Genocide by Any Other Name: North American Indian Residential Schools in Context
Ward Churchill
We must begin with the misrepresentation and transform it into what is true. That is, we must uncover the source of the misrepresentation; otherwise, hearing what is true won’t help us. The truth cannot penetrate when something is taking its place.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
‘Genocide’ is among the more profoundly misunderstood words in the English language. Most often, the term has been cast as no more than a synonym for mass murder – albeit mass murder of the most extreme sort – and considerable scholarly energy has been expended in debating the scale of killing or proportionality of its impact upon victim groups necessary for one or another slaughter to qualify as ‘truly’ genocidal rather than simply blending into history’s vast panorama of butchery. More refined – or tedious – lines of analysis have devolved upon such questions as whether certain modes or methods of killing must be present if a given ‘exterminatory phenomenon’ is to be considered ‘genuinely’ genocidal. Still others have delved into the function(s) served by mass murder in what are taken to be genocidal settings and, most ambiguously, the nature of the intentions which must guide perpetrator groups if their actions are to be construed as genocidal.
While it has been argued that such inquiries are undertaken for purposes of making our understanding of genocide more ‘rigorous,’ they have for the most part had a decisively exclusionary effect, establishing definitional and conceptual threshold criteria for what has been aptly described as the ‘incomparable crime’ so narrow that supposedly reputable researchers were asserting by the mid-1990s that the nazi-perpetrated judeocide of World War II was ‘phenomenologically unique.’ The conclusion embodied in such contentions is that ‘real’ genocide ‘has happened [only] once, to the Jews under Nazism’ (Bauer, 1978: 38). Not even the fate of the Sinti and Romani (Gypsies), simultaneously exterminated by the nazis in a proportion entirely comparable to that of the Jews – and in the same camps, by the same methods and under the same official decrees – is accorded equal footing. Similar absurdities abound.
The motives underlying imposition of such radical constraints upon the meaning of genocide have been anything but pure. On the one hand, as Edward Alexander has approvingly observed, their development has been a key element in a conscious strategy designed to invest the Jewish people with a monopoly on the sort of ‘high-grade moral capital’ attending genocidal victimization, a matter translating into certain of the political advantages enjoyed by the State of Israel (Alexander, 1994: 195). On the other hand, the result is plainly exculpatory, allowing virtually every perpetrator regime or society other than the Germans under Hitler to dodge not only the stigma of their history but other potential consequences of their crime(s). Small wonder that such a truncation and deformation of the definition of genocide has long been a practice embraced enthusiastically and all but universally by the world’s ruling elites and the ‘responsible’ intellectual establishments they sponsor. Indeed, in many quarters, it amounts to official policy.
That the policy at issue involves the ‘routine denial’ of a plethora of genocides – not least in countries such as France and Canada, where comparable denials of the nazi judeocide constitute a statutory offense – should be self-evident. The implications, as Roger Smith, Eric Markusen, and Robert Jay Lifton have pointed out in connection with the muchdenied 1915–18 Turkish genocide of Armenians, are exceedingly grim.
Where scholars [and other ostensibly reliable commentators] deny genocide, in the face of decisive evidence that it has occurred, they contribute to a false consciousness that can have the most dire reverberations. Their message is: [genocide] requires no confrontation, no reflection, but should be ignored, glossed over. In this way, scholars lend their considerable authority to the acceptance of this ultimate human crime. More than that, they encourage – indeed invite – a repetition of the crime from virtually any source in the immediate or distant future. By closing their minds to the truth, that is, scholars contribute to the deadly psychohistorical dynamic in which unopposed genocide begets new genocides. (Smith et al., 1995)
Clearly, such denial is diametrically opposed to the openness described as essential by Leo Kuper, Israel Charny, and others, who have devoted themselves to the task of conceiving ways and means of preventing the recurrence of ‘the human cancer.’ Because, as Irving Louis Horowitz has noted, ‘genocide is always and everywhere an essentially political decision,’ and since, following Huey P. Newton, politics itself must be seen as an ‘ability to define a phenomenon and cause it to act in a desired manner,’ the need to approach eradication of genocide from the vantage point of definitional viability – thence precision – is of cardinal importance (Horowitz, 1976: 39; Newton quoted in Cleaver, 1969: 10). Hence, we would do well to review the actual meaning of the term as it was set forth by Raphael Lemkin, the man who coined it in 1944 (Lemkin, 1944: 79–95). From there, it will be possible to apply Lemkin’s concept in analyzing a process that lies well beyond the parameters of what has become the norm of genocide scholarship, thereby restoring to his formulation something of its original efficacy and promise.
Form and scope of the crime
The first and most striking of aspect of Lemkin’s explanation of the neologism he created by combining ‘the ancient Greek word genos (race, tribe) and the Latin cide (killing)’ was the care he took to distinguish it from literal murder (irrespective of the scale on which the murder was committed) (Lemkin, 1944: 79). Rather, he was at pains to emphasize that he was addressing virtually any policy undertaken with the intention of bringing about the dissolution and ultimate disappearance of a targeted human group, as such.
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killing … It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of the essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups. Genocide is directed against the national group as an entity, and the actions involved are directed against individuals, not in their individual capacity, but as members of the national group. (Lemkin, 1944: 79, emphasis added)
Thus, while Lemkin acknowledged that outright physical extermination was one means by which genocide might be perpetrated, he was quite unequivocal in his insistence that it was not a necessary ingredient of the crime, far less that it was the ‘essential’ feature. What was essential in Lemkin’s conception was that extinguishing the existence of a target group be undertaken as a matter of policy. Insofar as such a process was evident, it fell within the rubric of genocide, ‘even though the individual members survived’ the process of group liquidation (Lebanese delegate to UN ad hoc committee, quoted in Davis and Zannis, 1973: 20). There is in fact every indication that Lemkin saw the physical survival of all or most members of groups subjected to genocide as being normative, their physical extermination exceptional. Consider what may be taken as the very core of his definition:
Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group; the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made on the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after the removal of the population and colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals. (Lemkin, 1944: 79)
Hence, as Zygmunt Bauman has noted, Lemkin was primarily concerned with depicting the essential ingredients of what might be termed ‘ordinary genocide,’ a process which is ‘rarely, if at all, aimed at the total annihilation of the group’ in physical terms (Bauman, 1989: 119). So decisive was the nonlethal dimension of ordinary genocide in Lemkin’s estimation that he observed how the term ‘denationalization’ might have sufficed to encompass what he meant were it not for the fact that ‘in connoting the destruction of one national pattern, it does not connote the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor’ (Lemkin, 1944: 79–80). Similarly, he observed that ‘denationalization,’ sometimes taken to connote a mere deprivation of citizenship, failed to encompass the fact that genocide, in some instances at least, involved ‘destruction of the biological structure’ of the target group (79–80). Much more than killing is at issue in this last connection. Involuntary sterilization and other measures designed to prevent births among the target group falls within the scope of ‘biological genocide’ (86–7). Not all of these are even physical in any literal sense. Lemkin held the nazi refusal to permit marriage between Poles to be genocidal, for example (86).
Such understandings from the outset informed the international legal discourse on genocide. In 1947, the Secretary-General of the newly formed United Nations, pursuant to Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) Resolution 47(IV), retained Lemkin to head up a committee of experts charged with drafting a law to define, prevent, and punish the crime of genocide (this was the so-called Secretariat’s Draft of the present Genocide Convention). Here, Lemkin offered substantial clarification of what is entailed, elaborating the nature of the protected classes involved – which he’d earlier referred to simply as ‘national’ or ‘oppressed’ groups – by listing ‘racial, national, linguistic, religious [and] political groups’ as falling under the law’s rubric (by implication, economic aggregates were included as well). Genocide itself is defined in a twofold way, encompassing all policies intended to precipitate ‘1) the destruction of [such] a group’ and ‘2) preventing its preservation and development.’ The modes through which such policy objectives might be attained are then delineated in tripartite fashion and in considerable detail.
1.Physical genocide includes both direct/immediate extermination (à la Auschwitz and the Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen operations in the USSR) and what are referred to as ‘slow death measures’: i.e. ‘subjection to conditions of life which, owing to lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene and medical care or excessive work or physical exertion are likely to result in the debilitation [and] death of individuals; mutilations and biological experiments imposed for other than curative purposes; deprivation of [the] means of livelihood by confiscation, looting, curtailment of work, and the denial of housing and of supplies otherwise available to the other inhabitants of the territory concerned’ (Davis and Zannis, 1973: 18–20; Arad et al., eds., 1989).
2.Biological genocide includes involuntary ‘sterilization, compulsory abortion, segregation of the sexes and obstacles to marriage,’ as well as any other policies intended to prevent births within a target group’ (Davis and Zannis, 1973: 20).
3.Cultural genocide – which encompasses the schema of denationalization and imposition of an alien national pattern that Lemkin had described as being the central feature of the crime in 1944 – includes all policies aimed at destroying the specific characteristics by which a target group is defined, or defines itself, thereby forcing them to become something else. Among the acts specified are the ‘forced transfer of children … forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of the group … prohibition of the use of the national language … systematic destruction of books printed in the national language, or religious works, or the prohibition of new publications … systematic destruction of national or religious monuments, or their diversion to alien uses [and] destruction or dispersion of objects of historical, artistic, or religious value and of objects used in religious worship’ (Davis and Zannis, 1973: 20).
