Since the first National Day of Truth and Reconciliation has just passed here in Canada, the topic of Residential Schools has been on my mind. Coincidentally, my book club met on September 30th, the very day. Our book choice was “The Splendid and the Vile” by Eric Larsson. It’s a historical book describing the years 1940-1941 in London and Berlin and in between. Mostly the book centres on Churchill but it does a good job of giving the reader an overview of the Blitz and all the interested parties in the war.
You’re probably wondering what a book about WW2 would have to do with our situation here as we grapple with the aftermath of the Indian Residential School (IRS) System and how it broke down several generations of indigenous peoples in Canada. Well, one of the members of our book club was born in Germany and arrived here in Canada as an adult, so she was able to give us a unique perspective on the war and its aftermath. She was born about 25 years after the end of WW2, but she learned all about it in school. She was well aware of the genocide perpetrated on Jews and other “outsiders” by the Nazis, and it was ground into her at an early age how much her country had been “the bad guys” (her words). National Pride was not encouraged, and even today she feels uncomfortable singing Germany’s national anthem. She recounts how some of her friends would travel the world speaking English, rather than admit they were German.
How different our situation here! Not only was I (and most other children, I’m betting) not aware of what a Residential School was, nor what their mandate was as we went through school, we had no real idea of the magnitude of the genocide inflicted on our Indigenous Peoples until we were well into adulthood. Instead of facing the situation head on when things started to come out in the media, admitting the errors of the past and trying to rectify them as best they could, the government(s) passed the buck time and time again. The Residential School System and its replacement, the Child Welfare System, have removed at least 150,000 children from their parents between 1870 and the present. Many were abused in horrific ways, and their culture and language stripped from them. The fact that the genocide was insidious, not overt as it was in Nazi Germany, made it comparatively easy for the governments to keep practicing it for so long. Also, I believe that the majority of white Canadians probably preferred (and maybe do to this day) not to think about the fact that our country was founded by forcibly removing people from their lands, and then, not happy with that, forcibly removing Indigenous children from their homes in a misguided effort to integrate the whole lot of them into white society. How short-sighted were our forebears? It’s hard to imagine, from the perspective of the 21st century and our better understanding of how trauma affects people from generation to generation, that they really may have thought they acted for the best. Unfortunately, their idea of what was best, was based on a total lack of respect for people with different languages, customs and skin colours than their own. Many people in government and in the churches had at least some idea of the abuse and neglect that was going on, but they chose to ignore it.
Today, are things improving? Sadly, it doesn’t appear as though they’ve changed enough. The Child Welfare System, supposedly conceived to protect all Canadian children from neglect and abuse, often continues the Indian Residential Schools’ legacy of removing children from their homes and placing them in often dangerous and traumatic situations outside of their own culture, on the grounds that their parents aren’t fit to look after them. If their parents aren’t fit, whose fault is that? It seems clear that parents who grew up in the IRS system would have a hell of a time knowing how to parent their own kids. Maybe the communities of Indigenous Peoples need to decide how to nurture their own children, and how to teach people who weren’t parented, how to be good parents. (Read more about the history of Residential Schools here.)
It gives me great pain to think that as I was going through school, with all its ups and downs, but relatively speaking a positive experience, Indigenous children were torn from their families and forced to live unnatural lives in horrific conditions. It is our duty as citizens, who have been at least somewhat complicit–because most of us have had some inkling of this practice for a long time now and have done nothing or very little about it– to acknowledge the crimes that have been committed, and teach future generations about our history; and to face it as unflinchingly and humbly as the German people have faced their own horrific past by teaching their children the truth, as painful and shameful as it is.
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