Indian Residential Schools Research Articles

Familial Attendance at Indian Residential School and Subsequent Involvement in the Child Welfare System Among Indigenous Adults Born During the Sixties Scoop Era

The health and wellness of Indigenous peoples continue to be impacted by the harmful colonization practices enforced by the Government of Canada. While the long-term health impacts of the Indian Residential School (IRS) system are documented, empirical evidence elucidating the relationship between the IRSs and the risk of offspring experiencing other collective childhood traumas, such as the Sixties Scoop (1950-1990) and the inequities within the child welfare system (CWS), is needed. Through an online study, we explored the links between familial (parents/grandparents) IRS attendance and subsequent involvement in the CWS in a non-representative sample of Indigenous adults in Canada born during the Sixties Scoop era. The final sample comprised 433 adults who self-identified as Status First Nation (52.2%), non-Status First Nation (23.6%), and Métis (24.2%). The study found that adults with a parent who attended IRS were more likely to have spent time in foster care or in a group home during the Sixties Scoop era. They were also more likely to have grown up in a household in which someone used alcohol or other drugs, had a mental illness or a previous suicide attempt, had spent time in prison, had lower mean levels of general household stability, and tended to have lower household economic stability. Moreover, the relationship between parental IRS attendance and foster care was explained, in part (i.e., mediated) by a higher childhood household adversity score. These findings highlight that the intergenerational cycles of household risk introduced by the IRS system contribute to the cycles of childhood adversity and increased risk of spending time within the CWS in Canada. This is the first study among Indigenous adults from across Canada to demonstrate quantitatively that being affected by the CWS during the Sixties Scoop era is linked to intergenerational cycles of risk associated with the IRS system.

The Sleeping Giant Awakens: Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation by David B. MacDonald

The Sleeping Giant Awakens:Genocide, Indian Residential Schools, and the Challenge of Conciliation by David B. MacDonald. Un article de la revue Ontario History (Volume 112, numéro 1, spring 2020, p. 1-131) diffusée par la plateforme Érudit.

Review: The Sleeping Giant Awakens: genocide, Indian residential schools, and the challenge of conciliation by David B. Macdonald

Review: <i>The Sleeping Giant Awakens: genocide, Indian residential schools, and the challenge of conciliation</i> by David B. Macdonald

Connecting Myself to Indian Residential Schools and the Sixties Scoop

This is a joint work between my Mom and I. It begins with a story passed down to my Mom about my grandfather’s experience at an Indian Residential School. My Mom asks me questions about the story and I respond, learning more as we talk. We ended up writing back and forth to one another over a few days to complete this. I found it very emotional and hard to talk about. We share this story fully acknowledging it is only one story, and it is shared with the intent for learning. I have heard many people say Residential Schools happened a long time ago. My mom started to share this story several years ago with primarily non-Indigenous social work students to demonstrate how Residential School and the Sixties Scoop impacted the five generations she speaks of in the story. My brother’s first day of school became a much bigger moment for her and my Mushum. We share this story with deep respect for all the families who were impacted by Residential Schools and the Sixties Scoop. We stand with you and support all of your voices and recognize many of you have lost far more than we have. For all our non-Indigenous family and friends, we share this with respect for you as well, and to foster better understanding and as a step towards reconciliation. This is our truth.

The Banker and the Blackfoot: An Untold Story of Friendship, Trust, and Broken Promises in the Old West by Edward Chamberlin

