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加拿大印第安寄宿学校

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发表于 2015-3-11 08:57:48 | 显示全部楼层 |阅读模式
国内既然看得到维基百科,那么可以自己去看。

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can ... ntial_school_system

下面的几楼,我把几个机构的原文放上来。

二楼:加拿大原住民及北方事务部 的调查报告 (Canada. Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, Volume 1: Looking Forward, Looking Back. Chapter 10, "Residential Schools." Ottawa: Supply and Services Canada, 1996.)

三楼:UBC人文学院的报告

另:加拿大真相及谅解委员会的报告 有6MB,PDF。想用附件上传,结果说文件太大。可是明明说是大小无限制。真奇怪

我不翻译这些文章。原文呈上。百里奚要是想来个归纳总结,自然更好。
 楼主| 发表于 2015-3-11 08:59:18 | 显示全部楼层
Volume 1 - Looking Forward Looking Back
PART TWO  False Assumptions and a Failed Relationship
Chapter 10 - Residential Schools
10
icon
Residential Schools

IN THE FIRST FEW DECADES of the life of the new Canadian nation, when the government turned to address the constitutional responsibility for Indians and their lands assigned by the Constitution Act, 1867, it adopted a policy of assimilation1. As described in the previous chapter, the roots of this policy were in the pre-Confederation period. It was a policy designed to move communities, and eventually all Aboriginal peoples, from their helpless 'savage' state to one of self-reliant 'civilization' and thus to make in Canada but one community — a non-Aboriginal, Christian one.2

Of all the steps taken to achieve that goal, none was more obviously a creature of Canada's paternalism toward Aboriginal people, its civilizing strategy and its stern assimilative determination than education. In the mind of Duncan CampbellScott, the most influential senior official in the department of Indian affairs in the first three decades of the twentieth century, education was "by far the most important of the many subdivisions of the most complicated Indian problem". 3 As a potential solution to that 'problem', education held the greatest promise. It would, the minister of Indian affairs, Frank Oliver, predicted in 1908, "elevate the Indian from his condition of savagery" and "make him a self-supporting member of the state, and eventually a citizen in good staning." 4

It was not, however, just any model of education that carried such promise. In 1879, Sir John A. Macdonald's government, pressured by the Catholic and Methodist churches to fulfil the education clauses of the recently negotiated western treaties,5 had assigned Nicholas Flood Davin the task of reporting "on the working of Industrial Schools...in the United States and on the advisability of establishing similar institutions in the North-West Territories of the Dominion." Having toured U.S. schools and consulted with the U.S. commissioner of Indian affairs and "the leading men, clerical and lay who could speak with authority on the subject" in western Canada, Davin called for the "application of the principle of industrial boarding schools" — off-reserve schools that would teach the arts, crafts and industrial skills of a modern economy. Children, he advised, should be removed from their homes, as "the influence of the wigwam was stronger than that of the [day] school", and be "kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions" — the residential school — where they would receive the "care of a mother" and an education that would fit them for a life in a modernizing Canada.6

Davin's report received the unqualified support of the churches and the department, with the latter going so far as to suggest that within the wide range of assimilative policies, it would be through residential education, more than any other method, that "the solution of that problem, designated 'the Indian question' would probably be effected...".7

Politician, civil servant and, perhaps most critically, priest and parson all felt that in developing the residential school system they were responding not only to a constitutional but to a Christian "obligation to our Indian brethren" that could be discharged only "through the medium of the children" and "therefore education must be given the foremost place".8

At the same moment, however, they were driven by more prosaic motives. Macdonald's deputy superintendent general of Indian affairs, L. Vankoughnet, assured him that Indian expenditures were "a good investment", for in due course Aboriginal people, "instead of being supported from the revenue of the country...would contribute largely to the same."9

The socializing power of education had a similarly self-serving utility. Schools were part of a network of institutions that were to minister to industrial society's need for order, lawfulness, labour and security of property.10 Scott admitted frankly that the provision of education to Indian communities was indispensable, for without it and "with neglect", they "would produce an undesirable and often dangerous element in society."11

Residential schools were more than a component in the apparatus of social construction and control. They were part of the process of nation building and the concomitant marginalization of Aboriginal communities. The department's inspector of education wrote in 1900 that the education of Aboriginal people in frontier districts was an important consideration, not only as an economical measure to be demanded for the welfare of the country and the Indians, themselves, but in order that crime may not spring up and peaceful conditions be disturbed as that element which is the forerunner and companion of civilization penetrates the country and comes into close contact with the natives. That benefit will accrue to both the industrial occupants of the country covered by treaty and to the Indians by weaning a number from the chase and inclining them to industrial pursuits is patent to those who see [that] a growing need of intelligent labour must occur as development takes place.12

The Aboriginal leader George Manuel, a residential school graduate, was rather more blunt. The schools, he wrote,

were the laboratory and production line of the colonial system...the colonial system that was designed to make room for European expansion into a vast empty wilderness needed an Indian population that it could describe as lazy and shiftless...the colonial system required such an Indian for casual labour...13

Selfless Christian duty and self-interested statecraft were the foundations of the residential school system. The edifice itself was erected by a church/government partnership that would manage the system jointly until 1969. In this task the churches — Anglican, Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian — led the way. Indeed, their energetic proselytizing resulted in the opening of residential schools in Ontario, the north-west and British Columbia even before the Davin report was submitted in 1879. Thereafter, the system — a combination of boarding schools built close to or in reserve communities and Davin's centrally located industrial schools — was expanded rapidly, reaching a high point with 80 schools in 1931 (see Table 10.1) and growing again in the 1950s as part of the nation's post-war expansion into Inuit homelands. It was maintained until the mid-1980s. Schools were built in every province and territory except Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland.14 They registered children from every Aboriginal culture — Indian, Inuit, and Métis children too — though the federal government assumed no constitutional responsibility for Métis people.15 While Métis children would be invisible, rarely mentioned in the records, they were nevertheless there and were treated the same as all the children were.