Significantly, no hierarchy is attached to these classifications. The perpetration of cultural genocide is presented as an offense every bit as serious – and subject to exactly the same penalties – as perpetration of physical or biological genocide. This was so in part because Lemkin held that the crux of what others would later call ‘the genocidal mentality’ (Lifton and Markusen, 1988) resides squarely within the cultural domain, and because he understood that there is ultimately no way of segregating the effects of cultural genocide from its physical and biological counterparts. For Lemkin, the deliberate destruction of cultures kills individuals just as surely as do guns and poison gas, especially when combined with imposition of the sorts of slow death measures which all but invariably attend such undertakings. There is thus no way in which cultural genocide may be reasonably set apart from physical and biological genocide as a ‘lesser’ sort of crime.
Lemkin’s draft was submitted to ECOSOC in November 1947, and, in turn, the Council subjected it to review by a seven-member ad hoc committee chaired by the US representative. The revised draft convention, which was unanimously adopted by the UN General Assembly on 9 December 1948, retained just enough of Lemkin’s thinking to be (barely) workable. The second article of the 1948 Convention on Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide defines the crime as being ‘any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such,’ by:
(a)killing members of the group;
(b)causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c)deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d)imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e)forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
It is worth noting the obvious at this juncture: killing is only one of five criteria, or 20 percent of the total. The other four – 80 percent of the entire definition of genocide posited in international law – consist of or devolve upon explicitly nonlethal lines of action, although (b) and (c) overlap with Lemkin’s ‘slow death measures.’ Note, too, that not only perpetration of these acts, but attempting to commit any of them, conspiring to do so, inciting them, or any other complicity in their commission are all criminal offenses under the convention’s third article. Under Article IV, it is specified that ‘persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in Article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.’
Genocide in North America
Both the United States and Canada have dodged implementation of the Genocide Convention from the outset, albeit in somewhat different ways. In Canada, the strategy was to foster an illusion of acceptance – Parliament voted to ratify the convention on 21 May 1952 – while quietly redefining the crime in the country’s domestic enforcement statute so as to omit any mention of policies and actions in which Canada was and is engaged. Thus, the convention’s prohibitions of policies causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of a target group and/or effecting the forcible transfer of their children were from the first moment expunged from Canada’s ‘legal understanding’ (Davis and Zannis, 1973: 24). In 1985, the Canadian statute was further ‘revised’ to delete measures intended to prevent births within a target group from the list of proscribed policies and activities. In its present form, Canadian law admits only items (a) and (c) among the criteria posited under the Convention’s second article as being constitutive of the crime of genocide. At least one Canadian court, moreover, has recently entered a decree making it a criminal offense for anyone to employ the term in any other way (Daishowa Inc. v. Friends of the Lubicon, 1998; for analysis, see Churchill, 2003: 247–61).
The sheer disingenuousness embedded in this definitional distortion is abundantly reflected in the parliamentary debates leading up to the 1952 ‘ratification.’ Although the official position was that only those provisions of the genocide convention ‘intended to cover certain historical incidents in Europe that have little essential relevance in Canada’ were being excised (House of Commons, 1952: 61), it was clearly noted that then-current ‘proposals to impose integrated education upon [American] Indian children, for example, might fall within [the Convention’s] prohibition’ against forced transfer of children (Canadian Civil Liberties Association, 1952: 6). Since the government had in fact been doing far more than entertaining proposals in this regard for the better part of a century – and would continue to do so for another 30 years – its claim that ‘mass transfers of children to another group are unknown … in Canada’ can only be seen as a baldfaced lie (House of Commons, 1952: 61). In effect, the Canadian statute was knowingly crafted not as an instrument of prevention or punishment, but rather as a mask for the fact that Canada was consciously committing genocide, and had every intention of continuing to do so.
As for the US, having led the way in watering down the convention during the UN revision process, it refused even to pretend to accept the resulting instrument for forty years. When the Senate did finally vote for ratification on 19 February 1986 – the ratifying instrument was not deposited with the United Nations Secretariat until November 1988 – it did so on the basis of an attached set of reservations, referred to as the ‘Sovereignty Package,’ which purported to set the US Constitution above international law and to render the country exempt from compliance.
The record of preratification debates conducted by US senators from 1950 onward is even more illuminating than that of their Canadian counterparts. A major sticking point for two successive generations was whether the Convention’s stipulation that killing members of a target group solely on the basis of their group membership is a genocidal act, irrespective of the numbers involved. This meant that the thousands of lynchings of African Americans carried out by the Ku Klux Klan constituted genocide, and would thus require the US to declare the Klan a criminal organization in the same sense the nazi SS had been declared such at Nuremberg. Another question was whether the entire corpus of US race law and policy might not be construed as genocidal.
Less discussed, but equally or more to the point, was the relationship of the US to American Indians. Here, the country was in violation of every one of the criteria posited in the Convention’s second article. While direct killing of the sort evidenced in scalp bounties and military extermination campaigns had mostly ended by the early twentieth century, the US imposition of slow death measures upon Native North Americans was quite clear-cut in 1950, and to a considerable extent remains so today.
The policy basis for this situation rests in the unilateral extension of federal ‘trust authority’ over what remained of Indians’ lands pursuant to a 1903 Supreme Court opinion, a maneuver through which the government empowered itself to license the exploitation of indigenous resources by preferred corporations at a small fraction – usually no more than 10 per cent – of the royalty rates prevailing on the open market. Even this pittance did not go to the Indians themselves, but was placed instead in ‘trust accounts’ administered ‘in behalf of’ their native owners by the US Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). From there, some 90 per cent of it – nearly $140 billion, by current estimates – has been ‘lost’ (that is, expended for purposes other than the well-being of the Indians whose money it was and is) (see Kennedy, 2002; Brinkley, 2003).
The upshot of this has been that as the US economy bloated itself on the wealth of native people, the people themselves have been driven into the depths of a destitution resembling that prevailing in the Third World. To take but one example, it was recently estimated that nearly 90 per cent of the dwellings on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, the poorest in the country for more than fifty years, were effectively un-inhabitable. Basic sanitation and water purification facilities were all but nonexistent, as was anything resembling adequate nutrition or medical care. Such conditions are by no means atypical of reservation settings throughout the US, and the impact upon the health and longevity of native people has been predictably severe.
The Indian health level is the lowest and disease rates the highest of all major population groups in the United States. The incidence of tuberculosis is 400 percent higher than the national average. Similar statistics show that the incidence of strep infections is 1,000 percent, meningitis 2,000 percent, and dysentery 10,000 percent higher. Death rates are shocking when Indian and non-Indian populations are compared. Influenza and pneumonia are 300 percent greater killers among Indians. Diseases such as hepatitis are in epidemic proportions, with an 800 percent higher chance of death. Diabetes is almost a plague. Overall, according to official census data, reservation-based American Indians experience an average lifespan one-third shorter than the general US population, with a marginally better ratio prevailing in Canada. (Strickland, 1997: 53)
Clearer examples of the ‘deliberate infliction of conditions of life calculated to bring about [a target group’s partial] physical destruction’ and the imposition of policies ‘causing serious bodily and mental harm’ to the rest are difficult to imagine. In sum, all the hallmarks of what Lemkin described as ‘a coordinated plan of different actions aimed at destroying the essential foundations of [existence] of national groups, with the aim of [eliminating] the groups themselves,’ remain ongoing realities in both of the settler states asserting contemporary hegemony over the North American continent.1
’To kill the Indian…’
Since the end of the ‘Indian Wars’ in 1890, by which point the indigenous population of North America had been reduced to 5 per cent or less of its pre-invasion total, the weight of policy in the US and Canada alike has been placed on ‘assimilating’ – ‘digesting’ might be a better word – the residue of survivors. Described in 1910 by one of its chief practitioners, US Indian Commissioner Francis Leupp, as ‘a mighty pulverizing engine for breaking up [the last vestiges of] the tribal mass’ (Leupp, 1910: 93), the objective of assimilation policy was from the outset to eliminate all American Indians culturally recognizable as such by some point in the mid-twentieth century. That its proponents failed to completely achieve this goal, despite sustained and concerted effort, is due to a number of mediating factors, not least the depth and degree of resistance mounted by the victims themselves.
Beginning with the unilateral extension of US jurisdiction over Indian Country in 1885 – actually, the process commenced much earlier in Canada – several components have featured prominently in giving assimilation policy its shape and substance. These include a comprehensive program to abolish the traditional indigenous practice of holding land in common, imposing in its stead an Anglicized system of individual property titles which undermined the cohesiveness of native societies, laid the groundwork for expropriation of more than two-thirds of the territory remaining in Indian hands at the turn of the century, and spawned an intractable ‘heirship problem’ precluding effective use by the nominal owners of what little was left. Concomitantly, programs were adopted to supplant the traditional mode of defining group members by genealogy (kinship) with ‘blood quantum’ (racial) criteria, to prohibit traditional spiritual practices and virtually compel the adoption of Christianity, to reshape traditional modes of governance along the lines of corporate boards, to disperse the native population as widely as possible, and, mostly during the 1950s, to ‘terminate’ the existence of more than a hundred distinct ‘bands’ and ‘tribes’ (i.e. they were simply declared ‘extinct’). All of this was undertaken on the basis of a self-ordained ‘plenary’ – that is to say, unlimited and absolute – power held by federal authorities over American Indian lands and lives.