Reviewed by: The Banker and the Blackfoot: An Untold Story of Friendship, Trust, and Broken Promises in the Old West by Edward Chamberlin David M. Craig The Banker and the Blackfoot: An Untold Story of Friendship, Trust, and Broken Promises in the Old West. By J. Edward Chamberlin. Katonah, NY: BlueBridge; Pierre: South Dakota Historical Society Press, 2018. 233 pp. Illustrations, sources and endnotes, index. $24.95, cloth. J. Edward Chamberlin, professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at the University of Toronto, recounts the friendship between Jack Cowdry and Crop Eared Wolf in order to tell the story of Fort Macleod, Alberta, and the High Plains borderlands between 1885 and 1905. The friendship at the heart of this study began one spring day in 1885 on the town's main street with their conversation about horses and what brought Cowdry to Blackfoot territory. Cowdry had come to Fort Macleod with hopes, but no specific plans. [End Page 334] Inspired by a rancher friend's stories about his 300-mile journey to Helena, Montana, to go to a bank, Cowdry started Fort Macleod's first bank and thus became important to the region's prosperity. Crop Eared Wolf, who would become chief of the Blood tribe, had come to town from the nearby Blood Reserve, one of three reserves resulting from the 1877 Treaty Seven between the tribes of the Blackfoot Confederacy and the Canadian government. For Cowdry, who became a much-respected mayor, the territory and town were the common homeland for the Blackfoot and the settlers during the critical years when openrange cattle ranching had replaced the buffalo. Chamberlain, who is Cowdry's grandson, argues that the settlers and the Blackfoot could have realized the spirit of Treaty Seven as they tried to fashion a commonwealth, but their efforts were undone by Ottawa's broken promises. Chamberlin, formerly a senior research associate with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, skillfully interweaves the history and customs of the Blackfoot, especially of the Sun Dance, as the tapestry against which Cowdry and Crop Eared Wolf's friendship emerges. He includes chapters on Treaty Seven, the North-West Rebellion of the Métis, and the residential school system, which was so destructive to the First Nations' culture. The quirt (riding whip) that Crop Eared Wolf gave Cowdry embodied their friendship, its Blackfoot iconography recording the warrior's tribal heritage and his own horseraiding exploits. The quirt became for Cowdry a promise whose terms were never explained, but when understood and kept could "redeem" the future. In explicating the quirt and its gift as stories, Chamberlin personalizes the thesis of his praised book, If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. Chamberlin's affectionate account of Cowdry and his friendship with Crop Eared Wolf is limited by its sources—family stories and reminiscences. While he can describe climbing into his grandfather's lap to hear these stories, he does not have the necessary resources to illuminate his heroes' inner lives. Instead Chamberlin invokes Owen Wister's The Virginian, whose protagonist is based upon an Alberta cowboy whom Jack Cowdry knew, to depict his grandfather's values and motivations, thereby romanticizing a crucial element of this account of the Old West. David M. Craig Department of English, Philosophy, and Modern Languages Montana State University Billings Copyright © 2021 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

Unghosting Bones: Resistant Play(s) versus the Legacy of Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Unghosting BonesResistant Play(s) versus the Legacy of Carlisle Indian Industrial School Jen Shook (bio) "Flesh can house no memory of bone. Only bone speaks memory of flesh." —Rebecca Schneider, "Archives: Performance Remains" "We talk about historical trauma… A hundred and thirty years later, this still has an impact on our youth. We're trying to make peace with those spirits and bring them home." —Russell Eagle Bear, Rosebud Sioux Historic Preservation Officer In N. Scott Momaday's The Moon in Two Windows, Luther Standing Bear, the first graduate of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, returns years later to catch a football game between Carlisle and the Army team. Moon closes as Luther and his son walk through the graves of Carlisle's cemetery, a resonant site for those who refuse to forget the genocidal legacy of the boarding school system launched at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The young boy points to distant figures of a man and a child holding hands, swinging "round and round" (Momaday 177). Though the script does not identify them, the image echoes an earlier moment when Etahdleuh, an older member of Luther's transitional generation, swings round and round with Grass, the ghost of a girl who died on the train from the reservation to the school. The joyful yet haunting, lively yet dead, Grass and Etahdleuh surface as remains from Carlisle founder Richard Pratt's assimilationist mantra, "Kill the Indian, save the man." While the Pratt who Luther sees at the football game totters with age, throughout the earlier era portrayed in most of Moon Pratt organizes his school with vigor with Etahdleuh serving as his cultural translator. Moon, in other words, travels back [End Page 159] and forth through time, stitching connections for the audience between Carlisle's graves, Pratt's commands, and the students' transcultural negotiations. Grass's death troubles Pratt's orderly plan, and what to do with her remains gestures toward another ongoing Native and US negotiation: protection and repatriation of the dead. That football game that Luther watches features another historical Carlisle alumnus, Olympian Jim Thorpe. Like the students beneath the Carlisle gravestones, Thorpe's remains also lie in Pennsylvania, but his family has been fighting for their return to his native Oklahoma for over fifty years. This legal battle plays out in a fictionalized documentary in Suzan Shown Harjo and Mary Kathryn Nagle's play, My Father's Bones. Together, The Moon in Two Windows (2006), by N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), and My Father's Bones (2013), by Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee) and Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee), resist the dismissal of anti-Native violence as a closed past event, calling to action both Native and non-Native audiences through embodied ghosts, cultural translation, empathy-modeling onstage audiences, and family/kinship interpellations. Both plays not only unghost the past in service of necessary and portable debate for present and future community health, they bring ghosts to life onstage in their activist memorializing of two specific issues: the generational loss perpetrated by the residential school system and the cultural genocide of looted human remains and sacred objects. By "unghost," I mean to make visible or acknowledge the presence of figures that have been obscured or ignored. To deal with ghost language in the landscape of Indigenous art carries a danger of reinscribing the erasure of Native peoples, the romantic obsession with their vanishment that fueled even so-called "Friends of the Indians" social movements. Yet un ghosting both attends to that erasure and amplifies the resilience, the survivability, of the peoples and cultures who remain and thrive despite centuries of genocide. While stage Indian ghosts haunted early US drama (and fiction and poetry and more) to perform an assuagement of settler guilt, the dead characters of Moon and Bones unsettle history and weave time to promote survivability.1 Unquiet memory in unburied bones circles like Grass and Etahdleuh in the Carlisle cemetery, unghosting hidden or ignored presences. Ghost characters might veer dangerously close to vanishment, the ongoing elegiac obsession [End Page 160] with "the last of the" that leads to convenient assumptions that Native peoples are extinct.2 Yet these stage ghosts must be played by actual actors, visibly...