TABLE 10.1
Residential Schools, 1931
Nova Scotia         Shubenacadie (RC)                    
Ontario         Albany Mission (RC)         Cecilia Jeffrey (PR)         Chapleau (CE)
          Fort Frances (RC)         Fort William (RC)         Kenora (RC)
          McIntosh (RC)         Mohawk (CE)         Moose Fort (CE)
          Mount Elgin (UC)         Shingwauk Home (CE)         Sioux Lookout (CE)
          Spanish (RC)                    
Manitoba         Birtle (PR)         Brandon (UC)         Cross Lake (RC)
          Elkhorn (CE)         Fort Alexander (RC)         MacKay (CE)
          Norway House (UC)         Pine Creek (RC)         Portage la Prairie (UC)
          Sandy Bay (RC)                    
Saskatchewan         Beauval (RC)         Cowessess (RC)         Duck Lake (RC)
          File Hills (UC)         Gordon's (CE)         Guy (RC)
          Lac La Ronge (CE)         Muscowequan (RC)         Onion Lake (CE)
          Onion Lake (RC)         Qu'Appelle (RC)         Round Lake (UC)
          St. Phillips (RC)         Thunderchild (RC)
Alberta         Blood (RC)         Blue Quills (RC)         Crowfoot (RC)
          Edmonton (UC)         Ermineskins (RC)         Holy Angels (RC)
          Lesser Slave Lake (CE)         Morley (UC)         Old Sun's (CE)
          St. Albert (RC)         St. Bernard (RC)         St. Bruno (RC)
          St. Cyprian (CE)         St. Paul's (CE)         Sacred Heart (RC)
          Sturgeon Lake (RC)         Vermilion (RC)         Wabasca (CE)
          Wabasca (RC)         Whitefish Lake (CE)          
Northwest Territories         Aklavik (RC)         Fort Resolution (RC)         Hay River (CE))
          Providence Mission (RC)                    
British Columbia         Ahousaht (UC)         Alberni (UC)         Alert Bay (CE)
          Cariboo (RC)         Christie (RC)         Coqualeetza (UC)
          Kamloops (RC)         Kitamaat (UC)         Kootenay (RC)
          Kuper Island (RC)         Lejac (RC)         Port Simpson (UC)
          St. George's (CE)         St. Mary's Mission (RC)         Sechelt (RC)
          Squamish (RC)                    
Yukon         Carcross (CE)         St. Paul's Hostel (CE)          

In 1931 there were 44 Roman Catholic (RC), 21 Church of England (CE), 13 United Church (UC) and 2 Presbyterian (PR) schools. These proportions among the denominations were constant throughout the history of the system.

In Quebec two schools, Fort George (RC) and Fort George (CE), were opened before the Second World War. Four more were added after the war: Amos, Pointe Bleue, Sept-ëles and La Tuque.

Put simply, the residential school system was an attempt by successive governments to determine the fate of Aboriginal people in Canada by appropriating and reshaping their future in the form of thousands of children who were removed from their homes and communities and placed in the care of strangers. Those strangers, the teachers and staff, were, according to Hayter Reed, a senior member of the department in the 1890s, to employ "every effort...against anything calculated to keep fresh in the memories of the children habits and associations which it is one of the main objects of industrial education to obliterate."16 Marching out from the schools, the children, effectively re-socialized, imbued with the values of European culture, would be the vanguard of a magnificent metamorphosis: the 'savage' was to be made 'civilized', made fit to take up the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship.

Tragically, the future that was created is now a lamentable heritage for those children and the generations that came after, for Aboriginal communities and, indeed, for all Canadians. The school system's concerted campaign "to obliterate" those "habits and associations", Aboriginal languages, traditions and beliefs, and its vision of radical re-socialization, were compounded by mismanagement and underfunding, the provision of inferior educational services and the woeful mistreatment, neglect and abuse of many children — facts that were known to the department and the churches throughout the history of the school system.

In the course of that history there were those who understood that such a terrible legacy was being created. In 1943, R. Hoey, the department's superintendent of welfare and training, on receiving from the principal of St. George's School (located on the Fraser River, just north of Lyttons, B.C.) a set of shackles that had been used routinely "to chain runaways to the bed" and reports of other abuses at the school, wrote, "I can understand now why there appears to be such a widespread prejudice on the part of the Indians against residential schools. Such memories do not fade out of the human consciousness very rapidly."17 Nevertheless, with very few exceptions, neither senior departmental officials nor churchmen nor members of Parliament raised their voices against the assumptions that underlay the system or its abusive character. And, of course, the memory did not and has not faded. It has persisted, festered and become a sorrowful monument, still casting a deep shadow over the lives of many Aboriginal people and communities and over the possibility of a new relationship between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians.
1. The Vision and Policies of Residential School Education
1.1 The Vision

...it is to the young that we must look for a complete change of condition.18

The tragic legacy of residential education began in the late nineteenth century with a three-part vision of education in the service of assimilation. It included, first, a justification for removing children from their communities and disrupting Aboriginal families; second, a precise pedagogy for re-socializing children in the schools; and third, schemes for integrating graduates into the non-Aboriginal world.