So, too, was the program that served as the linchpin of assimilationist aspirations. This was an initiative begun both north and south of the border during the 1870s, and lasting over a century, in which it was ideally intended that every single aboriginal child would be removed from his or her home, family, community, and culture at the earliest possible age and held for years in state-sponsored ‘educational’ facilities, systematically deculturated, and simultaneously indoctrinated to see her/his own heritage – and him/herself as well – in terms deemed appropriate by a society that despised both to the point of seeking as a matter of policy their utter eradication. That some native children escaped such processing had far less to do with the ambitions of those administering the system than with the fact that the US-Canadian settler states ultimately proved unwilling to allot sufficient resources to the task. Still, at its peak, the complex of Indian residential schools – ‘boarding schools,’ as they were called in the US – was large enough to accommodate about half of all Native North American children at any given moment, and something in the order of 80 per cent of several succeeding generations of native youngsters underwent some portion of their schooling therein.
The nature of the crime bound up in this coldly calculated ‘education for extinction’ was put quite bluntly by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the army officer selected by the US to create and supervise its system in 1879. The objective, Pratt publicly declaimed in 1895, was to ‘kill the Indian, save the man’ in every pupil (Pratt, 1895: 761–2). Or, to rephrase it as US Indian Commissioner William A. Jones did in 1903, the goal was to ‘exterminate the Indian but develop a man’ (quoted in Coleman, 1993: 46). The core thinking of those running the system could not have been framed more clearly: to be discernibly Indian was to be other than human; to be human, one could not be discernibly Indian. The formulation, and the mentality it reflects, is identical at base to that displayed in General Phil Sheridan’s earlier and much-celebrated observation that ‘the only good Indian is a dead one,’2 an enunciation but a step removed from Colonel John Chivington’s infamous order, issued just prior to the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864, that his troops should slaughter Indian babies right along with their parents and other adults because, after all, ‘nits make lice’ (see Hoig, 1961; Svaldi, 1989).
Canada in most respects modeled its system on that of the US. Proceeding first under the mantle of the 1857 Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes in the Province, and then under the 1884 Indian Advancement Act, the Indian Department took as its goal ‘tribal dissolution, to be pursued mainly through the corridors of residential schools’ (Milloy, 1999: 19). Pratt’s notion of killing Indians to save men was frequently voiced within the circles of those charged with ‘educating’ Indians, while Commissioner Jones’s Canadian counterpart, Duncan Campbell Scott, announced that the goal was ‘to be rid of the Indian question. That is [the] whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian problem’ (quoted in Titley, 1986: 50, emphasis added). Such endeavors, he explained at another point, were quite consistent with the fact that ‘progress’ – that is, consolidation of the Canadian state – would be unnecessarily difficult ‘so long as the Indians remain a distinct people and live as separate communities’ (quoted in Miller, 1996: 121).
Given the overtly genocidal character of such pronouncements, and the absolute centrality of the residential school system to Indian policy implementation in both the US and Canada for a sustained period, it is important to delve more deeply into the details of the system’s functioning. Only in this way, can their implications be properly understood. And only in such understanding can there be hope that some of the residential schools’ lingering effects might be redressed.
Forcing the transfer of children
There can be no question that the transfer of children upon which the residential school system depended was coercive, that it was resisted by indigenous parents and other adults – and often, to the extent they were able, by the youngsters themselves – and that physical force was used to overcome that resistance. In 1893, legislators authorized the BIA to ‘with-hold rations, clothing and other annuities from Indian parents or guardians who refuse or neglect to send and keep their children of proper school age in school’ (Statutes at Large of the United States, Vol. 27: 635). Canada followed suit with an amendment to its Indian Act in 1894 that authorized the cabinet to ‘make regulations, which shall have the force of law, for the commitment by justices or Indian agents of children of Indian blood under age of sixteen years to [an] industrial school or boarding school, there to be kept … for a period not extending beyond the time at which such children shall reach the age of eighteen years’ (An Act to Further Amend the Indian Act, c. 32, 57–8 Vict.).
In some cases, the basic elements of coercion built into such legislation were sufficient to produce compliance. Where resistance was concerted, however – or threatened to be – direct applications of force were not infrequent. A typical scene was recorded by the agent of the Mescalero Apache Reservation in 1886.
Everything in the way of persuasion and argument having failed, it became necessary to visit the [Indians’] camps with a detachment of police, and seize such children as were proper, and take them away to school, willing or unwilling. Some hurried their children off to the mountains or hid them away in camp, and the police had to chase and capture them like so many wild rabbits. This proceeding created quite an outcry. The men were sullen and muttering, the women loud in their lamentations, and the children almost out of their wits with fright. (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 49th Cong., 1st Sess., 1886: 417)
Virtually every memoir produced by a former boarding school student contains a section recounting the official use of force to compel enrollment (see, e.g., Sekaquaptewa as told to Udall, 1962: 8–12; Kaywaykla, 1970: 199–200; Kabotie, 1977: 8–10).
Although the military was not used to impound native children in Canada, the history there is otherwise quite similar. In 1893, for example, the Cree leader Star Blanket was deposed from his position as chief of his band and informed by the Indian Department that he would be reinstated only if he helped secure students for the residential schools. Officials routinely ‘withheld food rations from parents who resisted the removal of their children,’ and there are numerous accounts of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) ‘herd[ing] children onto … trains like cattle’ in the process of transporting them to institutions that ‘none of [them] wanted to go to … any more than [they] wanted to go to hell or a concentration camp’ (Fournier and Grey, 1997: 56; Johnson, 1989: 6). So pervasive was the use of force and coercion that in 1908 the recruitment methods employed by the Red Deer Industrial School in Alberta, which consisted of ‘coaxing and persuading instead of bribery and kidnapping,’ were officially highlighted as a marked exception to the rule (Milloy, 1999: 69–70).
Aside from the emotional trauma afflicting any family or community whose children are being ‘stolen from [their] embrace’ (paraphrasing Fournier and Grey, 1997), the resistance mounted by Native North Americans to the removal of their children for ‘education’ in residential facilities was usually based on a firm understanding that the process was consciously genocidal. Analyst John Milloy has observed that ‘reaction to [residential schooling] from First Nations governments across the southern part of [Canada] was resolutely negative. They recognized immediately its implications for continued tribal existence’ (Milloy, 1999: 19). As a now anonymous native leader put it as early as 1858, the purpose of the whole procedure was self-evidently to ‘break [indigenous societies] to pieces’ (quoted in Milloy, 1999: 19).
Destroying the national pattern of the oppressed group
In psychological terms, the regimen of residential schools was deliberately and relentlessly brutal. From the moment the terrified and bewildered youngsters arrived at the schools, designed as they were to function as ‘total institutions’ (Goffman in Etzioni, 1961: 313–14), a comprehensive and carefully calibrated assault on their cultural identity commenced. For boys and girls alike, this began with a thorough scrubbing and ‘disinfection’ – alcohol and kerosene were among the astringents used for the latter purpose – often accompanied by staff commentary about ‘dirty Indians.’ For boys, the next step was to undergo the humiliating experience of having their heads shorn, military-style. ‘At the heart of the policy was the belief that the [boys’] long hair was symbolic of savagism; removing it was central’ to destroying their sense of themselves as Indians (Adams, 1995: 101).
The same was true of the children’s clothing and other personal items, all of which were taken from them. In exchange, they were issued uniforms expressly intended to separate them from the ‘excessive individualism’ of their own traditions by reducing them ‘to sameness, to regularity, to order’ (Milloy, 1999: 124). Then came their names. Those with ‘savage’ or ‘unpronounceable’ identifiers like Chesegesbega or Sitahpetale, which included the great majority of new arrivals, quickly found themselves saddled with Anglicized replacements like ‘Smith’ and ‘Miller.’ A consistent theme running through autobiographical material written by former students is how this procedure in particular engendered an abiding sense that they had ‘lost’ themselves and were thus ‘stranger[s] with no possibilities’ for the future.
Such despair was perfectly in keeping with the desires of those in charge, in that it rendered the already malleable children still more so. The schools operated under the mandate of effecting a ‘complete change’ in their charges (Inspector of Indian Schools J.A. Macrae in 1886, quoted in Milloy, 1999: 38), a matter described in Canada – under the premise that ‘true civilization must be based on moral law, which Christian religion alone can give’ – as the ‘building and developing character on the foundation of Christian morality, making Christian faith and love the wellspring and motive of conduct’ (Convention of the Catholic Principals of Indian Residential Schools, 1924, quoted in Milloy, 1999: 38; Presbyterian Women’s Missionary Society, quoted in Coleman, 1993: 42). In the US, more secular objectives were additionally set forth.
It is of prime importance that a fervent patriotism be awakened in [the children’s] minds…. They should be taught to look upon America as their home and the United States government as their friend and benefactor. They should be made familiar with the lives of great and good men and women in American history, and be taught to feel pride in all their great achievements. They should hear little or nothing of the ‘wrongs [done] the Indians,’ and of the injustice of the white race. If their unhappy history is alluded to it should be to contrast it with the better future that is within their grasp. (Indian Commissioner Thomas
All of this was calculated to take considerable time, even under optimal conditions. Hence, from the outset, it was standard practice that the students be kept in the schools year-round and for as long as a decade, with neither visits to their homes nor visits from their families – even letters were sometimes withheld – because of the ‘deleterious … influences’ such interaction might exert (Superintendent General for Indian Affairs Edgar Dewdney in 1891, quoted in Department of Indian Affairs, 1889: xi). As early as 1863, US Indian Commissioner William P. Dole complained that any other course led to repeated ‘infection’ of the youngsters with ‘the filthy habits and loose morals of their parents’ (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess., 1863: 172). By 1888, the message was being framed even more bluntly: ‘Children leaving even the best of training schools for their homes [are] like swine return[ing] to their wallowing filth, and barbarism’ (‘Report of the School at Lawrence, Kansas,’ attached to Annual Report of Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 37th Cong., 3rd Sess., 1863: 172).