Sekuwe (My House): building health equity through Dene First Nations housing designs

ABSTRACT The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada determined that the Dene people, among other Indigenous groups, experienced cultural genocide through policies that separated them from their lands and resources, and from their families, languages, cultures, and by forcibly sending children to Indian Residential Schools. The resultant social inequity is manifested in conditions of social injustice including inadequate housing. The Dene healthy housing research was a continuing partnership between the two Dene First Nation communities, the university and a provincial First Nation non-government organisation. This project engaged the creative energies of university students and Dene senior-high students to create and articulate Dene healthy housing so that concepts/plans/designs are ready for future funding interventions. We co-developed methods and networks to reframe housing as a social determinant of health and an important factor in social justice. This project reflects the fundamental requirement for a respectful understanding of Dene perspectives on housing and health and the need for Dene control over their built environment.

Preserving the Painful: Lessons on Agency, Preservation, and Dialogue in Acknowledging Canada's Indian Residential School Sites

For nearly 150 years, Canada's Residential School Program sought to forcibly place Indigenous youth in boarding schools that would strip them of their Indigenous cultural knowledge and assimilate them into settler society. The trauma induced by these acts of cultural violence is now being acknowledged by the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which contains Calls to Action for how these and other atrocities committed against Indigenous Peoples might be brought to light. Among these calls to action is the mandate to work with Indigenous Peoples to acknowledge the sites of the Residential School Program. However, there are few precedents for commemorating sites of trauma associated with forced social reform. Drawing on lessons from sites of state-sanctioned social reform forcibly carried out against marginalized communities at the Sean McDermott Laundry in Dublin, Ireland, and the Holy Cross Laundry in Brisbane, Bennett House in Perth, and the Kinchela Aboriginal Boys Home in Kinchela, Australia, this paper demonstrates how attention can be paid to the agency and sovereignty of Indigenous Peoples in the best cases by acknowledging the diversity of survivor experiences. These projects point to the potential for preservation processes to be used as important avenues for difficult but necessary conversations regarding reconciliation and demonstrate instances where the process fell short of the objectives the TRC sets for the preservation of the Residential School sites.

Reconciliation and Cultural Genocide: A Critique of Liberal Multicultural Strategies of Innocence

AbstractThe aim of this article is to interrogate the concept of cultural genocide. The primary context examined is the Government of Canada's recent attempt at reconciliation through the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Drawing on the work of Audra Simpson (Mohawk), Glen Sean Coulthard (Yellowknives Dene), Kyle Powys Whyte (Potawatomi), Stephanie Lumsden (Hupa), and Luana Ross (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, located at Flathead Indian Reservation in Montana), I argue that cultural genocide, like cultural rights, is depoliticized, thus limiting the political impact these concepts can invoke. Following Sylvia Wynter, I also argue that the aims of “truth and reconciliation” can sometimes serve to resituate the power of a liberal multicultural settler state, rather than seek systemic changes that would properly address the present-day implications of the residential school system. Finally, I argue that genocide and culture need to be repoliticized in order to support Indigenous futurity and sovereignty.

Towards reconciliation: 10 Calls to Action to natural scientists working in Canada

In 2015, after documenting testimonies from Indigenous survivors of the residential school system in Canada, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released 94 Calls to Action to enable reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Canadians. Without personal connections to Indigenous communities, many Canadians fail to grasp the depth of intergenerational impacts of residential schools and associated systemic racism. Consequently, reconciliation remains an elusive concept. Here we outline 10 Calls to Action to natural scientists to enable reconciliation in their work. We focus on natural scientists because a common connection to the land should tie the social license of natural scientists more closely to Indigenous communities than currently exists. We also focus on natural sciences because of the underrepresentation of Indigenous peoples in this field. We draw on existing guidelines and our experiences in northern Canada. Our 10 Calls to Action are triggered by frustration. The authors have witnessed examples where natural scientists treat Indigenous communities with blatant disrespect or with ignorance of Indigenous rights. These 10 Calls to Action challenge the scientific community to recognize that reconciliation requires a new way of conducting natural science, one that includes and respects Indigenous communities, rights, and knowledge leading to better scientific and community outcomes.