The vision sprang from and was shaped and sustained by the representations of departmental officials and churchmen of the character, circumstances and destiny of the nation's Aboriginal population. For such social reformers in Canada, and indeed throughout the world of European empires, the contact between expansive and 'mature' non-Aboriginal culture and indigenous cultures in their 'infancy' imperilled the survival of Aboriginal peoples. According to an 1886 report from the department's inspector of schools for the north-west, for example, resource development and settlement had prevented Indian communities from following that course of evolution which has produced from the barbarian of the past the civilized man of today. It is not possible for him to be allowed slowly to pass through successive stages, from pastoral to an agricultural life and from an agricultural one, to one of manufacturing, commerce or trade as we have done. He has been called upon suddenly and without warning to enter upon a new existence.19

The need for government intervention to liberate these savage people from the retrograde influence of a culture that could not cope with rapidly changing circumstances was pressing and obvious. Without it, the inspector continued, the Indian "must have failed and perished miserably and he would have died hard entailing expense and disgrace upon the Country." The exact point of intervention that would "force a change in [the Indian's] condition" was equally clear — "it is to the young that we must look for a complete change of condition."

Only in the children could hope for the future reside, for only children could undergo "the transformation from the natural condition to that of civilization".20 Adults could not join the march of progress. They could not be emancipated from their "present state of ignorance, superstition and helplessness";21 they were "physically, mentally and morally...unfitted to bear such a complete metamorphosis".22 Under departmental tutelage, adults might make some slight advance. They could, Davin suggested, "be taught to do a little at farming and at stock raising and to dress in a more civilized fashion, but that is all."23 They were, in the words of the Reverend E.F. Wilson, founder of the Shingwauk residential school, "the old unimprovable people."24

The central difficulty in this analysis was not that adults were lost to civilization, but that they were an impediment to it. While they could not learn, they could, as parents, teach their children. Through them to their children and on through successive generations ran the "influence of the wigwam". If the children's potential was to be realized, it could only be outside the family. As E. Dewdney, superintendent general of Indian affairs in Macdonald's second government, reasoned, children therefore had to be removed from "deleterious home influences";25 they must be, the Archbishop of St. Boniface added, "caught young to be saved from what is on the whole the degenerating influence of their home environment."26 Their parents were, by the light of the vision's compelling logic, unfit. Only Frank Oliver demurred, pointing out the essentially un-Christian implication of this formative conclusion:

I hope you will excuse me for so speaking but one of the most important commandments laid upon the human by the divine is love and respect by children for parents. It seems strange that in the name of religion a system of education should have been instituted, the foundation principle of which not only ignored but contradicted this command.27

No one took any notice of the minister, however, for no one involved in Indian affairs doubted for a moment that separation was justified and necessary and that residential schools were therefore indispensable. Such institutions would, Parliament had been informed in 1889, undoubtedly reclaim the child "from the uncivilized state in which he has been brought up" by bringing "him into contact from day to day with all that tends to effect a change in his views and habits of life."28 In its enthusiasm for the schools, the department went so far as to suggest that it would be "highly desirable, if it were practicable, to obtain entire possession of all Indian children after they attain to the age of seven or eight years, and keep them at  
schools...until they have had a thorough course of instruction".29

The common wisdom of the day that animated the educational plans of church and state was that Aboriginal children had to be rescued from their "evil surroundings", isolated from parents, family and community,30 and "kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions".31 There, through a purposeful course of instruction that Vankoughnet described as "persistent" tuition,32 a great transformation would be wrought in the children. By a curriculum aimed at radical cultural change — the second critical element of the vision — the 'savage' child would surely be re-made into the 'civilized' adult.

The school, as department and church officials conceived it, was a circle, an all-encompassing environment of re-socialization with a curriculum that comprised not only academic and practical training but the whole life of the child in the school. This constituted the basic design of the schools and was maintained, with little variation, for most of the history of the system.

The classroom work of the teachers and students was to be guided by the standard provincial curriculum. To this was added equally important training in practical skills. The department held firm to Davin's industrial model, convinced that

no system of Indian training is right that does not endeavour to develop all the abilities, remove prejudice against labour, and give courage to compete with the rest of the world. The Indian problem exists owing to the fact that the Indian is untrained to take his place in the world. Once teach him to do this, and the solution is had.33

In every school, therefore, the children were to receive instruction in a range of subjects, including, for the boys, agriculture, carpentry, shoemaking, blacksmithing, tinsmithing and printing and, for the girls, sewing, shirt making, knitting, cooking, laundry, dairying, ironing and general household duties. As the curriculum was delivered in a half-day system until after the Second World War, with students spending half the day in the classroom and the other half in practical activities, trades training took place both in shops and in learn-by-doing chores. These chores had the additional benefit for the school of providing labour — on the farm and in the residences, bakehouse, laundry and dairy that made operation of the institution  
possible.34

Although these academic and practical courses might clothe the children in the skills and experience they needed to survive and prosper, the department and the churches realized that the children would have to undergo much more profound socialization. Skills would be useless unless accompanied by the values of the society the children were destined to join. The seeds of those values were, of course, embedded in each and every academic subject, in the literature they read, the poetry they recited, and the songs they were taught to sing. As well, however, in its 1896 program of study, the department directed that an ethics course be taught in each grade. In the first year, the students were to be taught the "practice of cleanliness, obedience, respect, order, neatness", followed in subsequent years by "Right and wrong", "Independence. Self-respect", "Industry. Honesty. Thrift", and "Patriotism....Self-maintenance. Charity." In the final year, they were confronted by the "Evils of Indian Isolation", "Labour the Law of Life" and "Home and public duties".35