With the youngsters thus isolated, and otherwise stripped of the most immediate links to their cultural identity, a deeper and more comprehensive demolition was undertaken. This devolved upon absolute prohibitions on the speaking of indigenous languages and the knowledge and practice of native spirituality. Although instruction was already delivered exclusively in that language, the BIA promulgated a regulation in 1890 requiring that ‘pupils be compelled to converse with each other in English, and should be properly rebuked or punished for persistent violation of this rule’ (cited in Adams, 1995: 140). Canada, which followed suit in 1896, was even more explicit, positing not only the inculcation of English and/or French but destruction of students’ ability to speak their own languages as goals. Almost universally, ‘school staff in addition to their other responsibilities were assigned the duty of preventing pupils from “using their own languages”,’ even in private conversations or prayer (Milloy, 1999: 39). Doing so, of course, meant that the children had to be placed under virtually continuous surveillance. The resulting stew of fear, loneliness and obliterated self-esteem, sustained for most students over periods of years, was quite literally devastating to all who underwent it.
Imposing the national pattern of the oppressor
The resemblance of residential schools to military facilities extended far beyond haircuts and uniforms. Captain Pratt’s prototypical Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which opened its doors in November 1879 and in many respects served as the template for what followed, was actually established in an unused army barracks in Pennsylvania, as were a number of others. Although less conspicuous there, the situation in Canada was similar. ‘Dormitories’ were typically built along the lines of barracks bays, and children were regimented in military fashion. As every newcomer quickly discovered, ‘nearly every aspect of his [or her] daily existence – eating, sleeping, working, learning, praying – would be rigidly scheduled, the hours of the day intermittently punctuated by a seemingly endless number of bugles and bells demanding this or that response’ (Adams, 1995: 117).
Pratt and his superiors sought to justify their imposition of a ‘Prussian’ regime with glowing descriptions of the ‘health benefits, ability to concentrate, and self-confidence’ supposedly imparted thereby (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 55th Cong., 2nd Sess., 1898: 541). More candid – or honest – observers extolled the ‘virtues’ of ‘patriotism’ and ‘obedience’ being systematically hammered into previously ‘wild’ youngsters (see, e.g., Grinstead, 1914: 153). As might be expected, these mindsets structured the roughly two hours per day devoted in most schools to ‘academic’ instruction. Here, first emphasis was on the ‘Three Rs’ – reading, ’riting and ’rithmetic – with the goal of bringing all students up to the rudimentary levels of proficiency necessary to allow them to meet the needs of potential employers in the ‘real world.’ As the children progressed, increasing weight was placed on what were called the ‘lessons of citizenship’ or ‘civilization.’ The children came to identify far more with the mythic legions of noble white men populating their textbooks and classroom lectures than they did with the grotesquely distorted caricatures of their own ancestors and traditions presented therein.
The second half of the instructional day was explicitly devoted to the proselytizing of Christianity. Implanting the ‘true faith’ was integral to the overseers’ mandate to ‘impose the national pattern’ they represented (indeed, the churches had established Indian residential schools as part of their missionary programs long before governments of either the US or Canada set out to do so). In both countries – partly to acquire the benefit of their experience, partly as a cost-constraining expedient – these pre-existing institutions and their staffs/faculties were simply incorporated, usually on a contract basis, into the official system, with the result that the churches were in this sense made responsible for the fulfillment of official policy. Conversely, church representatives were positioned to exert decisive influence in the formation of educational policy as it pertained to Indians.
In Canada, ‘the residential school system was a creature of the federal government even though the children in the schools were, in most cases, in the care of the churches’ (Milloy, 1999: xiii), while in the US, the reverse may ultimately have been the case. ‘Even as the government edged the mission societies to the margin’ in the US, however, ‘its teachers also sought to imbue pupils with some form of Christianity. For most secular as well as missionary educators, “civilization” was inconceivable unless grounded in Christian … values’ (Coleman, 1993: 115). Consequently, and regardless of whether church or state was ascendant in operating the schools at any given moment or location, the result was the same. Even as they underwent a harsh and thoroughgoing process of deculturation (or ‘denationalization’), the children were systematically ‘re-enculturated’ to function in psychointellectual terms as ‘little white people.’ Given the virulently racialist constructions of role and place by which the US and Canadian settler societies were and are defined, of course, ‘white’ was and is something an American Indian child could never become.
The ‘slow death measure’ of starvation
In the boarding schools, ‘hunger was a continual and symptomatic problem.’ A 1944 report submitted to Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs by Dr. A.B. Simes, medical superintendent of the Qu’Appelle Indian Hospital, concluded that ‘28% of the girls and 69% of the boys [were] underweight’ in the nearby Elkhorn School (Manitoba) (Simes, 1944). The same or worse was true of virtually every Indian residential facility in the country. The reason is not hard to find. Having forced thousands of native youngsters into the schools, the government was willing to spend almost nothing to feed them: the department’s per capita allocation for Indian residential school support – all support, that is, not just food – at the time of Simes’s report was 49 cents per day (and in many schools, only a fraction of that meager sum was actually being spent on students) (Milloy, 1999: 118, 332 n101).
It has since been argued that, given its overall economic situation during most of the period in question, this was ‘the best Canada could do.’ At the time, however, even Indian Department officials acknowledged that the rates applied to supporting native residential students were ‘exceptionally low’ (quoted in Milloy, 1999: 103). The truth of this admission is revealed in a comparison of annual allocations made to sustain white children in residential facilities in 1938, the year the all-time high rate of $180 was applied to Indians. A per-capita rate of $550 was allotted to the Manitoba School for Boys, to name one example, while the provincial School for the Deaf received a governmental subsidy of $642 per student (about threeand-a-half times the rate paid to support a native child). Church-sponsored facilities serving white children also did far better than those to which Indian youngsters were consigned: St. Norbert’s Orphanage in Winnipeg received $294 per student, St Joseph’s $320 (R.A. Hoey to Dir. of Indian Affairs H. McGill, 4 November 1938).
In the US, things were even worse. Although the Child Welfare League of America reported that the average expenditure per white child in a residential institution ranged from $313 to $541 annually, the 1928 Meriam Report concluded that as little as 9 cents per day ($32.85 per year) was being expended on the feeding of a native child in a government boarding school (Meriam, 1928: 12, 327–31, 348–50). Even assuming that triple this amount was involved by the time a child’s clothing, medical care and the like were added in – a wildly optimistic expectation, under the circumstances – the annual per capita expenditure on a native youngster was still less than $100, or about one-quarter the amount expended on the average white child in a residential facility (Wilbur and DuPuy, 1931: 126). In 1929, moreover, Representative Louis C. Cramton, chair of the House Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Department of Interior, argued vociferously – and unopposed by Indian Commissioner Charles Burke – that even this meager sum was ‘extravagant’ (quoted in Szasz, 1999: 19).
The results of such governmental ‘frugality’ were as grim as they were predictable. As Dr Simes discovered at the Elkhorn School, ‘there was not enough milk, no potatoes or other vegetables on stock, and … the children never received eggs’ (quoted in Milloy, 1999: 115). If anything, Simes’s findings understated the case. But Indian Affairs Director Duncan Campbell Scott dismissed claims about such dire conditions as ‘exaggerations,’ even ‘libels,’ claiming in the face of all evidence that ‘ninety-nine per cent of the Indian children at these schools are too fat’ (D.C. Scott to F. Mears, 11 January 1924). Hence, no departmental action was taken. Year after year, school by school, the situation remained the same.
The quality of such food as the children received was also a serious issue. Accounts of bug-ridden and spoiled foodstuffs abound, as when most of the students at Shubenacadie became violently ill after being served liver so tainted that it had taken on a greenish cast. The children’s inability to stomach such fare sometimes had dire consequences. A young girl at Shubenacadie who, ‘unable to swallow some soggy bread,’ vomited in her plate, found her face pushed into the mess by a nun supervising the dining room and was forced to eat what she’d regurgitated (Millward, 1992: 11). Nor was this the only report of such methods being used to prevent ‘food wastage.’
The number of American Indian children who actually died of starvation during their time in the residential schools is unknown. Probably, from that cause alone, it was not many. However, the ‘link between poor diets and poor health’ was well known to officials in both the US and Canada from a point long before either had imposed its residential education system upon native children. The implications tend to speak for themselves, not only in view of the staggering disease-driven mortality rates within the schools (discussed in the next section), but also with respect to the sharply reduced life expectancy afflicting survivors from start to finish. It is also worth noting that the effects of chronic malnutrition would unquestionably have been far worse had the children in most schools not devised ways of supplementing their diets by foraging and/or ‘stealing’ from institutional larders.
‘Indirect killing’ by disease
Since at least as early as 1763, when Lord Jeffrey Amherst ordered smallpox-infected blankets to be distributed to the Ottawas as a means of ‘extirpat[ing] this execrable race,’ the spread of disease has been a conscious part of the Euroamerican/Eurocanadian approach to facilitate the ‘vanishing’ of Native North America (see, e.g., Stearn and Stearn, 1945: 44–50). Probably not the first time, and certainly not the last, that epidemics were deliberately unleashed, Amherst’s gambit serves as an especially crystalline example of a larger whole. Most often, the methods employed were less direct, as when the US Army interned the entire Navajo population at the Bosque Redondo for four years (1864–68) under conditions that left half their number dead of malnutrition, exposure and, above all, disease. The residential schools must take their unfortunate place in this latter category.