'I Lost My Talk': Indian Residential Schools, Copyright, Archives and Commissions of Inquiry

People give statements to commissions of inquiry, courts, administrative tribunals, police and other government bodies. Who owns the copyright in those statements? What practical value is there in copyright ownership in those contexts? This paper examines in detail the copyright issues relating to the statements that survivors of Indian Residential Schools gave to Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission. As related background, the paper gives a detailed review of the Supreme Court of Canada's order to destroy statements given by survivors to the Independent Assessment Process. This paper examines copyright cases from Canada, England, the United States and Australia dealing with interviews generally, statements and indigenous peoples. This paper is one of a series by the author examining the many legal issues relating to Indian Residential Schools and the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

Remembrance across Borders: A Dialogue on One Educator’s Experience of Studying Indigenous Education in Germany

This article examines remembrance as an intersecting site for Indigenous and German Studies. Attending to the practice of remembrance, it looks at learners’ relationships with different, difficult pasts as a way of teaching towards better futures. The authors—weaving together the voices of student and instructor—explore a future teacher’s intersectional experience of taking an Indigenous Education course in Canada while simultaneously teaching in an international placement in Germany. Examining her experiences of studying Canadian Indian Residential School history while also visiting Holocaust memorial sites, this educator considers complex questions of pedagogy, memory, and social change through a transdisciplinary dialogue.

Risky Times and Spaces: Settler Colonialism and Multiplying Genocide Prevention through a Virtual Indian Residential School

Risky Times and Spaces: Settler Colonialism and Multiplying Genocide Prevention through a Virtual Indian Residential School

The Problem of the Past: How Historic Wrongs became Legal Problems

Compensation for historic wrongs was once legally unthinkable. Now such claims are increasingly commonplace and count among law’s most difficult cases. This paper tells the story of how historic wrongs became legal problems and seeks to provide the foundations for a more robust understanding of redress. To date, literature on historic injustice has tended to focus on threshold questions or on the relatively novel terrain of truth commissions, acknowledgement and commemoration. The survivor’s quest for individual redress has, by contrast, garnered relatively little sustained attention even though such claims are among the most disruptive and challenging aspect of this ‘new’ problem of historic wrongs. This project aims to respond to this gap. It begins by seeking to better understand the problem, using three illustrative cases to help trace how historic wrongs came to be among law’s most vexing problems of responsibility. The UK decisions on the Mau Mau uprising highlight how claims that seek redress for historic wrongs often exhibit surprising force, capable of eroding the once-powerful procedural rules that used to protect the past from legal responsibility. Canada’s five billion dollar settlement of claims relating to the legacy of Indian residential school reminds us both of this force and of the challenges law faces when confronted by its own complicity in historic injustice. Finally the US reparations for slavery movement illuminates how, despite defeat in the courtroom, ‘reparative justice’ claims often possess a tenacious quality that makes them capable of moving powerful institutions. Tracing the role law has played in spurring the problem of the past helps to illuminate some of the key features of redress that have to date been all but ignored and provides the basis for developing more effective responses to historic wrongs.

The problem of the past: How historic wrongs became legal problems

Compensation for historic wrongs was once legally unthinkable. Now such claims are increasingly commonplace and count among law’s most difficult cases. This article tells the story of how historic wrongs became legal problems and seeks to provide the foundations for a more robust understanding of redress. To date, literature on historic injustice has tended to focus on threshold questions or on the relatively novel terrain of truth commissions, acknowledgement, and commemoration. The survivor’s quest for individual redress has, by contrast, garnered relatively little sustained attention even though such claims are among the most disruptive and challenging aspect of this ‘new’ problem of historic wrongs. This project aims to respond to that gap. It begins by seeking to better understand the problem, using three illustrative cases to help trace how historic wrongs came to be among law’s most vexing problems of responsibility. The UK decisions on the Mau Mau uprising highlight how claims that seek redress for historic wrongs often exhibit surprising force, capable of eroding the once-powerful procedural rules that used to protect the past from legal responsibility. Canada’s five-billion-dollar settlement of claims relating to the legacy of Indian residential school reminds us both of this force and of the challenges law faces when confronted by its own complicity in historic injustice. Finally, the US reparations for the slavery movement illuminates how, despite defeat in the courtroom, ‘reparative justice’ claims often possess a tenacious quality that makes them capable of moving powerful institutions. Tracing the role law has played in spurring the problem of the past helps to illuminate some of the key features of redress that have to date been all but ignored and provides the basis for developing more effective responses to historic wrongs.

