Indian Residential Schools Research Articles

Colonial Violence in Sixties Scoop Narratives: From <em>In Search of April Raintree</em> to <em>A Matter of Conscience</em>

Colonial Violence in Sixties Scoop NarrativesFrom In Search of April Raintree to A Matter of Conscience Petra Fachinger (bio) "Adopted" in the parlance of the day, meant "no longer Indian." Thousands of us were denied the fundamental right to know who we were created to be. Richard Wagamese, "Surviving the Scoop" Indigenous literatures matter because Indigenous peoples matter. And that, to me, is a mighty good cause for celebration. Daniel Heath Justice, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter Inspired by personal experience, Métis author Beatrice Mosionier's novel In Search of April Raintree (1983) was one of the first texts written in Canada to deal with the Indigenous foster child experience. According to the late Métis scholar Jo-Ann Episkenew, In Search of April Raintree publicly acknowledges and validates the experiences of "the many Indigenous children in the care of the settler government's child-welfare system." She adds that "even though she [Mosionier] could have written an autobiographical account of her own experiences as a foster child, Culleton Mosionier made a deliberate choice to write the story of a fictional family, the Raintrees, who, like her own family, were torn apart by Canadian government policies" (Episkenew 112).1 The novel introduces major human rights issues that subsequent narratives echo: the violent removal of Indigenous children from their parents by the Canadian government to assimilate them by placing them in white middle-class homes, the resulting identity conflicts from which many foster care and transracial adoption survivors suff er, sexual assault on Indigenous women, suicide, and intergenerational trauma as a result of the residential school experience.2 All of these issues arise out of [End Page 115] systemic and institutional colonial violence, as April Raintree and the Sixties Scoop narratives that I will discuss in this essay show. Both the Sixties Scoop, which began in 1951, when amendments to the Indian Act gave the provinces jurisdiction over Indigenous child welfare where none existed federally, and continued through the 1980s, and the so-called Millennium Scoop are part of the history of the child-welfare system in Canada, which continues to tragically fail Indigenous peoples. These terms reflect the violence of the removal of Indigenous children without their parents' consent and often without their knowledge.3 The history of the large-scale governmental foster and adoption strategies of the Sixties Scoop, which saw the largest number of children taken in the 1960s and continued until the mid-1980s, has not yet received the same critical attention as the discussion of residential schools, which have entered the Canadian public consciousness more widely in response to the 2015 Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC). Unfortunately, despite the changes that have been made as a result of the condemning reports on the government's welfare initiatives and systemic underfunding, the number of children in permanent care outside of their own families and communities has continued to rise in the new millennium—hence the term "Millennium Scoop."4 Cora Morgan, Manitoba's First Nations family advocate, for example, points to a case "where a three-day-old boy was taken from his mother simply because the mother had been a ward of Family Services until she was 18" (Vowel 185). Moreover, a number of provinces have been housing teenaged Indigenous foster children in motels and hotels when no other accommodation seems to have been available. This practice has come under scrutiny after the brutal murder in 2014 of fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine (Anishinaabe), who was one of the many victims of such placement (185). According to Patrick Johnston, several factors have contributed to the recent resurgence of interest in the Sixties Scoop: the fact that the TRC has characterized it as a legacy of the residential school system; the formal apology by former premier Greg Selinger in the Manitoba legislature in 2015; the tireless efforts of Cindy Blackstock (Gitxsan), executive director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society; increased activism by those affected; and a series of class-action lawsuits launched in five different provinces. On 28 May 2018 Premier Rachel Notley formally apologized on behalf of the province of Alberta to [End Page 116] Sixties...

Situating Intergenerational Trauma in the Educational Journey

The impact of trauma on learning in post-secondary institutions is largely ignored. However, recent studies on how Aboriginal people experience mental health issues are bringing attention to Aboriginal students’ experiences of intergenerational trauma (IGT). IGT occurs when the maladaptive effects of an original trauma experience, such as historic trauma inclusive of Indian Residential Schools (IRS), results in unhealthy effects on the first generation being passed down to the next generation or multiple generations. Given the lengthy history of collective historic trauma experienced by Aboriginal people, it is reasonable to expect that Aboriginal students’ learning is affected by IGT. As post-secondary educators, we engaged a limited study to further our knowledge of the impact of IGT on Aboriginal students. We were puzzled by Aboriginal students’ attrition within university programs—students we believed who were more than capable of success. We chose to explore this issue from the perspective of trauma-informed education principles (Mordoch & Gaywish, 2011). Building on past work, this qualitative study explores how IGT affects the educational journeys of Aboriginal students. A conceptual framework based on an Anishinabe teaching of Four Lodges (directional)—Talking, Planning, Teaching, and Healing—guided our research. The researchers formulated questions for each Lodge to frame our research on how IGT is understood by students enrolled in select programs for mature Indigenous students. We asked about the effects of IGT in the classroom and the resultant problems students face in their educational journey. Sixteen Indigenous students, 10 instructors, and nine administrators employed in Aboriginal focus or access programs for at least three years participated in semi-structured interview conversations. Findings reflect their perceptions of the interplay between IGT and educational experiences and potential strategies to redress resultant issues. Keywords: intergenerational trauma; post-secondary education; trauma-informed education