Mortality rates in the schools were appalling from the outset. While comprehensive data for the US are sketchy – partly because of a policy of sending terminally ill children home to die, their deaths thus lumped in with reservation statistics – no less an authority than Duncan Campbell Scott observed that, in Canada, ‘fifty percent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education they received therein’ (Scott, 1913: 615). To place this startling proportion in proper perspective, it should be borne in mind that the death rate at the infamous nazi concentration camp of Dachau was 36 per cent, mostly from disease. At Buchenwald, another notorious example, the rate was 19 per cent. At Mauthausen, described by historian Michael Burleigh as exhibiting ‘the harshest regime of all the concentration camps,’ the death rate was 58 per cent (again, mostly from malnutrition and attendant disease) (Burleigh, 1997: 211). What is known of the US experience suggests that conditions and outcomes there were, at best, only marginally better than those pertaining under Scott’s regime in the north.
The vast majority of fatalities among youngsters in the schools were caused by the rampant spread of contagious diseases, primarily tuberculosis (although influenza had its moments as a major killer, and smallpox made an occasional appearance). At the Crow Creek School (South Dakota), for instance, it was reported in 1897 that nearly all the children there ‘seem[ed] to be tainted with scrofula and consumption’ (quoted in Adams, 1995: 130). Overall, a 1908 study undertaken by the Smithsonian Institution concluded that by that year only one in every five students was likely to be ‘entirely free’ of tubercular symptoms (Hrdlicka, 1909: esp. 25, 32; Murphy, 1911: esp. 106–7).
Beginning in 1882, when the tuberculosis bacillus was first conclusively identified, a medical consensus rapidly formed holding that among the best defenses against the disease were ‘strict hygiene, a nutritious diet … and well-ventilated living quarters’ (Adams, 1995: 130). Conditions in US boarding schools went in exactly the opposite direction, a circumstance greatly compounded by a gross underfunding of medical services (Szasz, 1999: 19). So blatant was the cause-and-effect relationship that, by 1899, even a BIA inspector, William McConnell, was openly denouncing the whole residential education system as embodying a policy of deliberate slaughter.
The word ‘murder’ is a terrible word, but we are little less than murderers if we follow the course we are now following after the attention of those in charge has been called to its fatal results. Hundreds of boys and girls are sent home to die so that a sickly sentiment may be patronized and that institutions where brass bands, foot and base ball are the principal advertisements may be maintained. (quoted in Putney, 1980: 10–11)
‘Those in charge,’ repeatedly – although seldom so bluntly – informed of the silent holocaust occurring as a result of their methods and priorities, not only ignored it but, whenever possible, actively suppressed relevant information. More damning still is the pattern of promotion prevailing in the BIA throughout the entire period, a process which saw some of the most egregious offenders elevated to higher and broader realms of responsibility. On balance, then, there can be no reasonable dispute of the fact that responsible US officials knew exactly what they were doing when, during the half-century lasting from 1880 to 1930, they continued to feed other people’s children like fodder into the maw of their residential facilities as fast as or faster than beds were vacated by dead or dying youngsters. Nor did the vaunted reforms marking America’s ‘New Deal’ of the 1930s mean an abandonment of the system. In 1941, forty-nine schools were still operating, some 14,000 native youngsters were still consigned to them, and conditions, although noticeably improved, still produced rates of death by disease markedly higher than the norm (for statistics, see Szasz, 1999: 60; for health data, see, e.g., Wood, 1980: esp. 179–80). So it would remain, to one extent or another, until 1990, when the Phoenix Indian School finally closed its doors.
In Canada, where things have been rather better documented – albeit far from adequately – the full horror comes into clearer focus. This is in substantial part due to a study of fifteen residential schools undertaken in 1907 by Dr. P.H. Bryce, chief medical officer of the Indian Department. The Bryce Report, as it is usually called, revealed that of the 1,537 children who had attended the sample group of facilities since they’d opened – a period of ten years, on average – 42 per cent had died of ‘consumption or tuberculosis,’ either at the schools or shortly after being discharged. Extrapolating, Bryce’s data indicated that of the 3,755 native children then under the ‘care’ of Canada’s residential schools, 1,614 could be expected to have died a miserable death by the end of 1910 (Bryce, 1907: 17–20). In a follow-up survey conducted in 1909, Bryce collected additional information, all of it corroborating his initial report. At the Qu’Appelle School, the principal, a Father Hugonard, informed Bryce that his facility’s record was ‘something to be proud of’ since ‘only’ 153 of the 795 youngsters who’d attended it between 1884 and 1905 had died in school or within two years of leaving it (Milloy, 1999: 92).
The reasons were neither hard to find, nor constrained to glaring dietary deficiencies. Press reports in the first decade of the twentieth century spoke of ‘Indian boys and girls dying like flies’ because of an ‘absolute inattention to the bare necessities of [their] health’ in ‘schools that aid [the] white plague,’ and noted how ‘even war seldom shows as large a percentage of fatalities as does the education system imposed on our Indian wards.’4
The response of those in charge was to do nothing. Or, more accurately, they did nothing constructive. As in the US, they did continue to facilitate a steady increase in the number of native children lodged in the schools. Beyond that, their main effort appears to have been aimed at discrediting Bryce as a ‘medical faddist’ who had brought the system into ‘undeserved disrepute’ (S. Swinford, 4 December 1907). One ranking bureaucrat actually went on record describing the ‘jolly, healthy children fairly bubbling over with vitality’ supposedly inhabiting Manitoba’s boarding schools (Manitoba Indian Commissioner David Laird, quoted in Milloy, 1999: 92). By 1914, the author of the Bryce Report had been pushed out of the Indian Service altogether, forced to watch from the sidelines in mounting rage and frustration as the business of ‘educating’ Indians went on as usual.
By 1922, Bryce had had enough, publishing a searing tract entitled The Story of a National Crime in which the mechanics of death in the schools were laid bare and responsibility placed squarely on Duncan Campbell Scott’s conscious and undeviating blend of ‘thrift’ with ever greater numbers of compulsory enrollments (Bryce, 1922). Among other things revealed was that in several of the schools upon which Bryce had reported in 1907, conditions had grown demonstrably worse over the intervening decade and a half. At most residential schools, ‘apparently robust children weakened shortly after admission,’ and ‘eventually became so sick’ they had to be confined to sick bays where ‘the dead, the dying, the sick and convalescent, were all [lumped] together in the same room’ in order to hold down the cost of their ‘care’ (memo from W. Ditchburn, 12 October 1920; Rev. J. Woodsworth to Sec., 25 November 1918). Sometimes they were then ‘buried two [or more] in a grave’ to reduce the expense entailed in disposing of their corpses. Topping things off, Scott had ordered that departmental medical services be cut back in 1918 – the position of medical inspector was eliminated altogether – ‘for reasons of economy’ (Rev. J. Woodsworth to Sec., 25 November 1918).
The Indian Department mounted a vituperative defense of its policies and practices for public consumption. But privately, Scott himself conceded the substance of Bryce’s charges. Writing behind a shroud of presumed confidentiality in a 1918 report to Superintendent General Arthur Meighan, he readily admitted that the buildings to which his minions were sending more and more native children were already seriously overcrowded and otherwise ‘inadequate,’ and that the resultant ‘unsanitary [conditions therein] were undoubtedly chargeable with a very high death rate among pupils’ (D.C. Scott to A. Meighan, January 1918). Thus informed, Meighan took no more corrective action than had his predecessors. Indeed, it would be another sixteen years before moneys were set aside to establish the first tuberculosis sanatorium for the ravaged youngsters, and even then no special funds were designated to improve conditions in the schools themselves. That would have to wait until ‘comprehensive reforms’ were finally undertaken in 1957. As late as 1969, reports on a number of schools revealed conditions were not especially different from those recorded by Bryce and others at the beginning of the century. So it would remain until the last of Canada’s Indian residential facilities was closed in 1984.
Viewed in the whole, and especially in light of Scott’s sharing of critical information with Arthur Meighan and other such highly placed officials, there can be no real question of the onus of blame resting upon the Indian Department alone. If it was not literally a policy consensus in Canada that residential schooling should be used as a handy medium through which to physically liquidate an appreciable segment of the country’s aboriginal population, then their mass death was undeniably treated as an ‘acceptable’ by-product of the government’s broader drive to annihilate them culturally. To refocus analyst John Milloy’s apt assessment of the priorities displayed by the principal of Old Sun’s School in 1922, Canadian officials as a group were plainly ‘determined that, with slates and chalk in hand, the children would die on the road to civilization’ (Milloy, 1999: 99).
As to Canada’s ‘general public,’ leaving aside the transient and largely pro forma expressions of outraged ‘concern’ attending release first of the Bryce Report, and later of The Story of a National Crime – manifestations which in themselves prove that average settlers knew, or had reason to know, what was being done ‘in their name’ – ‘the deaths, and the condition of the schools pricked no collective conscience, wrought no revolution,’ nor even sustained pressure for a reformulation of policy. As in the US, the fate of native people, children included, was simply not discussed within the polite circles of Good Canadians. Instead, such issues, like those contemporaneously pertaining to Jews and other ‘undesirables’ in Germany, were swept, quietly and conveniently, ‘into the darker reaches of the national consciousness’ (Milloy, 1999: 102). A better illustration of ‘the genocidal mentality’ at work is impossible to conceive.
