Alvin thought about their parents, even his own older brothers and sisters, who had gone to residential school before his family moved to Muskrat Dam. And he thought about the forced schooling of more than 150,000 Indigenous kids and what it had done to the psyche of the people and the impact it had had on the next generation and the next.

And then he thought about the five dead students there in Thunder Bay. A direct line of causation could be drawn from the residential school legacy to the failings in the government-run education system his people were left with.

And yet still the inequities rage. Northern First Nations families are faced with the horrific choice of either sending their children to high school in a community that cannot guarantee their safety, or keeping them at home and hoping distance education will be enough. Families are still being told—more than twenty years after the last residential school was shut down—that they must surrender their children for them to gain an education. Handing over the reins to Indigenous education authorities such as the NNEC without giving them the proper funding tools is another form of colonial control and racism.