Cultural Genocide and the First Nations of Upper Canada: Some Romantic-era Roots of Canada’s Residential School System

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article investigates the Romantic-era origins of Canada’s residential school system, which removed Aboriginal children from their homes in an official effort to sever familial and cultural ties and indoctrinate them into the hegemonic Euro-Canadian cultural order. The subject of a ground-breaking report recently published by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, this education system was not formally instituted until 1879; hence, most of its scholarship focuses on Canada’s post-Confederation period. This article attempts to expand our understanding of the residential school system by tracing its formal ideological foundations back to the 1820s when Upper Canada’s lieutenant governor, Sir Peregrine Maitland, and his chief adviser, the prominent Anglican cleric, educator, and amateur poet John Strachan – both of whom maintained strong transatlantic ties – first recommended Aboriginal children’s participation in immersive forms of colonial pedagogy. To contextualize this discussion, the article also examines key writings by the Irish-Ojibwe poet Bemwewegiizhigokwe (Jane Johnston Schoolcraft), who in 1839 lamented her children’s enrollment in American boarding schools, becoming one of the first Aboriginal writers to reveal the adverse effects of such pedagogy on Native American children and their families.