Balance needed in discussions about residential schools
To the Expositor:
Congratulations to Mr. Manitowabi! I am happy to see that he is studying the work and careers of Spanish Residential School attendees, such as Basil Johnston and Cecil King. Perhaps as a result of this he will use his distinguished new position to counter the false assertion that residential schools were places where genocide happened.
Basil Johnston attended the Spanish school in the late 1940s and wrote a book, ‘Indian School Days,’ an affectionate, humorous and mainly positive memoir about his years there. He went on to become an ethnologist, specializing in Indigenous languages and culture with the Royal Ontario Museum. He quotes many of his schoolmates as saying that their attendance there was the best thing that could have happened to them. It certainly made him into a very successful adult.
At an exhibition at M’Chigeeng I attended at the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation, ‘The Anishinaabe Residential School Experience: Reflection of Former Students,’ I learned that Cecil King, referred to by Mr. Manitowabi, became a University Professor in Saskatchewan. He said that he could never have achieved anything near what he achieved had he not gone to that school. He said he learned to speak better Ojibwe there.
I also learned that graduate Peter Johnson, former chief of the Serpent River First Nation, said that the Spanish residential school was the best thing that ever happened to him because he met his wife of 45 years there. He said that the schooling he received there taught him independence and allowed him to serve as a Roman Catholic deacon.
Retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Jack Major, who went to Espanola High School, was a friend of Basil Johnston. They played football and hockey against each other. Justice Major says that the notion that pupils at Spanish were torn from happy homes is a myth. (Some parents applied for their children to attend one.) He remembers that a lot of the students there were rescued from starving on trap lines and many had tuberculosis, for which they received special care. He says it’s true that English was paramount, “but how else to equip students to function off the reserve?”
Finally, as to residential schools generally, the renowned Cree playwright and pianist Tomson Highway, recipient of the Order of Canada and a residential school attendee, said that people only hear negative stories about residential schools, never all the positive stories. He said that “there are many successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself, and my career wouldn’t have happened without that residential school.”
Hopefully Mr. Manitowabi, as part of his new job, will inject some balance back into the discussions about residential schools. Congratulations again to him.
Sincerely,
Peter Best
Sudbury