Recognizing Settler Ignorance in the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has been mandated to collect testimonies from survivors of the Indian Residential Schools system. The TRC demands survivors of the residential school system to share their personal narratives under the assumption that the sharing of narratives will inform the Canadian public of the residential school legacy and will motivate a transformation of settler identity. I contend, however, that the TRC provides a concrete example of how a politics of recognition fails to transform relationships between Native and settler Canadians not only because it enacts an internalization of colonial recognition, but because it fails to account for what I call “settler ignorance.” Work in epistemologies of ignorance and epistemic oppression gives language to explain sustained denial and provide tools to further understand how settler denial is sustained, and how it can be made visible, and so challenged. For this task, Mills’s articulation of white ignorance should be expanded to a consideration of white settler ignorance. Over and above an account of white ignorance, such an account will have to consider the underlying logics of settler colonialism. This characterization of settler ignorance will show that the denial of past and ongoing violence against Indigenous peoples, through the reconstruction of the past to assert the primacy of settlers, is not explainable in terms of a lack of recognition but is rather structural ignorance.

The Triumph of Olemaun: Survivance, Empathic Unsettlement, and Restorying the History of Canadian Residential Schools

The ignorance of many Canadians regarding residential schools and their traumatic legacy is emphasised in the reports of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) as a foundational obstacle to achieving reconciliation. Many of the TRC's calls to action involve education that dispels and corrects this ignorance, and the commission demands ‘age-appropriate curriculum on residential schools, Treaties, and Aboriginal peoples' historical and contemporary contributions to Canada’ to be made ‘a mandatory education requirement for Kindergarten to Grade Twelve students’ (Calls to Action 62.i). How to incorporate the history of residential schools in kindergarten and early elementary curricula has been much discussed, and one tool gaining traction is Indigenous-authored picturebooks about Canadian residential schools. This article conducts a close reading of Margaret Pokiak-Fenton and Christy Jordan-Fenton's picturebook When I Was Eight (2013). The picturebook gathers Indigenous and settler children together to contest master settler narratives regarding the history of residential schools. Using Gerald Vizenor's concept of ‘survivance’ and Dominick LaCapra's notion of ‘empathic unsettlement’, the article argues that picturebooks work to unsettle young readers empathetically as part of restorying settler myths about residential schools and implicating young readers in the work of reconciliation.

The Residential School Experiences in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles & Sweetgrass and Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen

In Canada, the residential school system established in the nineteenth century remains a dark chapter in the nation’s history. The schools operated under that system were one of the major instruments used by the government to assimilate Aboriginal people into mainstream Canadian society. Based on the assumption that children were easier to manipulate and control than adults, the residential school system targeted Aboriginal children. As a common theme in Canadian Aboriginal literature, residential school experiences are represented in Drew Hayden Taylor’s Motorcycles & Sweetgrass and Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen. The present paper focuses on the traumatic residential school experiences depicted in the two novels as well as their long-term effects. Healing the wounds of history remains a daunting task for the Canadian government.

Reconciliation and Environmental Racism in Mi’kma’ki

There has been more talk but not enough action on reconciliation since the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its final report in 2015 containing ninety-four calls to action (Truth and Reconciliation Canada 2015). Indigenous people have not experienced the reconciliation intended in the actions that Canada has agreed to implement. Indigenous people and all Canadians need to hold Canada accountable to these actions for true reconciliation to manifest in Canadian society. The TRC calls to action and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) hold particular meaning and hope for me, as a survivor of Indian Residential Schools (IRS), and many other survivors who have gone through the TRC process. Truth is the first step toward reconciliation; understanding is the second step, and remediation is the third. Water is sacred. Protecting the water and asserting our rights in the Peace and Friendship Treaties are my responsibilities as a Mi’kmaw woman and rights holder. They are also an integral aspect of my healing journey. When I acknowledge Canadians’ habitation on the unceded lands of the Mi’kmaq, I mean that acknowledgment from the core of my spirit, the spirit of my ancestors, and my future generations. I am living that acknowledgment.

