The false assertion that residential schools were not genocide needs addressing
To the Expositor:
A counterpoint to ‘The Spanish Residential School Narrative: Balance needed in discussions about residential school’ by Peter Best, March 15, Page 4.
I certainly agree with the title of this letter to the editor that balance is needed in discussions about residential schools. However this narrative, that it’s a false assertion residential schools were places where genocide happened, is a blatant lie! It’s an insult to the families of the almost three thousand Indigenous children who died under mysterious circumstances at residential schools.
From about 1863 to 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in state-run boarding schools. The children were often not allowed to speak their language or to practice their culture, and many were mistreated, abused and certainly shamed. Of course, there were survivors who played the game with the abusive nuns and Christian brothers. I am a big fan of the books written by Basil Johnston and Tomson Highway and can honour their legacy, that they took advantage of their education.
I can’t speak about Basil (1929-2015), but I have met Tomson personally, as well as having read all his excellent books, especially ‘Permanent Astonishment: A Memoir’ (published 2021). This is a moving, amusing and detailed description of Tomson’s childhood with loving Cree parents, Balazee and Joe Highway who, yes, due to their poverty, harshness of life in the Canadian sub-arctic, early deaths of five of their 10 young children and Balazee’s illness, sent Tomson (when he was six, till 15), and his beloved younger brother, Rene, to the “Guy Hill Indian Residential School.” Both brothers were groomed by priests and obtained benefits by accepting their advances. Yes, Tomson does admit that he has had a creative and interesting life as a homosexual due to those early educational opportunities. However, he does describe in this recent book many other children who were traumatized by these pedophiles.
John A. Macdonald, as Canada’s founding prime minister, played the instrumental role of initiating, supporting and defending the residential school system in the late 19th century. Macdonald dreamed of creating an organized system of federal schools for Indigenous children that could be used to disrupt Indigenous lifeways and control over the land, to accelerate successful settler colonialism. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 2015 report deals with the racist and brutal legacy of residential schools. The Canadian government was aware of alarming death rates at these schools dating all the way back to 1907. Less than 25 years after residential schools became official Canadian policy, Peter Bryce released the Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and Northwest Territories, which revealed that 24 percent of all Indigenous children at residential schools died of tuberculosis. Bryce went so far as to call residential schools “a national crime.” Nothing changed. The schools remained open and their conditions remained horrific. This shows the Canadian government knew exactly what they were doing to these children and to the families and communities they stole these children from. They simply didn’t care.
Derek McPhail
Mindemoya
