The whole part of the residential school was a part of a bigger scheme of colonization. There was intent; the schools were there with the intent to change people, to make them like others and to make them not fit.
And today, you know, we have to learn to decolonize.
—Shirley Flowers, Statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada1
In 1933, an Anglican missionary described the All Saints School at Aklavik in the Northwest Territories as the “most northerly residential school in the British Empire.”2 This proud claim is a reminder that Canada’s residential school system was part of a global imperial process that brought states and Christian churches together in a complex and powerful fashion. The men and women who established the schools celebrated this link between their work and the growth of European empires.
The spread of those empires, the modern age of imperialism, was set in motion in the fifteenth century when the voyages of maritime explorers revealed potential sources of new wealth to the monarchs of Europe. By the 1440s, the Portuguese had reached the Gulf of Guinea. Soon after, they were bringing slaves, gold, and ivory from Africa to Europe. The Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and the Incas gave Spain, and ultimately all of Europe, access to the precious metals of North and South America. This not only enriched the Old World, it also unleashed an unceasing wave of migration, trade, conquest, and colonization.3 It marked the beginning of the creation of a European-dominated global economy. Although it was led initially by Spain and Portugal, this era of imperial expansion came to be directed by Holland, France, and, in the end, most spectacularly by Britain.4
The Age of Empire saw powerful European states gain control of other peoples’ lands throughout the world. It was an era of mass migration. Millions of Europeans came as colonial settlers to nearly every part of the world. Millions of Africans were transported across the Atlantic Ocean in the European-led slave trade, in which coastal Africans collaborated. Traders from India and China spread throughout the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, bringing with them servants whose lives were little different from those of slaves.5 The activities of explorers, farmers, prospectors, trading companies, or missionaries often set the stage for expansionary wars, the negotiation and the breaking of Treaties, attempts at cultural assimilation, and the exploitation and marginalization of the original inhabitants of the colonized lands.6
To a large extent, the colonists were extending beyond their own borders the social values they had practised at home. In England’s case, for example, during the transition away from feudalism in the fourteenth century, landlords, seeking to benefit from new, more efficient farming practices, forced hundreds of thousands of peasants off their land and then did the same thing in the conquered colonies of Ireland and Scotland. Since, by British standards, Indigenous people were not using land as productively as possible, the colonizers acting under British laws and British conceptions of ‘possession’ believed they had the right to the land wherever they took measures to ‘improve’ it.7
Although the formal European empires finally collapsed in the last half of the twentieth century, their legacy remains: it is visible in the unequal distribution of global resources; in the civil wars that have marked the histories of many former colonies; and in the social, economic, educational, and health conditions of peoples whose lands have been colonized. On one day in February 2012, in the international news were stories of Malaysians protesting the opening of an Australian refinery in their country, the working conditions in an American computer plant in China, the killing of American soldiers in Afghanistan, the impact of tourism on Indigenous people in the Amazon, and controversy over British oil exploration in Somalia. Each of these stories is but the latest event in a worldwide story with an imperial pedigree.8
Canada is also the product of this history. It was initially colonized by the French Empire, and was one of the prizes in a lengthy inter-imperial conflict between France and Britain. Once established as a state in 1867, it remained part of the British Empire. In its westward and northern expansion, Canada wrote its own chapters in the history of colonialism, albeit with continued investments from Britain and later from the United States. The relationship between colonists and Indigenous peoples is long and complex, reflecting changes in the interests of both and shifts in the balance of power. Throughout their encounter, both colonizer and colonized pursued their own, often changing, goals. At the beginning of this period in what is now Canada, Aboriginal peoples were in a dominant position. Not only were the European newcomers outnumbered, they also counted on Aboriginal people for their very survival. Their journeys of exploration depended on the support of Aboriginal guides. The fur trade, the major European economic activity in the region, could not have functioned without Aboriginal labour. Aboriginal people, for their part, valued many of the new trade goods and engaged in a complex set of diplomatic relations with both French and English colonial powers. In the end, however, the experience of Aboriginal people in Canada had much in common with that of Indigenous peoples in other colonized lands throughout the world. As the balance of power shifted, their rights to land and self-government were brushed aside, and they were pushed onto reserves and cut off from participation in the dynamic sectors of the economy.9 This colonial history has profoundly shaped Canada’s political culture and national identity, and continues to shape relations between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people. The residential school system and its legacy must be set in the larger international context of colonial policies that predated the schools and have continued on after their closing. This chapter provides brief introductions to the idea of empire and colonialism, the justifications for imperialism, and the role of education in imperialism.