Corporate Colonialism and the “Crimes of the Powerful” Committed Against the Indigenous Peoples of Canada

Canada is both a capitalist and colonial society, one founded on the seizing of Indigenous lands for capitalist purposes. In the process, a variety of “crimes of the powerful” were committed, including the theft of Indigenous lands, the forcible confinement of Indigenous people onto reserves, and the subjection of Indigenous children to physical and sexual assaults via the residential school system. In more recent times, the corporate quest for extractive resources has created further harms for Indigenous communities. The lives of too many Indigenous people in Canada are now contoured by complex poverty, Indigenous children are over-represented in the child welfare system, and Indigenous adults are over-incarcerated in prisons and jails. Using a “crime” lens, this paper brings an awareness of Canada as a capitalist and colonial society—conceptualized here as “corporate colonialism”—to the foreground. In the process, the various manifestations of the “crimes of the powerful” against the Indigenous peoples of Canada are exposed.

Criminology's Time: Settler Colonialism and the Temporality of Harm at the Assiniboia Residential School in Winnipeg, Canada, 1958–1973

This article examines the delimiting role time plays in criminological research, especially with respect to historical studies related to genocide in a settler-colonial context. In short, we argue that criminological temporalities often exclude forms of collective destruction defined by a more complicated duration or scope. We do this through investigation of Canada's residential school system, with specific attention to a single Indian Residential School (IRS) within this system, the Assiniboia Residential School (ARS) in Winnipeg. Assiniboia was different than other residential schools in Canada because, despite playing a role in Indigenous assimilation, students experienced more freedom and less abuse than was characteristic of other schools. We argue that grappling with an institution such as Assiniboia, as part of an experience of state crime, requires that the notion of crime as a temporal event, or as the outcome of a linear criminogenic process, be challenged and opened to concepts of time that are pulsating, uneven and persistent within a broader settler-colonial mesh.

The Message of the Carillon: Bells as Instruments of Colonialism in Twentieth-Century Canada

Bells and carillon have long symbolized the harmonious community in Euro-American political discourse. In this article, I denaturalize this rhetorical position by taking into account the context of bells and carillon in interwar Canada. I do so by reading William Lyon Mackenzie King’s address at the inauguration of the Parliament Hill carillon within the broader context of Canada’s colonial “Old World” nostalgia for the carillon. I then turn to testimony from survivors of the residential school system to argue that the link between bells, harmony, and community had to be forcefully imposed by settlers to banish any potential discord.

Suicidal thoughts and attempts in First Nations communities: links to parental Indian residential school attendance across development.

The Indian residential school (IRS) system in Canada ran for over a century until the last school closed in 1996. Conditions in the IRSs resulted in generations of Indigenous children being exposed to chronic childhood adversity. The current investigation used data from the 2008-2010 First Nations Regional Health Survey to explore whether parental IRS attendance was associated with suicidal thoughts and attempts in childhood, adolescence and in adulthood among a representative sample of First Nations peoples living on-reserve across Canada. Analyses of the adult sample in Study 1 (unweighted n=7716; weighted n=186,830) revealed that having a parent who attended IRS was linked with increased risk for suicidal thoughts and attempts in adolescence and adulthood. Although females were negatively affected by having a parent who attended IRS, the link with suicidal ideation in adulthood was greater for males. Analyses of the youth sample in Study 2 (unweighted n=2883; weighted n=30,190) confirmed that parental IRS attendance was associated with an increased risk for suicidal ideation and attempts. In contrast to the adult sample, parental IRS attendance had a significantly greater relation with suicidal ideation among female youth. A significant interaction also emerged between parental IRS attendance and age in the youth sample, with the influence of parental attendance being particularly strong among youth ages 12-14, compared with those 15-17 years. These results underscore the need for culturally relevant early interventions for the large proportions of Indigenous children and youth intergenerationally affected by IRSs and other collective traumas.