Cardinal among these virtues was moral training for, as a memorandum from the Catholic principals explained, "all true civilization must be based on moral law." Christianity had to supplant the children's Aboriginal spirituality, which was nothing more than "pagan superstition" that "could not suffice" to make them "practise the virtues of our civilization and avoid its attendant vices." In the schools, as well as in the communities, there could be no compromise, no countenancing Aboriginal beliefs and rituals, which, "being the result of a free and easy mode of life, cannot conform to the intense struggle for life which our social conditions require."36

The children were not only to imbibe those values, and a new faith, they were to live them. The school was to be a home — a Canadian one. On crossing its threshold, the children were entering a non-Aboriginal world where, with their hair shorn and dressed in European clothes, they would leave behind the 'savage' seasonal round of hunting and gathering for a life ordered by the hourly precision of clocks and bells and an annual calendar of rituals, the festivals of church and state — Christmas, Victoria Day, Dominion Day and St. Jean Baptiste Day — that were the rapid, steady pulse of the industrial world. According to Dewdney, students had to be taught that "there should be an object for the employment of every moment", and thus the "routine...the recurrence of the hours for meals, classwork, outside duties...are all of great importance in the training and education, with a view to future usefulness".37

In school, in chapel, at work and even at play the children were to learn the Canadian way. Recreation was re-creation. Games and activities would not be the "boisterous and unorganized games" of "savage" youth. Rather they were to have brass bands, football, cricket, baseball and above all hockey "with the well regulated and...strict rules that govern our modern games", prompting "obedience to discipline" and thus contributing to the process of moving the children along the path to civilization.38

None of the foregoing would be achieved, however, unless the children were first released from the shackles that tied them to their parents, communities and cultures. The civilizers in the churches and the department understood this and, moreover, that it would not be accomplished simply by bringing the children into the school. Rather it required a concerted attack on the ontology, on the basic cultural patterning of the children and on their world view. They had to be taught to see and understand the world as a European place within which only European values and beliefs had meaning; thus the wisdom of their cultures would seem to them only savage superstition. A wedge had to be driven not only physically between parent and child but also culturally and spiritually. Such children would then be separated forever from their communities, for even if they went home they would, in the words of George Manuel, bring "the generation gap with them".39 Only in such a profound fashion could the separation from savagery and the re-orientation as civilized be assured.

That the department and churches understood the central challenge they faced in civilizing the children as that of overturning Aboriginal ontology is seen in their identification of language as the most critical issue in the curriculum. It was through language that children received their cultural heritage from parents and community. It was the vital connection that civilizers knew had to be cut if progress was to be made. E.F. Wilson informed the department that at Shingwauk school, "We make a great point of insisting on the boys talking English, as, for their advancement in civilization, this is, of all things, the most necessary."40 Aboriginal languages could not carry the burden of civilization; they could not "impart ideas which, being entirely outside the experience and environment of the pupils and their parents, have no equivalent expression in their native language."41 Those ideas were the core concepts of European culture — its ontology, theology and values. Without the English language, the department announced in its annual report of 1895, the Aboriginal person is "permanently disabled" and beyond the pale of assimilation for, "So long as he keeps his native tongue, so long will he remain a community apart."42

The only effective road to English or French, however, and thus a necessary pre-condition for moving forward with the multi-faceted civilizing strategy, was to stamp out Aboriginal languages in the schools and in the children. The importance of this to the department and the churches cannot be overstated. In fact, the entire residential school project was balanced on the proposition that the gate to assimilation was unlocked only by the progressive destruction of Aboriginal languages. With that growing silence would come the dying whisper of Aboriginal cultures. To that end, the department ordered that "the use of English in preference to the Indian dialect must be insisted upon."43

It was left to school principals to implement that directive, to teach the languages of 'civilization' — French in Quebec and English in all other parts of Canada, including Francophone areas, and to prevent the language of 'savagery' from being spoken in the school. Some instituted imaginative systems of positive reinforcement through rewards, prizes or privileges for the exclusive use of English. More often than not, however, the common method was punishment. Children throughout the history of the system were beaten for speaking their language.44

The third and final part of the vision was devoted to the graduates, their future life and their contribution to the civilization of their communities. It was this aspect of the vision that underwent the greatest change. While the ideology of the curriculum and its goal of extensive cultural replacement remained constant, the perceived utility of the schools to the overall strategy of assimilation and their relationship to Aboriginal communities underwent substantial revision. There were, in fact, two residential school policies. The first, in the long period before the Second World War, placed the school at the heart of the strategy to disestablish communities through assimilation. In the subsequent period, the residential school system served a secondary role in support of the integration of children into the provincial education system and the modernization of communities.

Initially, the schools were seen as a bridge from the Aboriginal world into non-Aboriginal communities. That passage was marked out in clear stages: separation, socialization and, finally, assimilation through enfranchisement. By this last step, the male graduate could avail himself of the enfranchisement provisions of the Indian Act, leaving behind his Indian status and taking on the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship.

Each stage in the passage had its difficulties, and the department was fully aware that its task was not completed with the training that led to graduation. Indeed, it declared in its annual report of 1887, "it is after its completion that the greatest care...needs to be exercised, in order to prevent retrogression." Retrogression — cultural backsliding — was the great fear. Once the connection between child and community had been broken it should not be re-established; the child should never again fall under the influence of Indian "prejudices and traditions" or the "degradations of savage life."45 To prevent this unhappy occurrence, the department reported in 1887, it would be best "to prevent those whose education at an industrial institution...has been completed from returning to the reserves". They were instead to be placed in the non-Aboriginal world and secured there by employment in the trade they had learned at the school, "so as to cause them to reside in towns, or, in the case of farmers, in settlements of white people, and thus become amalgamated with the general community."46 By implication, the future was not only one of amalgamating growing numbers of employable graduates but also the progressive decay and final disappearance of reserve communities.