The word empire has its origin in the Latin imperium, which originally meant the right “to wage war, and to make and execute laws.”10 Over time, the word came to refer to lands far distant from Rome over which the Romans had extended their military and political authority.11 The Roman Empire was formed through military conquests that allowed imperial officials to exploit conquered lands.12 This expansion was justified by the claim that the empire was spreading a universal law for humankind, that to be incorporated into the empire was to make the journey from barbarism to civilization.13 In this way, the Romans provided future emperors with a model for imperial expansion and a language with which to legitimize their actions.14
Each European empire gathered together a set of colonies, usually by force or the threat of force, into an unequal political union. The imperial homeland dominated and exploited the colonies. The classic European empires were, usually, ethnically and religiously diverse and geographically extensive, at times spanning several continents. They were maintained by both the threat of violence and the collaboration of some of the local elites.15 The terms imperialism and colonialism are closely bound together—and the words often are used interchangeably. Imperialism can be said to define the policy of acquiring and maintaining an empire, while colonialism refers to the practices involved in the transforming of the acquired territories into colonies, most commonly by transferring settlers from the imperial power to the colony.
Imperialism is not a solely European practice. China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire, for example, all placed assimilationist pressures on the people who lived within these increasingly centralized states.16 Europeans did not reserve colonialism exclusively for non-Europeans; the process was, in many ways, an extension of domestic policies through which the modern European states were created. In this process, for example, in Britain, the Cornish, Welsh, and Gaelic languages were marginalized.17 The First World War was preceded by a ferocious and often violent competition between the European powers to secure foreign colonies, particularly in Africa, and the Second World War was driven, in large measure, by German ambitions to create a European empire.
It has sometimes been argued that empires established law and order and maintained lengthy periods of peace. But the idea of a Pax Romana or Pax Britannica—extended eras of peace established under the benevolent rule of the Roman or British empires—is largely a myth, the product of imperial self-promotion. Empires were established militarily, and engaged in extensive and violent wars with one another, maintained a military presence on their frontiers, and conducted innumerable military campaigns to put down nationalist uprisings.18 To cite only a few examples from the history of the British Empire: as many as 10,000 Singhalese died as a result of the British campaign of destruction and starvation following a revolt in Sri Lanka in 1817; two wars were fought to keep the Chinese market open to opium that the British were producing in India; the repression of the Indian Mutiny left thousands dead; and British gunships were used around the globe to advance British interests. At various times, troops under British control saw duty in the Persian Gulf, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Egypt, Burma, Nyasaland, the Sudan, and Canada. By the early nineteenth century, under the protection of the British navy, the British Empire was established in West, South, and East Africa; India; Ceylon; Singapore; Australia; New Zealand; the Caribbean; and Canada.19
Colonies were established to be exploited economically. Benefit could come directly in the form of tax revenues, precious metals, or raw materials for industries in the homeland. Colonies often were required to purchase their imports solely from the homeland, making them a captive market.20 New forms of economic activity in Europe had fostered a new type of business person, the entrepreneur with surplus capital in search of an investment opportunity. Colonies provided them with the opportunities they sought.21 Exploiting these conditions usually involved the expropriation or marginalization of Indigenous labour.22 The benefits of empire went largely to the imperial power rather than to the conquered nation. Profits were not retained in the colony, and spending on education and social welfare was kept to the minimum needed to maintain social order.23 In a colony, the fundamental decisions about the lives of the colonized were made by representatives of the empire, who were implementing policies that had been created in the imperial centre for the benefit of imperial power. There are Canadian examples of this process; for example, throughout most of their history, the Yukon and Northwest Territories have been internal colonies, ruled by appointed administrators living in Ottawa.24
There was no one, single, colonial model. In some cases, the colony was run by a chartered company; in others, the colonizing state ruled directly; in yet others, local leaders were recruited to lead local governments. In what could be called “colonies of occupation,” imperialists sought to exploit natural resources using Indigenous labour. The number of colonists was limited: usually, only little more than the military and the personnel needed to control and exploit the colony. After their term of service had expired, most often the colonists returned to the homeland.25 In India, for example, the British presence did not exceed 10,000 in a colony of 400 million.26 When many of these empires collapsed in the 1940s and 1950s, the colonized peoples proclaimed their sovereignty while most of the remaining colonists left.
