So yesterday, Diep and I visited the Woodlawn Cultural Center in Brantford. We learned a lot about the residential schools and just the history of the relationship between the indigenous people and the white immigrants who settled in Ontario.
Because of some technical difficulties getting to the center, we ended up taking the tour of the residential school before we toured the museum. In some ways, I felt like this was fortuitous. Our guide was someone from an indigenous background, and she spoke of the residential schools as a quite horrific place, naming those who had attended the school and left it "survivors." At first I had a little difficulty accepting the degree of severity involved in the abuse and deprivation that went on in the schools. It sounded pretty bad, but nothing worse than what Oliver Twist experienced in an orphanage in the Dickens novel. As she continued to tell stories, though, I began to get a clearer idea of what she was talking about. She spoke from firsthand accounts of people who had attended the schools, and that was very convincing to me.
From what she told us, I would say that there were several forces that created the plight of the children in these residential schools. Part of it was just the Anglican/Catholic tradition of strict, even inhumane charity schools (which those of European descent are somewhat familiar with this tradition from other contexts). However, layered on top of that tradition was a clear racism. The schools were designed to strip students of their indigenous identities. They were not allowed to use their native language or even to have much contact with their families. The purpose of the schools was to assimilate the children into mainstream society, but the conditions of the school were so bad that the people who grew up in them were not equipped in any way to join society--they were only deprived of their own cultural heritage, instilled with all kinds of traumatic baggage, and returned to a family they no longer knew.
As I reflected on this situation, I tried to see if from both sides. I could imagine the establishment of the schools being well-intentioned. I have met a lot of people who just assume that their view of the world is the correct one and that education consists of bringing other people to embrace their worldview. Interestingly, I have met this attitude in very conservative circles and also among social justice and diversity advocates. In light of that fact, it's hardly surprising that at one point, the Ontario government believed that assimilation through education was in the best interest of indigenous peoples. In fact, even in their more recent policy statements, focus is placed on making indigenous people in Ontario productive members of society, although collaboration with indigenous populations on what education should be has become more of a consideration.
Perhaps the most destructive aspect of these schools was the power difference between two cultures, two ways of life. According to our guide, Indian Agents had the power to take children away from their parents without the parents consent and put them in these schools. She even gave us an example of a boy who was abducted off the streets. This would seem more shocking to me if it didn't remind me to some extent of social workers in the U.S. We justify this kind of power by labeling the parents as "unfit." It doesn't take too much of a stretch of my imagination to believe that these Indian Agents also thought they were removing children from the families of "unfit" parents--perhaps because of real dysfunction at times (like alcoholism and poverty), but with a little prejudice and racism thrown in, probably many more families could be labeled "unfit." Governments have this kind of power and it is vulnerable to abuse.
Further, teachers and administrators did not have any accountability. Perhaps because of their Christian background (the school we toured was Anglican) and the high regard "missionaries" were usually held in, these people did not seem to get supervised at all. When children came forward about abuse, it was the word of a small "savage" against the word of an august, spiritual member of society. In these cases, the word of the teacher was taken over the word of the child. Again, as someone who has lived where two cultural/racial groups abut each other, I know how natural it is to place confidence in one's own racial/cultural group and distrust, on principal, the perspective of the other. This kind of cultural estrangement mixed with the power distance (the children had no power whatsoever, not even through their parents) created space for extreme abuse and deprivation.
As an educator and potential policymaker, the most important lesson that I took away from this experience was how close the potential for this kind of abuse is to all of us. It came out of good intentions and ignorance. People with a lot of power chose to operate from their limited understanding instead of engaging deeply with people who were different from them. Further, these people did not create transparent, accountable processes. Finally, power inequity between racial groups is never a good thing, and as a policymaker and educator, it is our responsibility to find ways to lessen those power distances and give the less powerful group their voice as often as we can.
Our guide mentioned that now the Ontario government has set aside money as restitution for those who experienced abuse in these schools, but even in the process of dolling that money out, the government agents are re-inflicting this abuse on those former students by making them recount their experiences and they deciding whether those traumatic experiences were really abuse and whether they really deserve money for what they experienced. Her example was making people tell how many times they had been raped and setting a price tag on those experiences (kind of like retroactive prostitution!). This state of affairs along with the initial missionary purpose of these schools just makes me want to weep. How can we set out to do a good thing and go so wrong? It is a very complex and difficult problem--and it reflects a weakness in our way of looking at life when we only see things in terms of justice and the bottom line and forget that justice must be mixed with mercy and that people are more valuable than the bottom line.
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