Reality intervened in this strategy, however, and, indeed, the department and the churches did not exercise the "greatest care" of graduates. There was no placement program, and even if there had been, situations were not available in towns or "settlements of white people". "Race prejudice", an Indian agent informed the department, "is against them and I am afraid that it will take time, under the circumstances, before they can compete with their white brothers in the trades."47 By 1896, the department had to face the fact that "for the majority [of graduates], for the present at least, there appears to be no alternative" but to return to the reserves.48 That present became the future; there were always but few openings for graduates. With the exception of temporary labour shortages during the war, it was obvious that "no appreciable number of graduates of the Schools will be in a position to earn a livelihood by working as a craftsman among whites."49

The second fact that had to be faced was that in returning to their communities, as Reed predicted, "there will be a much stronger tendency for the few to merge into the many than to elevate them."50 A great proportion of the graduates would go "back to the ways of the old teepee life",51 to the "nomadic habits of his ancestors."52 They could not, one principal reported "stand firm" or "overcome this tendency to drift with the current that carries so many of their own people."53

The department and the churches recognized the problem — one that cut to the very heart of their strategy, blunting the usefulness of the schools and in fact so calling into question the industrial school model that, in 1922, it was abandoned in favour of the simpler boarding school, thereafter called a residential school. They recognized it but, as would be the case so often in the history of the system when it faced difficulties, they did very little apart from discuss it and formulate proposals.54

In 1898, the deputy superintendent general, James Smart, recognizing the impossibility of countering the drift back to reserves, decided to make a virtue out of necessity. He redesigned the system, supplementing its original emphasis on the enfranchisement of individual graduates with the additional goal of developing the communities to which the graduate returned. It would now be the object "to have each pupil impart what he has gained to his less fortunate fellows, and in fact become a centre of improving influence for the elevation of his race".55 The graduates could be, the principal of the Regina industrial school predicted, a "great moral force in the uplift of the life of the reserve", providing "an object lesson" in farming, gardening, housekeeping, the care of the sick and "maintaining sanitary conditions about their homes."56

By 1901, the department had initiated an experiment, the File Hills colony on the Peepeekeesis reserve, designed to release the graduates' uplifting developmental potential. The colony, under the close supervision of the agent W.M. Graham, was a model settlement of 15 former pupils, each allocated an 80-acre lot, horses, farming equipment, lumber and hardware for houses. Departmental expenses were to be recouped from the young farmers when they achieved an adequate income and the funds transferred to "help others make a like start."57

Reports on the colony were promising in 1902 but in ensuing years they were much less so,58 with the graduates described as being "all the way from 'lazy and indifferent' to 'making favourable or satisfactory progress'".59 Reflecting these assessments, or perhaps because the experiment was, as the historian Olive Dickason has suggested, "too costly for the budget-minded department",60 Duncan Campbell Scott chose not to extend it. Instead, he merely called upon principals and agents to co-ordinate the return of graduates to reserves and, so that they should not be thrown "entirely upon [their] own resources", he announced a modest start-up program — offering graduates "a gift of oxen and implements...and the granting of a loan which must be repaid within a certain time, and for which an agreement is signed by the pupil."61

These loans substituted for what could have been a more ambitious attempt to resolve the problem of the graduates.62 As the United Church's Association of Indian Workers in Saskatchewan pointed out in 1930, there continued to be "a missing link that should be forged into the present system along the line of 'Follow up work'."63 Without such a link, without any effective "control over the graduates",64 they were destined to return to the reserves, where rather than being that "great moral force",65 they would fall under "the depressing influence of those whose habits still largely pertain to savage life".66 For those ex-pupils and for the communities, assimilation would remain an ever-distant departmental goal.


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 楼主| 发表于 2015-3-11 09:00:45 | 显示全部楼层
The Residential School System

Children's dining room, Indian Residential School, Edmonton, Alberta. Between 1925-1936. United Church Archives, Toronto, From Mission to Partnership Collection.
    Children's dining room, Indian Residential School, Edmonton, Alberta. Between 1925-1936. United Church Archives, Toronto, From Mission to Partnership Collection.

Residential Schools

        Two primary objectives of the residential school system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture. These objectives were based on the assumption Aboriginal cultures and spiritual beliefs were inferior and unequal. Indeed, some sought, as it was infamously said, “to kill the Indian in the child.” Today, we recognize that this policy of assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm, and has no place in our country.

                    Prime Minister Stephen Harper, official apology, June 11, 2008   

What was the Indian residential school system?

The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Aboriginal children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream Canadian society. The residential school system operated from the 1880s into the closing decades of the 20th century. The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Aboriginal heritage and culture or to speak their own languages. Children were severely punished if these, among other, strict rules were broken. Former students of residential schools have spoken of horrendous abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological. Residential schools provided Aboriginal students with an inferior education, often only up to grade five, that focused on training students for manual labour in agriculture, light industry such as woodworking, and domestic work such as laundry work and sewing.