These colonies of occupation can be contrasted to settler colonies such as Canada, the United States, Australia, and New Zealand. Although these colonies might have been initiated with an intention to simply exploit resources, over time, the focus shifted to large-scale, permanent migration of agricultural settlers. From 1830 to 1840, for example, European immigration to North America rose by 40%. Between 1815 and 1912, two and a half million people emigrated from the British Isles. So extensive was this migration that, by 1900, only a third of the English-speaking people in the world lived in Europe.27 These immigrants frequently were driven by famine, religious or ethnic persecution, and the changes brought about by mechanization of agriculture and manufacturing.28
The increase in the number of colonists was often matched by dramatic decreases in Indigenous populations.29 The Maori population dropped from 80,000 in 1842 to 40,000 in 1896.30 The population of the Belgian Congo dropped by over nine million people in the wake of colonization.31 In North America, the population decline began upon contact and continued until the twentieth century. Estimates of the rate of population decline for North America range from 53% for some groups to 95% for others. New and deadly diseases such as smallpox, measles, and influenza dramatically reduced Indigenous populations. Colonialism had rendered Indigenous people especially vulnerable to epidemics by disrupting their relationship to the environment. The poor living and working conditions often associated with colonialism not only left people prey to epidemics, but also made it far more difficult for Indigenous populations to recover from an epidemic.32
The reception that colonialists received from Indigenous peoples varied according to time and place, depending on respective interests and needs. The variables included the level of Indigenous interest in European trade goods and the colonists’ need for Indigenous support and assistance for their very survival. The potential existed for co-operation and exchange. In comparing the French and English in North America, one group of Iroquois observed in 1754 that if one were to look at the forts established by the French, “you will see that the land beneath his walls is still hunting ground, having fixed himself in those places we frequent, only to supply our wants; whilst the English, on the contrary, no sooner get possession of a country than the game is forced to leave it; the trees fall down before them, the earth becomes bare, and we find among them hardly wherewithal to shelter us when the night falls.”33 The statement highlights the reasons not only for co-operating with the French, but also for resisting the English.
Conflict and resistance were common throughout the history of imperialism. Resistance could come from the Indigenous peoples: in 1577, when British explorer Martin Frobisher tried to take two Inuit hostages on Qikiqtaaluk (Baffin Island), the Inuit fought back, leaving Frobisher with an arrow wound in the buttocks.34 Two hundred years later, in 1788, when British captain Arthur Phillips landed at Botany Bay in Australia, he was greeted by Aboriginal people chanting “Warra, Warra,” which has been translated as “Go away.”35 An Elder on Vancouver Island told colonial official Gilbert Sproat that “we do not want the white man. He steals what we have. We wish to live as we are.”36 In other cases, the Indigenous people questioned the colonizers’ claim to the land. First Nations leaders in the Nass River area of British Columbia told a government commission in 1887, “What we don’t like about the government is their saying this: ‘We will give you this much land.’ How can they give it when it is our own? We cannot understand it. They have never bought it from us or our forefathers.”37 Resistance also came from the peoples who had been dragged away from their homelands: slaves on the British island of Trinidad, in preparation for a revolt, sang that “The bread we eat is the white man’s flesh / the wine we drink is the white man’s blood.”38 And, as the American War of Independence demonstrated, even settlers themselves could rebel, particularly if imperial policy attempted to curb the rate and speed at which they took the lands of Indigenous people.39 Indigenous resistance continued after colonization, taking such varied forms as guerrilla warfare, strikes, and even refusal to assimilate. Such a refusal did not mean that colonized peoples rejected every aspect of colonial society, particularly if they were able to control the pace of change. In Canada, for example, Aboriginal people valued many of the goods they received through the fur trade and were able to exploit their position as the suppliers of furs to their economic benefit.40
In settler colonies, the mere presence of Indigenous people blocked settler access to the land.41 Herman Merivale, a future British permanent undersecretary of the Colonial Office, noted in his 1840 Lectures on Colonization and Colonies that there were four basic approaches an imperial power could take in its relations with Indigenous people. It could exterminate them, enslave them, separate them from colonial society, or assimilate them into colonial society.42 At one point or another, just about every colonial power experimented with each of these alternatives. Peoples who made their livings as hunters, fishers, and herders, who held land communally, or who lacked a strong and protective state were marginalized economically and socially.43 To accommodate settlers, Indigenous people were separated from their land (and the source of their livelihood). Settlers felled forests, overfished rivers, and fenced and ploughed plains, effectively disrupting the economic base and asserting dominion over the land of Indigenous peoples around the world.44 To separate Indigenous people from the land, settler colonialism negotiated Treaties where possible, waged wars of extinction, eliminated traditional landholding practices, disrupted families, and imposed new political and spiritual order that came complete with new values and cultural practices.45 The outcome was usually disastrous for Indigenous people, while the chief beneficiaries of empire may well have been colonists in the settler colonies and their descendants. Many of the colonies they settled grew to be among the most prosperous societies in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century world.46
Settler colonies often went on to achieve political independence. In the case of Canada and the United States of America, these newly created nations spread across North America, creating land-based empires and continuing to colonize Indigenous peoples. Settler colonialism remains an ongoing process, shaping both the structure and the quality of the relationship between the settlers and Indigenous peoples.