Social Determinants of Health Inequities in Indigenous Canadians Through a Life Course Approach to Colonialism and the Residential School System.

Indigenous populations in Canada have experienced social, economic, and political disadvantages through colonialism. The policies implemented to assimilate Aboriginal peoples have dissolved cultural continuity and unfavorably shaped their health outcomes. As a result, indigenous Canadians face health inequities such as chronic illness, food insecurity, and mental health crises. In 2015, the Canadian government affirmed their responsibility for indigenous inequalities following a historic report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It has outlined intergenerational traumata imposed upon Aboriginals through decades of systemic discrimination in the form of the Residential School System and the Indian Act. As these policies have crossed multiple lifespans and generations, societal conceptualization of indigenous health inequities must include social determinants of health (SDOH) intersecting with the life course approach to health development to fully capture the causes of intergenerational maintenance of poor health outcomes. To provide culturally sensitive care for those who have experienced intergenerational trauma, health care providers should be aware of and understand two key SDOH inequity influencing the indigenous life course, including the residential school system and loss of socioeconomic status, over time due to colonialism.

Witnessing Painful Pasts: Understanding Images of Sports at Canadian Indian Residential Schools

AbstractImages are powerful tools for shaping perceptions of the past. In the context of sport at Canadian Indian residential schools, photographic images were consciously constructed and carefully selected and have been subsequently recirculated by contemporary media. Images of smiling, happy children at play at Canadian Indian residential schools have been used to lend credence to notions of sport as an unquestionable force for good without considering the context in which the images were created. In this paper, we explore how media, including online public repositories and newspapers, have taken up images of sport, specifically hockey, at Indian residential schools and how they evoke ideas about the nation and Indigenous–settler relations in Canada. We argue that photographs of residential school sports reinforce colonial narratives that lend ideological weight to settler colonial rule.

Seeing and feeling difficult history: A case study of how Canadian students make sense of photographs of Indian Residential Schools

ABSTRACT Students in social studies classrooms are faced with a barrage of images, many of which represent historical trauma and violence. Although photographs can be used as pedagogical tools to represent experiences of injustice and elicit deeper understanding, they also activate affective and unrelated responses in students. In this case study, I explore the responses of Canadian secondary students to a set of historical photographs found in textbooks and resources that focus on the Indian Residential Schools. Findings from the study indicate that student responses to images representing difficult knowledge are unpredictable. Students were affectively and emotionally provoked by the photographs to both accept and deny abuse, as well as make personal connections to their own experiences of schooling. These findings raise questions around the best ways to use photographs of historical injustice in classrooms, as well as the ethics of using photographs that represent the suffering of others.

KANIEN’KEHA / MOHAWK INDIGENOUS LANGUAGE REVITALISATION EFFORTS IN CANADA

This paper gives an overview of ongoing revitalisation efforts for Kanien’keha / Mohawk, one of the endangered Indigenous languages in Canada. For the Mohawk people, their language represents a significant part of the culture, identity and well-being of individuals, families, and communities. The endangerment of Kanien’keha and other Indigenous languages in Canada was greatly accelerated by the residential school system. This paper describes the challenges surrounding language revitalisation in Mohawk communities within Canada as well as progress made, specifically for the Kanien’keha / Mohawk language.

Truthful Engagement: Making the Witness Blanket, an Ongoing Process of Reconciliation

This report from the field summarizes a conversation between Carey Newman and guest editor, Catherine Etmanski, which took place on January 12, 2018. The conversation focused on Carey’s work engaging people across Canada in a project titled The Witness Blanket. The Witness Blanket is a national monument of the Indian Residential School Era made of items collected from residential schools, from churches, government buildings, and traditional structures from across Canada. In this report, Carey provides insight into the process of collecting artefacts from communities across Canada. Although not all pieces he received were aesthetically pleasing—and neither were the stories associated with them—through this process, he learned the importance of including all voices and stories. With time and reflection, he learned the power of collective truth. While making the Witness Blanket, some items challenged his creativity and tested his commitment to include something from every contributor, but he felt a responsibility to find a place for them all. He also brings focus to traditional perspectives or ways of being that helped guide him through the process of building and leading a team through the expansive community engagement process and the eventual creation of a monument, national tour, and documentary film.