The ‘slow death measure’ of forced labor
Amplifying the debilitating effects of continuous anxiety and stress, malnutrition, and the near-total absence of basic sanitation in the fostering of rampant disease among residential school students was the substantial work regimen imposed in most such institutions. A number of facilities were from the outset explicitly designated as ‘industrial schools’ – Pratt’s prototype at Carlisle is a classic example; there were 25 such entities in the US and 22 in Canada by 1907 (Szasz, 1999: 10; Milloy, 1999: 55) – but those never endowed with that telltale descriptor ultimately functioned in much the same way. Overall, the situation in the US was such that in 1935 BIA employee Oliver LaFarge went on record describing the boarding school system as being composed of ‘penal institutions – where little children [are] sentenced to hard labor for a term of years for the crime of being born of their mothers’ (LaFarge, 1935: 233). In Canada, residential school survivors have also not infrequently compared their experience to imprisonment – in 1991, the Musqeam leader Wendy Grant-John referred to them as ‘internment camps for children’ (quoted in Fournier and Grey, 1997: 61) – although as those who had actually been incarcerated in both types of facility usually observed, ‘the food was better in prison’ (quoted in Miller, 1996: 387).
Whether or not they were formally designated as purveyors of ‘industrial training,’ virtually all residential facilities were, by design, ‘frankly supported in part by the labor of their students,’ who, by the time they reached fifth grade, ‘work[ed] for half a day and [went] to school for half a day.’ A US investigating commission found in 1928 that ‘much of the work of Indian children in boarding schools would … be prohibited in most states under child labor laws’ (Meriam et al., 1928: 13). The official justification in the US and Canada alike for exempting native children from such protections was that, in the course of their ‘employment,’ they were being prepared for future self-sufficiency by ‘learning a trade.’ The trades taught, however, often bore no relationship to the prospect of future employment. Plainly, production rather than ‘education,’ ‘vocational’ or otherwise, was at issue. As one analyst has put it, ‘The student worked for the school rather than the school for the student’ (Kizer, n.d.: 69).
The goal, openly and repeatedly stated on both sides of the border, was to make each school ‘financially self-sufficient,’ or even profit-making. Toward this end, where students were paid for their labor at all – some administrators apparently believed token ‘wages’ might provide incentive to greater productivity – the compensation was abysmally low. According to 1897 BIA guidelines, students new to a job should never be paid, but might receive 1 cent per hour after a few months. Children with two years’ experience might receive a ‘raise’ to 1.5 cents per hour. Even these tiny sums did not go to the youngsters who earned them, however. Rather, they were deposited in no-interest ‘savings accounts’ (mis)managed by school administrators.
The labor demanded of children in residential institutions was not only dreary and demeaning, but often gut-bustingly difficult. In a single year, the thirty-eight ‘working age’ boys at the Fort Stevenson Indian Boarding School (North Dakota), ‘in addition to cutting and hauling 300 posts, fencing in twenty acres of pasture, cutting over 200 cords of wood, and storing away 150 tons of ice … mined 150 tons of lignite coal. Proud of this accomplishment, the superintendent boasted that “a vast amount of hard labor” was required to extract the coal, partly because “about 9 feet of earth had to be removed before the vein was reached” ’ (Adams, 1995: 151). It is impossible to calculate with precision the extent to which the conditions of forced labor imposed upon residential school students, rather than the malnutrition and other adverse conditions to which they were all but universally subjected, proved decisive in lowering their resistance to the diseases that at times claimed half their number. Probably the best approach is, as historian David E. Stannard recommends, to treat the combination of factors as an inseparably interactive whole (Stannard, 1996: 177).
Torture
To be sure, native children were not merely the passive victims of all that was being done to them. Virtually without exception, survivor narratives include accounts of subversion, both individual and collective, most commonly involving such activities as ‘stealing’ and/or foraging for food, possessing other ‘contraband,’ persistence in the speaking of native languages, and running away. In many – perhaps most – residential schools, such activities were so common and sustained as to comprise outright ‘cultures of resistance’ (for overviews, see Coleman, 1993: 146–61; Adams, 1995: 209–38; Miller, 1996: 343–74). And in most instances, the official response was to intensify the already harsh disciplinary regimen by which institutional life was defined, resorting to ‘corrective measures’ exceeding any reasonable limit or proportion. Many of the methods routinely employed not only went beyond the usual standards of ‘cruel and unusual punishment’ prohibited under Anglo-American law for application to convicted felons in penal facilities, but violated the prohibitions against torture found in international legal custom and convention.
Under guidelines promulgated in 1890, the schools were licensed to inflict corporal punishment, literal imprisonment in a ‘guardhouse,’ and other such penalties on students believed ‘guilty of persistently using profane or obscene language; lewd conduct; stubborn insubordination; lying; fighting; wanton destruction of property; theft, or similar misbehavior’ (Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 56th Cong., 1st Sess., 1900: clii). ‘In other words,’ observes analyst David Wallace Adams, ‘just about everything’ the children did was subject to discretionary interpretation and punishment by their overseers (Adams, 1995: 121). The severity of such beatings, sometimes undertaken with fists, rubber hoses and even baseball bats, is attested by the case of a 13-year-old boy who in 1912 was ‘held, handcuffed, and almost beaten into “insensibility” with a strap. The result was that “the boy collapsed, lay on the floor almost helpless, and … after sixteen days, twenty-six cruel scars remained on his body, and eleven upon his right arm” ‘ (Adams, 1995: 122). Such brutality, found by congressionally commissioned investigators to be endemic in 1928, was hardly the end of it. There are many accounts of children as young as 8 being shackled to posts, ‘having a ball and chain tied to their ankle,’ and so on (McBeth, 1983: 106).
Although in 1929 Indian Commissioner Burke made an ostentatious display of renewing the 1898 ban on the worst of such practices, his successor, Charles J. Rhodes, effectively gutted the constraints a year later. As had been the case with the 1898 constraints, Burke’s 1929 ban was for the most part ignored anyway (almost invariably without discernible consequences to violators), and, irrespective of periodic official pronouncements to the contrary, ‘harsh measures of discipline remained in use’ at facilities like the Phoenix and St Francis (South Dakota) Indian schools into the mid-1980s (Trennert, 1988: 192). As always, things were no better in Canada, especially during the tenure of Duncan Campbell Scott as Indian Service director.
Those who physically resisted such abuse, usually but not always adolescent males, typically came in for still harsher treatment. One young man at the McKay School (Manitoba), who in 1924 fought back against a strapping after he was accused of ‘slacking’ at work – actually, his hands had become too blistered to hold the pitchfork he was assigned to use – ended up bruised ‘black from his neck to his buttocks’ (Milloy, 1999: 147). Another boy, upon being cracked across the skull with a cane by a staff thug named Skinner at the Red Deer School, seized the cane and hit his assailant back; shortly thereafter, the youngster was beaten so badly that he needed to undergo cranial surgery. Such atrocities were regularly reported to Scott, but, other than the release of a vacuous 1921 assertion that abuse would not be condoned, no action was taken. The torture continued on a system-wide basis, decade after decade, until the very end. During the late 1960s, for example, a staff member at the Oblates’ St Philip’s Residential School (Saskatchewan) regularly burned ‘recalcitrant’ children with his cigarette lighter, and developed a specialized punishment called ‘whipping with five belts’ in which a cluster of narrow straps resembling the infamous cat-o’-nine-tails – but embellished with metal studs – was used to induce a ‘proper’ degree of submissiveness in the unruly; ‘It was not at all uncommon for this punishment to leave scabs that stuck to clothing and left scars’ (Miller, 1996: 327). Another method of ‘bringing unduly stubborn youngsters to their senses’ during the same period was to place them in restraints and then apply electrical shocks (Chrisjohn and Young with Maraun, 1997: 32).
Native residential schoolchildren opted all too frequently to embrace the ultimate refusal of the conditions imposed upon them: suicide. In this connection, however, the record is sufficient to provide only occasional glimpses of what was happening. The first documented suicide at the Phoenix Indian School was that of a Pima boy in 1894, for instance; contemporaneous accounts strongly suggest that ending the burden of ‘severe discipline and punishment’ was likely his motive (Trennert, 1988: 50). At the Williams Lake School in 1920, ‘in the aftermath of severe beatings’ nine youngsters attempted mass suicide, one of them successfully, by eating water hemlock (Milloy, 1999: 148, 153–4).
‘Cause of death’ bookkeeping on both sides of the border was ultimately too shoddy – or deliberately misleading – to allow anything resembling a comprehensive and accurate appraisal of suicide rates in the schools. But even such fragmentary evidence as is available plainly belies apologistic screeds like Robert Havighurst’s convenient – and therefore influential – 1971 study claiming that ‘virtually no suicides occurred … in boarding schools’ during the first ninety years of their operation. There is, after all, a considerable distinction to be drawn between the number of suicides attempted on the one hand and the number of attempts recorded on the other, especially in a context where ‘those in charge’ at all levels preferred that things appear to be other than they actually were. Even without hard data on the number of child suicides claimed by the residential schools, the ghastly toll taken by the systematic torture practiced in those institutions for more than a century is quite clear.