A National or International Crime? Canada's Indian Residential Schools and the Genocide Convention

This essay addresses the relationship linking Canada's Indian Residential School saga with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the United Nations' Genocide Convention. It sets the Canadian experience in a broader context, investigating the treatment of marginalized peoples in national and international environments dominated by the unwritten conventions of victors' justice. From the era of the Nuremberg and Tokyo tribunals, the full weight of international law falls disproportionately on the losing side of major conflicts. Those who commit crimes against humanity on the side of triumphant power are usually put behind shields of impunity, and this propensity sets the framework for the contained domestic handling of the international crime of genocide in Canada. This justiciable genocide took place historically through the forced removal of Aboriginal children from their biological families with clear intent to terminate First Nations as distinct peoples. The Indian Residential Schools were one part of a larger complex of enforced laws and policies including the effort to enfranchise schooled Indian adults as regular Canadian citizens bereft of Aboriginal and treaty rights.

On the Call for a Residential Schools National Monument

In its final report, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada called “… upon the federal government, in collaboration with Survivors and their organizations, and other parties to the Settlement Agreement, to commission and install a publicly accessible, highly visible, Residential Schools National Monument in the city of Ottawa to honour Survivors and all the children who were lost to their families and communities.” As we reckon with this “call to action” number 81, and bear witness to recent and ongoing public repudiation of contentious monuments, it becomes apparent that the logic of such a monument must be questioned. On the surface, it would appear that a counter or therapeutic monument (for which we have models) might best suit call 81’s objectives. I argue that the 144 Indigenous-led commemoration projects funded through the Indian Residential Schools Settlement, which reflect contemporary Indigenous commemorative approaches, forms, and practices for remembering and healing from traumatic pasts and their ongoing legacies, are those most relevant to the Residential Schools National Monument project. They can inform its process, design, siting, and programming, which may enable it to resist, counter, redefine, and perhaps even decolonize the “national monument.” In this article, I both critique call 81 and seek to contribute to this possibility.

Questions of Privacy and Confidentiality after Atrocity: Collecting and Retaining Records of the Residential School System in Canada

Record collection and record preservation have direct consequences for survivors and often determine the efficacy of the production of genocide memory. Currently, there are increased restrictions that limit our access to evidence and threaten long-term preservation of records. This article will focus on the recent decision to permanently destroy Independent Assessment Process files within fifteen years. These records contain personal disclosures of serious abuses and their destruction reflects an uneasy precedent with record conservation. While institutions strive to protect the privacy and safety of survivors and respect the use of their information, there are concerns that the state, churches and organizations obscure memory through the use or misuses of records or use the terms of privacy to protect themselves. This paper will draw on examples of conflicts within access, privacy, respect, and memory that inevitably contribute or detract from efforts in reconciliation or transitional justice.

Advancing Indigenous primary health care policy in Alberta, Canada

For Indigenous people worldwide, accessing Primary Health Care (PHC) services responsive to socio-cultural realities is challenging, with institutional inequities in healthcare and jurisdictional barriers encumbering patients, providers, and decision-makers. In the Canadian province of Alberta, appropriate Indigenous health promotion, disease prevention, and primary care health services are needed, though policy reform is hindered by complex networks and competing interests between: federal/provincial funders; reserve/urban contexts; medical/allied health professional priorities; and three Treaty territories each structuring fiduciary responsibilities of the Canadian government.In 2015, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of Canada released a final report from over six years spent considering impacts of the country's history of Indian residential schools, which for more than a century forcibly removed thousands of children from their families and communities. The TRC directed 94 calls to action to all levels of society, including health systems, to address an historical legacy of cultural assimilationism against Indigenous peoples. To address TRC calls that Indigenous health disparities be recognized as resulting from previous government policies, and to integrate Indigenous leadership and perspectives into health systems, PHC decision-makers, practitioners, and scholars in the province of Alberta brought together stakeholders from across Canada. The gathering detailed here explored Indigenous PHC models from other Canadian provinces to collaboratively build relationships for policy reform and identify opportunities for PHC innovations within Alberta.

“I Didn't Get to Say Good‐Bye… Didn't Get to Pet My Dogs or Nothing”: Bioecological Theory and the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada

AbstractFor more than 100 years, Canada systematically attempted to assimilate Indigenous families, in part by separating children from their families and forcing them to attend residential schools. Non‐Indigenous Canadians are just now learning about the history of Canada's residential schools. Social scientists in Canada and elsewhere, including the United States (residential or boarding schools were not unique to Canada), are studying the impact of residential schools on adult survivors and their children, in particular by focusing on the intergenerational transmission of historical trauma. I propose a contextual model for family scholars to use in studying the long‐term and intergenerational effects of the residential schools: Urie Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory with its emphasis on process–person–context–time. Although comprehensive contextual theories run the risk of limited precision, I conclude that Bronfenbrenner's theory does justice to a broad understanding of the residential schools and their intergenerational legacy, with important implications for future research.