Residential schools systematically undermined Aboriginal culture across Canada and disrupted families for generations, severing the ties through which Aboriginal culture is taught and sustained, and contributing to a general loss of language and culture. Because they were removed from their families, many students grew up without experiencing a nurturing family life and without the knowledge and skills to raise their own families. The devastating effects of the residential schools are far-reaching and continue to have significant impact on Aboriginal communities. Because the government’s and the churches’ intent was to eradicate all aspects of Aboriginal culture in these young people and interrupt its transmission from one generation to the next, the residential school system is commonly considered a form of cultural genocide.

From the 1990s onward, the government and the churches involved—Anglican, Presbyterian, United, and Roman Catholic—began to acknowledge their responsibility for an education scheme that was specifically designed to “kill the Indian in the child.” On June 11, 2008, the Canadian government issued a formal apology in Parliament for the damage done by the residential school system. In spite of this and other apologies, however, the effects remain.
What led to the residential schools?

European settlers in Canada brought with them the assumption that their own civilization was the pinnacle of human achievement. They interpreted the socio-cultural differences between themselves and the Aboriginal peoples as proof that Canada’s first inhabitants were ignorant, savage, and—like children—in need of guidance. They felt the need to “civilize” the Aboriginal peoples. Education—a federal responsibility—became the primary means to this end.

Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald commissioned journalist and politician Nicholas Flood Davin to study industrial schools for Aboriginal children in the United States. Davin’s recommendation to follow the U.S. example of “aggressive civilization” led to public funding for the residential school system. “If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young. The children must be kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions,” Davin wrote in his 1879 Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (Davin’s report can be read here.)

In the 1880s, in conjunction with other federal assimilation policies, the government began to establish residential schools across Canada. Authorities would frequently take children to schools far from their home communities, part of a strategy to alienate them from their families and familiar surroundings. In 1920, under the Indian Act, it became mandatory for every Indian child to attend a residential school and illegal for them to attend any other educational institution.1

Students in the assembly hall of the Alberni Indian Residential School, 1960s. United Church Archives, Toronto, from Mission to Partnership Collection.
    Male students in the assembly hall of the Alberni Indian Residential School, 1960s. United Church Archives, Toronto, from Mission to Partnership Collection.

Students in the assembly hall of the Alberni Indian Residential School, 1960s. United Church Archives, Toronto, from Mission to Partnership Collection.
    Female students in the assembly hall of the Alberni Indian Residential School, 1960s. United Church Archives, Toronto, from Mission to Partnership Collection.

Living conditions at the residential schools

The purpose of the residential schools was to eliminate all aspects of Aboriginal culture. Students had their hair cut short, they were dressed in uniforms, and their days were strictly regimented by timetables. Boys and girls were kept separate, and even siblings rarely interacted, further weakening family ties.2  Chief Bobby Joseph of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society recalls that he had no idea how to interact with girls and never even got to know his own sister “beyond a mere wave in the dining room.”3  In addition, students were strictly forbidden to speak their languages—even though many children knew no other—or to practise Aboriginal customs or traditions. Violations of these rules were severely punished.

Residential school students did not receive the same education as the general population in the public school system, and the schools were sorely underfunded. Teachings focused primarily on practical skills. Girls were primed for domestic service and taught to do laundry, sew, cook, and clean. Boys were taught carpentry, tinsmithing, and farming. Many students attended class part-time and worked for the school the rest of the time: girls did the housekeeping; boys, general maintenance and agriculture. This work, which was involuntary and unpaid, was presented as practical training for the students, but many of the residential schools could not run without it. With so little time spent in class, most students had only reached grade five by the time they were 18. At this point, students were sent away. Many were discouraged from pursuing further education.

Abuse at the schools was widespread: emotional and psychological abuse was constant, physical abuse was meted out as punishment, and sexual abuse was also common. Survivors recall being beaten and strapped; some students were shackled to their beds; some had needles shoved in their tongues for speaking their native languages.4  These abuses, along with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and severely inadequate food and health care, resulted in a shockingly high death toll. In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Aboriginal children across Canada were dying in residential schools.5  This figure does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Bryce reported that anywhere from 47 percent (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75 percent (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home.6

In addition to unhealthy conditions and corporal punishment, children were frequently assaulted, raped, or threatened by staff or other students. During the 2005 sentencing of Arthur Plint, a dorm supervisor at the Port Alberni Indian Residential School convicted of 16 counts of indecent assault, B.C. Supreme Court Justice Douglas Hogarth called Plint a “sexual terrorist.” Hogarth stated, “As far as the victims were concerned, the Indian residential school system was nothing more than institutionalized pedophilia.”7

The extent to which Department of Indian Affairs and church officials knew of these abuses has been debated. However, the Royal Commission of Aboriginal Peoples and Dr John Milloy, among others, concluded that church and state officials were fully aware of the abuses and tragedies at the schools. Some inspectors and officials at the time expressed alarm at the horrifying death rates, yet those who spoke out and called for reform were generally met with silence and lack of support.8  The Department of Indian Affairs would promise to improve the schools, but the deplorable conditions persisted.9

Some former students have fond memories of their time at residential schools, and certainly some of the priests and nuns who ran the schools treated the students as best they could given the circumstances. But even these “good” experiences occurred within a system aimed at destroying Aboriginal cultures and assimilating Aboriginal students.

“Sister Marie Baptiste had a supply of sticks as long and thick as pool cues. When she heard me speak my language, she’d lift up her hands and bring the stick down on me. I’ve still got bumps and scars on my hands. I have to wear special gloves because the cold weather really hurts my hands. I tried very hard not to cry when I was being beaten and I can still just turn off my feelings…. And I’m lucky. Many of the men my age, they either didn’t make it, committed suicide or died violent deaths, or alcohol got them. And it wasn’t just my generation. My grandmother, who’s in her late nineties, to this day it’s too painful for her to talk about what happened to her at the school.”