Predation
Throughout the entire period in which the residential schools were operating, in virtually every facility, and, perhaps most unspeakably, even as the children were mercilessly flogged for the slightest deviation from the supposed virtues of ‘strict chastity’ and other such aspects of ‘Christian morality,’ they were routinely subjected to the attentions of sexual predators among the staff members, quite prominently including priests, nuns, and Protestant clergy. So ubiquitous was the situation that in 1995 Douglas Hogarth, a Supreme Court judge for British Columbia, went on record describing his country’s residential school system as having been ‘nothing but a form of institutionalized pedophilia’ and ‘sexual terrorism’ (quoted in Grant, 1996: 229).
Although they have adamantly denied it, ‘those in charge,’ both of the churches and of the Indian Service, knew about and defended this sexual predation as well. In numerous cases, when predation in a given school was discovered or suspected by native communities whose children were lodged there, the predator was simply moved to another institution and, at least in some instances, promoted.
Some indication of the scale of the predation is conveyed by a 1991 report of the Cariboo Tribal Council into the operations of the Oblates’ St Joseph’s [Mission] residential school in Williams Lake. The report
produced shocking figures … In answer to an interviewer’s question to a group 187 people … whether they had suffered sexual abuse as children [at the school], 89 answered in the affirmative, 38 in the negative, and 60 refused to answer. Depending on how the non-respondents are allocated between the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ categories, these data represent a reporting rate of from 48 to 70 per cent … The chief investigators of a less scientific study of abuse at the Roman Catholic Kuper Island School in British Columbia found that more than half the [70] people interviewed had horrendous stories…. Mel H. Buffalo, an advisor to the Samson [Cree] band in Hobbema, Alberta, reported that ‘every Indian person I’ve spoken to who attended these schools has a story of mental, physical or sexual abuse to relate.’ (Miller, 1996: 329)
In 1993, three years after investigators for the Ministry of National Health and Welfare had also turned up – and publicly commented upon – evidence that ‘100% of the children at some schools were sexually abused’ between 1950 and 1980 (quoted in Globe and Mail, 1 June 1990), the Indian Service, which had by then been merged into what is called the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development (DIAND), turned over the first thirty-five of its files on suspected molestation cases for further action by the RCMP. Meanwhile, conclusive proof was piling up in court, beginning in 1989, when Oblate priest Harold McIntee pled guilty to allegations that he’d molested more than a score of boys as young as 5 during his years at the St Joseph’s Mission School. In 1995, Arthur Henry Plint, a career supervisor at the Alberni School, pled guilty to having committed serial sexual offenses against the children under his ‘care’ from the moment he was hired until his retirement twenty years later. His case is emblematic of the rest:
Plint, then seventy-seven, cursed his accusers as he walked into court under the glare of television lights, hitting out with a cane in a final act of contempt and violence. Inside, he pled guilty to sixteen counts of indecent assault of aboriginal boys aged six to thirteen, between 1948 and 1968. Three of the boys were forcibly sodomized, others forced to perform oral sex … often daily, for months and years. (Fournier and Grey, 1997: 71, 73–4)
As one official had already acknowledged, ‘only the tip of the iceberg’ appeared to have been revealed by such cases (quoted in Miller, 1996: 333). Under these circumstances, Canada’s Aboriginal Rights Coalition requested in 1992 that the Indian Department initiate an official and comprehensive investigation of the extent to which sexual predation had prevailed in the schools. In December of that year, Duncan Campbell Scott’s heir, Tom Siddon, continued his predecessor’s tradition of hiding the truth by declaring that he did not ‘believe a public inquiry [was] the best approach’ to resolving the issue (quoted in Milloy, 1999: 301). Although ‘by 1992, most of the churches had apologized’ – the Presbyterians held out until late 1994 – Siddon also made it clear that the Indian Service had no intention of following suit: ‘There would be no ministerial apology, no apology on behalf of Canadians, and no plans for [providing] compensation’ to the victims (quoted in Milloy, 1999: 299, 301). The most the department was willing to offer was a carefully worded expression of ‘regret’ that bad things had happened in the schools, through no fault of its own.
The situation is even more putrid in the US. There, the wall of silence behind which much of what happened to the north was all too conveniently hidden prior to 1990 remains as towering as ever. Even amidst a burgeoning scandal concerning endemic sexual predations of priests and others operating in mainstream settings over the past thirty years, and of systematic cover-ups and protection of offenders, most prominently by the Catholic Church, there has been no exploration whatsoever of the probability that such abuse of native children was as pervasive in US residential schools as in Canada’s. To the contrary, such efforts as have been made to ‘explain’ the much better-documented – and in that sense unavoidable – phenomena of forced labor and physical torture have been primarily of the sort designed to neutralize rather than elaborate the implications.
Worlds of pain
It is true that in both Canada and the United States the imposition of residential schooling upon indigenous children ended some twenty years ago. It is not true, however, as DIAND’s Tom Siddon was already claiming by 1991, that the effects are now ‘in the past.’ To the contrary, the ravages of a virulent cluster of psychological dysfunctions that has come to be known in Canada as ‘Residential School Syndrome’ (RSS) – there is no corresponding term in the US, although the symptomatologies involved are just as clearly present there – not only remains undiminished, but may in some respects have intensified during the decades since the last survivors were released from residential facilities. Given the proportion of the native population caught up in the residential school system during the last two generations of its operation, and the fact that the syndrome is demonstrably transmissible to children and others closely associated with or dependent upon survivors, the magnitude of its ongoing impact upon Native North America deserves exploration.
In its most common manifestations, RSS includes acutely conflicted self-concept and lowered self-esteem, emotional numbing (often described as ‘inability to trust or form lasting bonds’), somatic disorder, chronic depression and anxiety (often phobic), insomnia and nightmares, dissociation, paranoia, sexual dysfunction, heightened irritability and tendency to fly into rages, strong tendencies towards alcoholism and drug addiction, and suicidal behavior. While the syndrome has been treated as if were something unprecedented and unique by most Canadian researchers – that is, as a ‘clinical’ phenomenon requiring extensive study before it can be either defined or effectively addressed – such posturing diverts attention from the fact that there is nothing at all new or especially different about RSS. Rather, it has a number of obvious and well-researched corollaries, including the entirely comparable sets of symptoms afflicting victims of rape, torture, hostage-taking, domestic violence and child abuse. Strong similarities also exist between the behaviors exhibited among those suffering RSS and the Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) often associated with soldiers who’ve undergone heavy combat. Perhaps most significantly, the symptomotologies of RSS are virtually interchangeable with those attending the so-called Concentration Camp Syndrome (CCS) manifested on a collective basis by survivors of both the nazi facilities and their counterparts in the Soviet Union and elsewhere.
One readily observable result of the residential schools, all but unremarked in discussions of RSS, is the existence of an entire stratum of native people in both Canada and the US who were, in what might be seen as a permanent variation of the so-called Stockholm Syndrome with which hostages are sometimes temporarily afflicted, ‘ideologically converted’ by their experience (see Symonds, 1982; Strentz, 1982). For the most part deeply Christianized, often just as deeply rejecting of their own peoples/traditions, and primally conditioned to identify their interests as coinciding with those of their oppressors, they have over the past fifty years been increasingly employed by the settler status quo – governmental, corporate and academic – as a sort of ‘broker class,’ willing to extend an appearance of ‘native endorsement’ to even the most objectively anti-Indian initiatives.4 In exchange for their utility in perpetually subverting themselves and their peoples, the brokers typically receive incidental monetary compensation and appointments to prestigious – but invariably powerless – positions as Indian ‘leaders.’ The process steadily deepens their estrangement from native communities – wherein they are usually branded as ‘sell-outs’ – and furthers the process of sociopolitical fragmentation within the communities themselves.
A much larger group, which significantly overlaps with the first, consists of people among whom the ‘neutralizing’ symptomatologies of RSS pre-dominate, either intermittently or continuously. Deculturated to the point of being unable to participate fully in their own societies (at least in their own minds), and congenitally barred by the race codes upon which North America’s settler societies continue to function from fitting into them either, such people are trapped in a perpetual limbo of conflicted identity, personal unfulfillment, and despair. Seeking some sense of ‘normalcy’ in marriage and the forming of families, they typically discover that a combination of the psycho-emotional damage they’ve suffered in the schools, their all-but-total lack of experience in actual familial settings, and often their inability to secure the steady work necessary to provide for their dependants, generates catastrophic results. As a rule, they end up visiting upon their offspring some variation of the misery they themselves suffered as youngsters. Aware of this, but incapable of altering the destructive dynamics at play, most compound the problem by seeking the oblivion and self-nullification offered by alcohol and other substances. Ultimately – or alternatively – they seek the final ‘closure’ of suicide, at a rate more than five times the national average.
For the children of residential school survivors, childhood is often an experience worse than it was for one or both of their parents. Their suffering and witnessing of traumatic abuse begins much earlier – often at birth – and tends to be sustained longer and in a more intensive fashion. The tormentors of residential schoolchildren were at least the aliens who had displaced their parents; for the children of survivors, the tormentors all too frequently are their parents themselves. The record of the residential schools is filled to overflowing with poignant accounts of little boys and girls who cried themselves to sleep each night in loneliness for the warmth and affection of the homes from which they’d been torn; the children of survivors are home, and must shed their tears in desperate hunger for something they’ve never known. Children in the schools escaped in droves, almost always trying to return to the places whence they’d come; when the children of survivors run, as they often do, it is only ‘away.’
