“I'm sorry now we were so very severe”: 1930s Colonizing Care Relations between White Anglican Women Staff and Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat People in an “Eskimo Residential School”

Abstract

Feminist Studies 45, no. 2/3. © 2019 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 335 Val Marie Johnson “I’m sorry now we were so very severe”: 1930s Colonizing Care Relations betweenWhite Anglican WomenStaff and Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat Peopleinan“EskimoResidentialSchool” Colonial actors and Indigenous peoples have a conflicted “shared history” of residential schools in Canada.1 The conflict is reflected in seemingly unbridgeable accounts of what residential schools represent . Critics, including survivors, analyze residential schools (boarding schools in the United States) as brutal institutions with a living history involving the “theft of indigenous peoples’ lives, land and resources,” as laid out by Roland Chrisjohn et al. This history lives through survivors speaking back to these institutions’ ongoing multigenerational impacts and linked forms of colonizing damage.2 Official and staff accounts frame 1. Val Marie Johnson and Isabelle Knockwood, “Our Shared History” (Presentation , Knockwood Honorary Degree Citation for Doctor of Civil Law, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, October 19, 2013). 2. Ronald D. Chrisjohn, Tanya Wasacase, Lisa Nussey, Andrea Smith, Marc Legault, Pierre Loiselle, and Mathieu Bourgeois, “Genocide and Indian Residential Schooling: The Past Is Present,” in Canada and International Humanitarian Law: Peacekeeping and War Crimes in the Modern Era, ed. Richard D. Wiggers and Anne L. Griffiths (Halifax, NS: Dalhousie University Press: 2002), 263. See also Alice French, My Name Is Masak (Winnipeg , MB: Peguis Publishers Ltd., 1992); Abraham Okpik, We Call It Survival (Iqaluit, NU: Nunavut Artic College, 2005); Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association, Sivumuapallianiq: Journey Forward: National Inuit Residential Schools Healing Strategy (Ottawa: Pauktuutit Inuit Women’s Association of Canada, 2007); We Were So Far Away: The Inuit Experience of Residential Schools (Ottawa: Legacy of Hope Foundation, 2010); and Arie Molena, 336 Val Marie Johnson the schools as positive or at least well-meaning institutions, with abuse restricted to isolated individuals in a distant past. Some staff and their supporters emphasize the schools’ provision of care.3 Canadian Senator Lynn Beyak recently reiterated this “kindly and well-intentioned” residential school narrative, claiming to speak for “a silent majority.” Despite a 2008 national apology presenting these schools as “a sad chapter in our history,”4 their reverberations in Indigenous communities, including through state control of Indigenous resources, mean that colonization still operates through the state removal of children from their families and communities, now defined as “child welfare.” Beyak thus defended residential school staff and “foster families.” The federal government has pledged “to build a new relationship” with Indigenous peoples, but strongly resisted a 2016 Canadian Human Rights Commission ruling that upheld a decade-old First Nations complaint—that their children’s overrepresentation “in state care” (including with foster families) replicates residential school dynamics.5 “‘National Memory’ and Its Remainders: Labrador Inuit Counterhistories of Residential Schooling” in Power through Testimony: Reframing Residential Schools in the Age of Reconciliation, eds. Brieg Capitaine and Karine Vanthuyne (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2017), 135– 54. On US schools, see Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998). On impacts, see Amy Bombay, Kimberly Matheson, Hymie Anisman, “The Intergenerational Effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the Concept of Historical Trauma,” Transcultural Psychiatry 51, no. 3 (June 2014): 320–38. 3. Bernice Logan, “School Workers Find Their Voice,” interview with Solange De Santis, Anglican Journal (April 2003); Mary Harrington Bryant, 4 Years— And Then Some (Ottawa: Pro Printers, 2007); Thomas A. Lascelles, “Indian Residential Schools,” Canadian Catholic Review 10 (1992): 6–13. Some Indigenous people, including those connected with Shingle Point School, report positive experiences. See also Cheryl Gaver, “Residential Schools in Canada: Why the Message Is Not Getting Across” in Power through Testimony. 4. Lynn Beyak, Senate Debates, Senate of Canada, March 7, 2017; Kristy Kirkup, “Senator Beyak Says ‘Silent Majority’ Supports Her on Residential Schools,” Globe and Mail, April 6, 2017; Stephen Harper, “Statement of Apology to Former Students of Indian Residential Schools,” Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (June 11, 2008). 5. Mia Rabson, “Tribunal Again Tells Feds to Fund Indigenous Child Welfare, Minister Agrees,” CTV News, February 1, 2018, https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics /tribunal-again-tells-feds-to-fund-indigenous-child-welfare-minister-agrees1 .3785170; Cindy Blackstock, “Residential Schools...