- Musqueam Nation former chief George Guerin,
Kuper Island school
Stolen from our Embrace, p 62


The shift away from the residential school system

European officials of the 19th century believed that Aboriginal societies were dying out and that the only hope for Aboriginal people was to convert them to Christianity, do away with their cultures, and turn them into “civilized” British subjects—in short, assimilate them. By the 1950s, it was clear that assimilation was not working. Aboriginal cultures survived, despite all the efforts to destroy them and despite all the damage done. The devastating effects of the residential schools and the particular needs and life experiences of Aboriginal students were becoming more widely recognized.10 The government also acknowledged that removing children from their families was severely detrimental to the health of the individuals and the communities involved. In 1951, with the amendments to the Indian Act, the half-day work/school system was abandoned.11

The government decided to allow Aboriginal children to live with their families whenever possible, and the schools began hiring more qualified staff.12 In 1969, the Department of Indian Affairs took exclusive control of the system, marking an end to church involvement. Yet the schools remained underfunded and abuse continued.13 Many teachers were still very much unqualified; in fact, some had not graduated high school themselves.14

In the meantime, the government decided to phase out segregation and begin incorporating Aboriginal students into public schools. Although these changes saw students reaching higher levels of education, problems persisted. Many Aboriginal students struggled in their adjustment to public school and to a Eurocentric system in which Aboriginal students faced discrimination by their non-Aboriginal peers. Post-secondary education was still considered out of reach for Aboriginal students, and those students who wanted to attend university were frequently discouraged from doing so.15

The process to phase out the residential school system and other assimilation tactics was slow and not without reversals. In the 1960s, the system’s closure gave way to the “Sixties Scoop,” during which thousands of Aboriginal children were “apprehended” by social services and removed from their families. The “Scoop” spanned roughly the two decades it took to phase out the residential schools, but child apprehensions from Aboriginal families continue to occur in disproportionate numbers. In part, this is the legacy of compromised families and communities left by the residential schools.

The last residential school did not close its doors until 1986.16
Long-term impacts

        It is clear that the schools have been, arguably, the most damaging of the many elements of Canada’s colonization of this land’s original peoples and, as their consequences still affect the lives of Aboriginal people today, they remain so.

                    —John S. Milloy, A National Crime

The residential school system is viewed by much of the Canadian public as part of a distant past, disassociated from today’s events. In many ways, this is a misconception. The last residential school did not close its doors until 1986. Many of the leaders, teachers, parents, and grandparents of today’s Aboriginal communities are residential school survivors. There is, in addition, an intergenerational effect: many descendents of residential school survivors share the same burdens as their ancestors even if they did not attend the schools themselves. These include transmitted personal trauma and compromised family systems, as well as the loss in Aboriginal communities of language, culture, and the teaching of tradition from one generation to another.

According to the Manitoba Justice Institute, residential schools laid the foundation for the epidemic we see today of domestic abuse and violence against Aboriginal women and children.17 Generations of children have grown up without a nurturing family life. As adults, many of them lack adequate parenting skills and, having only experienced abuse, in turn abuse their children and family members. The high incidence of domestic violence among Aboriginal families results in many broken homes, perpetuating the cycle of abuse and dysfunction over generations.

Many observers have argued that the sense of worthlessness that was instilled in students by the residential school system contributed to extremely low self-esteem. This has manifested itself in self-abuse, resulting in high rates of alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide. Among First Nations people aged 10 to 44, suicide and self-inflicted injury is the number one cause of death, responsible for almost 40 percent of mortalities.18 First Nations women attempt suicide eight times more often than other Canadian women, and First Nations men attempt suicide five times more often than other Canadian men.19 Some communities experience what have been called suicide epidemics.

Many Aboriginal children have grown up feeling that they do not belong in “either world”: they are neither truly Aboriginal nor part of the dominant society. They struggle to fit in but face discrimination from both societies, which makes it difficult to obtain education and skills. The result is poverty for many Aboriginal people. In addition, the residential schools and other negative experiences with state-sponsored education have fostered mistrust of education in general, making it difficult for Aboriginal communities and individuals to break the cycle of poverty.

In the 1980s, residential school survivors began to take the government and churches to court, suing them for damages resulting from the residential school experience. In 1988, eight former students of St. George’s Indian Residential School in Lytton, B.C., sued a priest, the government, and the Anglican Church of Canada in Mowatt v. Clarke. Both the Anglican Church and the government admitted fault and agreed to a settlement. Another successful case followed in 1990, made by eight survivors from St. Joseph’s school, in Williams Lake, against the Catholic Church and the federal government.20

The court cases continued, and in 1995, thirty survivors from the Alberni Indian Residential School filed charges against Arthur Plint, a dorm supervisor who had sexually abused children under his care. In addition to convicting Plint, the court held the federal government and the United Church responsible for the wrongs committed.

The Anglican Church publicly apologized for its role in the residential school system in 1993, the Presbyterian Church in 1994, and the United Church in 1998. Most recently, in April 2009, Assembly of First Nations leader Phil Fontaine accepted an invitation from Pope Benedict XVI and travelled to Vatican City with the goal of obtaining an apology from the Catholic Church for its role in the residential school system. After the meeting, the Vatican issued a press release stating that “the Holy Father expressed his sorrow at the anguish caused by the deplorable conduct of some members of the Church and he offered his sympathy and prayerful solidarity."21

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions

Truth and Reconciliation Commissions are used around the world in situations where countries want to reconcile and resolve policies or practices, typically of the state, that have left legacies of harm. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is a non-adversarial way to allow residential school survivors to share their stories and experiences and, according to the Department of Indian Affairs, will “facilitate reconciliation among former students, their families, their communities and all Canadians” for “a collective journey toward a more unified Canada.

