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Residential Roots STEPHEN HENIGHAN
The hemispheric context reveals the roots of the residential school system
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rom the early 1880s until 1996 Indigenous children in Canada were taken away from their parents and interned in residential schools. The children were prohibited from speaking their languages, trained to despise their culture, fed a poor diet, taught an impoverished curriculum, forced to perform manual labour and catechized with the Christian religion. In nearly all of these schools, as documented by the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, children were physically and sexually abused by their teachers. 62 Geist 108 Spring 2018
These experiences left many residential school survivors unfit for adult life. In addition to the annihilation of cultures and languages, the system’s legacies include family breakdown, unemployment, mental illness and substance abuse. No adult Canadian today was taught this history in school. When we asked our teachers about social problems among Indigenous people, the more liberal ones gave answers such as, “They’re trying to preserve a stone-age culture.” Less enlightened
teachers eschewed condescension for flat-out racist stereotyping. Our ignorance of the residential school system lent apparent credence to racist explanations for the social problems suffered by Indigenous people. Books such as Richard Wagamese’s novel Indian Horse (2012) or Joseph Auguste Merasty’s memoir The Education of Augie Merasty (2015) hadn’t yet been written. To learn about racism, we were given Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and John Howard Griffin’s Black Like Me (1961)—books
photo: students of fort albany residential school