It has been reasonably estimated that one in every two adult American Indians suffered acute alcoholism during the twentieth century. In some locales, the Grassy Narrows Reserve (Ontario), for example, as well as Alkali Lake (British Columbia), Norway House (Manitoba) and Cross Lake (Manitoba), the tally was at times 100 per cent (Shkilnyk, 1985; York, 1992: 175–200). Much verbiage – and untold research dollars – have been expended in trying not-so-subtly to affix blame to the victims themselves, a process of seeking and asserting ‘proof’ that native people are ‘genetically predisposed to alcoholism’ or that ‘there is something in traditional cultures’ that obtains the same result (Westermeyer, 1974; Leland, 1976; Maracle, 1993). No study has as yet attempted to correlate such obvious facts as that, while half of all native people have lately become alcoholics, an equal proportion were also processed through residential schools. In the same vein, although they share neither genetic nor cultural characteristics with Native North Americans, other peoples subjected to long-term colonization on the English model – the Irish, for instance – have been notoriously beset by comparable rates of alcoholism, ‘schizophrenia,’ and other such RSS-like maladies.
Shaping the future
Native North Americans are by no means the only people who have been subjected to residential schooling, or something similar, by their colonizers. Certainly, the ‘station’ policy maintained by Australia with regard to the aboriginal populace of that subcontinent during the bulk of the twentieth century bears a more than passing resemblance, as do the results embodied in the Aborigines’ ‘lost generations.’ Although residential facilities were not usually employed, the system of compulsory schooling imposed by Britain upon the Irish from the early nineteenth century onward entailed ‘pedagogical’ objectives identical to those pertaining to American Indians: destruction of linguistic and spiritual traditions, undermining of familial/social structures, and so on. The same goals hallmark the modes of schooling more selectively forced by the British upon their colonial subjects in India and West Africa. Occasionally, as with the British ‘Home Child’ program, some of the worst aspects of what was done to American Indian and Australian aboriginal young people have also been visited upon unwanted or ‘surplus’ white youngsters. While the fate of the Home Children was an exceptionally ugly manifestation of the vicious class structure by which the ‘English-speaking world’ has organized itself internally, such phenomena have plainly been the rule in colonial settings.
Indeed, it has been observed that something akin to the residential school system is inherent to any successful order of colonialism. As Sartre noted in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s monumental anti-colonialist tract, The Wretched of the Earth, and elsewhere, colonization can only be accomplished by a violent subjugation ‘internalized as Terror by the colonized’:
Colonial violence does not only aim to keep the enslaved people at a respectful distance, it also seeks to dehumanize them. No effort will be spared to liquidate their traditions, substitute our language for theirs, destroy their culture without [admitting them to] ours; they will be rendered stupid by exploitation. Malnourished and sick, if they continue to resist, fear will finish the job: the [natives] have guns pointed at them; along come civilians who settle [upon their] land and force them with the riding crop to farm it for them. If they resist, the soldiers [or police] will shoot and they are dead men; if they give in, they degrade themselves and they are no longer human beings; shame and fear fissure their character and shatter their personality. The business is carried out briskly by experts: ‘psychological services’ are by no means a new invention. Neither is brainwashing. (Sartre, 2001a: 142–3)
Eventually, if the colonizers’ system functions as intended, the colonized ‘do not even need to be exterminated any more…. The body will be allowed to live on but the spirit will be destroyed’ (Sartre, 2001b: 76). In effect, aside from the ‘perpetual massacre’ through which it is necessarily sustained, colonialism ‘is by its very nature a [process] of cultural genocide. Colonization cannot take place without systematically liquidating all the [autochthonous] characteristics of the native society’ (Sartre, 1968: 62–3). It follows that, for Sartre, colonialism, as such, equals genocide. It may be added, moreover, that there is nothing in his formulation, unlike those advanced from virtually every other quarter during the second half of the twentieth century, which is in the least inconsistent with Raphael Lemkin’s original conception of the crime.
Sartre’s percipience has been treated as controversial, especially among self-described ‘genocide scholars.’ For those not disposed to reject the formulation out of hand, there can be neither compromise nor equivocation. Given that residential schooling and its corollaries have all along served as cornerstones for the consolidation of colonial order, and that colonialism in itself amounts to genocide, there can be no hedging as to whether either the schools or their after-effects were and are ‘really’ genocidal. They were, and blatantly so. The ‘something taking the place of this truth’ remarked by Wittgenstein in the epigraph to this essay is thereby revealed as the aggregate of ‘interpretations’ holding that the Indian residential school systems maintained by the US and Canada were anything but instruments of genocide. The first task, then, is to ‘uncover the source of the misrepresentation’ and ‘transform it into what is true.’ Genocide, always and everywhere, must be called by its right name. So, too, must those who would camouflage or deny it be called by theirs.
Having thus ‘defined the phenomenon’ at hand in a fashion common to both Wittgenstein and Huey Newton, the question becomes how it might be caused ‘to act in the desired manner’ (that is, to cease and disappear). The answer, of course, resides in the ‘source’ of both the phenomenon and its misrepresentation. Insofar as the genocide embodied in residential schooling arises as an integral aspect of colonialism, then colonialism must be seen as constituting that source. It follows that the antidote will be found, exclusively so, in a thoroughgoing process of decolonization. To be consciously anti-genocidal, one must be actively anti-imperialist, and vice versa. To be in any way an apologist for colonialism is to be an active proponent of genocide. In this, given the dynamics of power at play, there are – indeed can be – no bystanders.
Rephrased in affirmative terms, decolonization in the context of Native North America means simply the assertion and realization by American Indians of the right to self-determination repeatedly confirmed in international law as being vested in all peoples, ‘by virtue of [which], they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.’5 More concretely, this means the extension of unfettered indigenous jurisdiction over the full extent of the territories explicitly reserved by native peoples for their own use and occupancy in their treaties with the US and Canada, as well as such territories as were expropriated from them through fraudulent or coerced treaties. Within these reconstituted homelands – an aggregate totaling perhaps half the continent – it follows that indigenous nations, not North America’s settler state governments, will exercise complete control over everything from natural resource disposition, to their form(s) of government, to the criteria of citizenship. There can be none of the current US subterfuge of pretending that native people are already self-determining, or that they are entitled to exercise only a kind of ‘internal self-determination’ previously unknown to legal discourse.
Restitution in terms of property and jurisdiction are by no means the only elements involved in the decolonization of Native North America. The colonization itself occurred in flagrant violation of international law, not least through the systematic breach of some 400 ratified treaties in the US and scores more in Canada,6 and has been maintained since 1945 in circumvention of provisions in the United Nations Charter making colonialism itself illegal. To this must be added the implications of sustained and multifaceted violations of the Genocide Convention and numerous other conventions, covenants and declarations by both North American settler states. Under international tort law, offending entities incur a liability with regard to each such breach of legality requiring that, to the extent possible, they repair all damages done as a result of their transgressions. In cases where reparation is not possible – for example, where land has been rendered uninhabitable by mining and/or contamination, or where the destruction of population is involved – they are obliged to make adequate compensation to the victims and survivors. Under no circumstances is an offending entity entitled to define adequacy of restitution, reparation or compensation; this is the prerogative/responsibility of a neutral third party such as the International Court of Justice (‘World Court’).
Finally, there is the matter of criminal culpability. Those who formulated and presided over, as well as those who carried out, criminal policies are subject to prosecution for their actions. Where domestic tribunals fail to mete out justice in such matters – as those of the US and Canada invariably have – the authority of the newly constituted International Criminal Court may be invoked (despite an ongoing refusal on the part of the US in particular to accept its jurisdiction). As to the matter of the culpability lodged in the broader settler populations that have for so long proven themselves accepting of what was and is being done to American Indians, and who have gladly queued up to avail themselves of material benefits plainly accruing at the expense of native people – a posture adding up to complicity, if nothing else – a more metaphysical resolution presents itself. In general, this would assume the form of penance explored quite eloquently by Karl Jaspers in his The Question of German Guilt. At a minimum, providing an accurate account of Euro-American history – thereby replacing national and cultural hubris with the sort of humility accompanying all such admissions of criminal comportment – would undoubtedly go far towards dissipating the attitudes which gave rise to the residential school system and related atrocities, while giving no small measure of psychic comfort to surviving victims.
The task is daunting. Yet, should those among North America’s settler societies who manage to see things clearly nonetheless shirk their responsibility to do that which is necessary, the agony of the Others who are their countries’ victims will continue, and even incrementally worsen to the point of their long-prophesied extinction. Somewhere between this point and that, those relegated a nullified existence will seize upon a moment of cumulative anguish and do the job themselves – or try to – in a manner both natural and far more horrific than if the defaulters had done it themselves. If the resulting monumentality of violence would be redeemed by the fact that it was ‘no less than man reconstructing himself’ (to quote Sartre), far better that significant sectors of the colonizing populace joined hands with the colonized before the fact, eliminating colonialism in a common project that had the effect of reducing the magnitude of violence experienced by all concerned.
Surely such a project is worthy by all conceivable moral, ethical, and legal standards. Equally, we owe it to the survivors of the ongoing process of genocide embodied in the residential schools – and to their children, their grandchildren, and to our own humanity, if ever it is to be reclaimed – that we shoulder the burden, whatever it may entail, of ensuring that the order of colonialism is shattered at last, never to be restored. Most importantly, we owe it, all of us, to our coming generations, seven deep into the future, to bequeath to them lives free of the nightmarish reality in which we ourselves remain so mired. Should that prove to be the legacy of the little ones who suffered so long and so terribly in the schools, then perhaps their spirits may finally be at peace.
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