Meanwhile, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples had been interviewing Indigenous people across Canada about their experiences. The commission’s report, published in 1996, brought unprecedented attention to the residential school system—many non-Aboriginal Canadians did not know about this chapter in Canadian history. In 1998, based on the commission’s recommendations and in light of the court cases, the Canadian government publicly apologized to former students for the physical and sexual abuse they suffered in the residential schools. The Aboriginal Healing Fund was established as a $350 million government plan to aid communities affected by the residential schools. However, some Aboriginal people felt the government apology did not go far enough, since it addressed only the effects of physical and sexual abuse and not other damages caused by the residential school system.

In 2005, the Assembly of First Nations launched a class action lawsuit against the Canadian government for the long-lasting harm inflicted by the residential school system. In 2006, the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was reached by the parties in conflict and became the largest class action settlement in Canadian history.22 In September 2007, the federal government and the churches involved agreed to pay individual and collective compensation to residential school survivors. The government also pledged to create measures and support for healing and to establish a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The Indian Residential School Survivors Society was formed in 1994 by the First Nations Summit in British Columbia and was officially incorporated in 2002 to provide support for survivors and communities in the province throughout the healing process and to educate the broader public. The Survivors Society provides crisis counselling, referrals, and healing initiatives, as well as acting as a resource for information, research, training, and workshops.23 It was clear that a similar organization was needed at the national level, and in 2005, the National Residential School Survivors Society was incorporated.24

I have just one last thing to say. To all of the leaders of the Liberals, the Bloc and NDP, thank you, as well, for your words because now it is about our responsibilities today, the decisions that we make today and how they will affect seven generations from now.

My ancestors did the same seven generations ago and they tried hard to fight against you because they knew what was happening. They knew what was coming, but we have had so much impact from colonization and that is what we are dealing with today.

Women have taken the brunt of it all.

Thank you for the opportunity to be here at this moment in time to talk about those realities that we are dealing with today.

What is it that this government is going to do in the future to help our people? Because we are dealing with major human rights violations that have occurred to many generations: my language, my culture and my spirituality. I know that I want to transfer those to my children and my grandchildren, and their children, and so on.

What is going to be provided? That is my question. I know that is the question from all of us. That is what we would like to continue to work on, in partnership.

Nia:wen. Thank you.

—Beverley Jacobs, President, Native Women's Association of Canada, June 11, 2008

Read the full transcript and watch the video here.
Official government apology

    We feel that the acceptability of the apology is very much a personal decision of residential school survivors. The Nisga’a Nation will consider the sincerity of the Prime Minister’s apology on the basis of the policies and actions of the government in the days and years to come. Only history will determine the degree of its sincerity.

                —Kevin McKay, Chair of the Nisga’a Lisims Government, June 12, 2008

In September 2007, while the Settlement Agreement was being put into action, the Liberal government made a motion to issue a formal apology. The motion passed unanimously. On June 11, 2008, the House of Commons gathered in a solemn ceremony to publicly apologize for the government’s involvement in the residential school system and to acknowledge the widespread impact this system has had among Aboriginal peoples. You can read the official statement and responses to it by Aboriginal organizations here. The apology was broadcast live across Canada (watch it here).

The federal government’s apology was met with a range of responses. Some people felt that it marked a new era of positive federal government–Aboriginal relations based on mutual respect, while others felt that the apology was merely symbolic and doubted that it would change the government’s relationship with Aboriginal peoples.

Although the apologies and acknowledgements made by governments and churches are important steps forward in the healing process, Aboriginal leaders have said that such gestures are not enough without supportive action. Communities and residential school survivor societies are undertaking healing initiatives, both traditional and non-traditional, and providing opportunities for survivors to talk about their experiences and move forward to heal and to create a positive future for themselves, their families, and their communities.

        We are on the threshold of a new beginning where we are in control of our own destinies. We must be careful and listen to the voices that have been silenced by fear and isolation. We must be careful not to repeat the patterns or create the oppressive system of the residential schools. We must build an understanding of what happened to those generations that came before us.

                    -- Wayne Christian, Behind Closed Doors: Stories from the Kamloops Indian Residential School, 2000

By Erin Hanson
发表于 2015-3-11 10:57:38 | 显示全部楼层
本司胡同 发表于 2015-3-11 09:00
The Residential School System

Children's dining room, Indian Residential School, Edmonton, Albert ...

你能给个中文版的么,翻译水平有限
发表于 2015-3-11 12:18:59 | 显示全部楼层
水平有限 加 懒人。同求翻译。
 楼主| 发表于 2015-3-11 23:08:31 | 显示全部楼层
子奚这两天好像冒头,读一读,给个读后感,好不好?
发表于 2015-3-12 22:54:03 | 显示全部楼层
水平有限 加 懒人。同求翻译。


风行大哥说出了我的心声。求翻译。

话说,这就是新帖吗?
发表于 2015-3-14 21:26:31 | 显示全部楼层
.。。。没看懂,刷,一拉下来全都是英文。。。
发表于 2015-3-16 01:27:57 | 显示全部楼层
独自--彷徨 发表于 2015-3-12 22:54
风行大哥说出了我的心声。求翻译。

话说,这就是新帖吗?

用谷歌在线翻译就行了    能看懂
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