Settler colonial archives: some Canadian contexts

ABSTRACTArchives became a central part of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) into Indian residential schools over its 7-year course. The Commission’s mandate included the creation of a National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation: a permanent archive of residential school history as well as a place to house records of the Commission’s work. The TRC’s final Calls to Action also recommended reform to archival institutions in Canada. This paper focuses on the central role that archives played during the TRC and what these realities might offer for considering methodologies and settler colonial archives more generally. It begins with a detailed description of the TRC’s archival layers and then zooms out to larger considerations of state archives and settler colonialism. The paper then considers the settler colonial language and metaphors often used in archival research and then offers several ‘archive stories’ or field notes, from the author’s larger research. It concludes with new directions in understanding archives.

Uncomfortable Comparisons: The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission in International Context

The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Indian Residential Schools is a novel foray into a genre previously associated with so-called “transitional” democracies from the post-Communist world and the global South. This basic fact notwithstanding, a systematic comparison with the broader universe of truth commission-hosting countries reveals that the circumstances surrounding the Canadian TRC are not entirely novel. This article develops this argument by distilling from the transitional justice literature several bases of comparison designed to explain how a truth commission’s capacity to promote new cultures of justice and accountability in the wake of massive violations of human rights is affected by the socio-political context in which the commission occurs; the injustices it is asked to investigate; and the nature of its mandate. It concludes that these factors, compounded by considerations unique to the Canadian context, all militate against success. If Canadian citizens and policymakers fail to meet this profound ethical challenge, they will find themselves occupying the transition-wrecking role played more familiarly by the recalcitrant and unreformed military and security forces in the world’s more evidently authoritarian states.

The Ethics of Reconciling: Learning from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission

In 2008, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) was initiated to address the historical and contemporary injustices and impacts of Indian Residential Schools. Of the many goals of the TRC, I focus on reconciliation and how the TRC aims to promote this through public education and engagement. To explore this, I consider two questions: Ethical queries arise which speak to broader concerns about the TRC’s capability to fulfill its public education goals. I raise several concerns about whether the TRC’s plan to convoke the collective will result in over-simplifying the process by relying on blunt, poorly defined identity categories that erase the heterogeneity of those residing in Canada, as well as the complexity of the conflict among us. I attempt to situate myself in-between proclamations of “success” or “failure” of the TRC, to better understand what can be learned from contested truths and experiences of uncertainty.

Map of the Land, Map of the Stars

Before the highways, Yukon peoples freely travelled the rivers and trails, guided by the stars and their knowledge of the land. The play is about searching for our stories, gathering them, honouring them. It celebrates people’s deep connections between the land and the sky, which go back thousands of years for Yukon First Nations—the Indigenous people who lived here first. This play happens in many times and places. The audience time-travels back and forth with the seven performers to hear stories, songs, and dances from different times and people. This play explores how major events disrupted people’s way of life on the land. The Klondike Gold Rush was one. Thousands of stampeders came to the Yukon hoping to get rich. The building of the Alaska Highway during World War II brought more incredible changes to Yukon people. It also was very hard for the American soldiers who had to build it, many of them young African-American men. Some stories are about the colonization of Indigenous people: “the process where one group imposes its values and cultural beliefs on another group over time.” The laws, religions, and residential school system’s painful effects on families are part of these stories. The play also looks at how people come together in positive ways. Many fall in love with this land, and people already living here, and start new lives together. With this play, we’re trying to search for a good trail forward together, with reconciliation and harmony, for all of us.

‘Two Young Ladies in Connection with a Certain School:’ The Watson-Ketcheson Affair of 1952–53 and the Remains of Eugene R. Fairweather

AbstractTwo young teachers posted at an Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, Canada, sought to act as whistleblowers regarding abuse there in 1952–53. Theologian Eugene R. Fairweather of Trinity College, Toronto, acted as their advocate and spiritual advisor. A significant correspondence, mostly purged from the official record, considered the reports of the whistleblowers, their fate, and the fraught place of the Residential Schools in Canadian Anglicanism in the decades before the era of Truth and Reconciliation. This article examines the relevant correspondence, retained only in the archival remains of Fairweather at Trinity. The correspondence, which adds to existing narratives of Anglican complicity in and responses to abuse at the Schools, suggests that future research must scrutinize official as well as previously overlooked sources of information, particularly the archival repositories of universities and theological schools, in search of the truth.