At their height, the European empires laid claim to most of the earth’s surface and controlled the seas.47 Numerous arguments were advanced to justify such extravagant interventions into the lands and lives of other peoples. These were largely elaborations on two basic concepts: 1) the Christian God had given the Christian nations the right to colonize the lands they ‘discovered’ as long as they converted the Indigenous populations, and 2) the Europeans were bringing the benefits of civilization (a concept that was intertwined with Christianity) to the ‘heathen.’ In short, it was contended that people were being colonized for their own benefit, either in this world or the next.
The Roman Catholic Church, building on the traditions of the Roman Empire, conceived of itself as the guardian of a universal world order.48 The adoption of Christianity within the Roman Empire (which defined itself as ‘civilized’) reinforced the view that to be civilized was to be Christian.49 The fact that Christ was born during the reign of Augustus, the founding Roman emperor, was interpreted as a sign that the Romans had been preparing the way for Christianity.50 Subsequently, a narrative was fashioned that claimed that the fourth-century Emperor Constantine donated the Roman Empire to the Pope, who in turn bestowed it upon the Holy Roman Emperor. This came to be known as the “Donation of Constantine,” later demonstrated to be based on a forged document that had been created several hundred years after Constantine’s death. The Donation of Constantine was used to buttress papal authority to bestow sovereignty over North and South America to the Portuguese and Spanish crowns.51
The papacy was already playing a role in directing and legitimizing colonialism prior to Columbus’s voyages to the Americas in the 1490s. In 1433, Pope Eugene IV granted spiritual authority over a number of islands in the Madeira archipelago in southwest Portugal to the Portuguese Order of Christ, a religious and military body then led by Prince Henry of Portugal.52 In doing so, Eugene claimed an interest in seeking the salvation of all the people of the world.53 The papacy continued to legitimate and control imperial expansion through a series of papal bulls. (A papal bull is a charter issued by the Pope; it takes its name from the Latin word for the mould used to seal the document.) In 1455, Pope Nicolas V issued a bull (Romanus Pontifex) giving Portugal rights to the African coast from Cape Bojador (in the present-day Western Sahara) south. The bull also granted the Portuguese the right to reduce the inhabitants of Africa to slavery, in large measure as a result of the Portuguese exploration and possession of these lands.54 A 1481 bull (Aeterna Patris) gave Portugal the rights to lands and islands yet to be discovered from the Canary Islands “toward Guinea” (in Africa).55 With these bulls, the papacy was granting the lands of Indigenous peoples to the Portuguese Crown on the basis of discovery and conquest. These bulls helped shape the political and legal arguments that have come to be referred to as the “Doctrine of Discovery,” which was used to justify the colonization of the Americas in the sixteenth century.
Portuguese King João sought to use the bulls, which gave Portugal the right to “lands yet to be discovered,” to argue that the lands that Christopher Columbus had claimed for Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain actually belonged to him. For their part, the Spanish argued that the Portuguese had no claim to the lands in what is today known as the “Americas,” since they were not “toward Guinea,” as the 1481 bull had stipulated.56 To keep the Pope’s support, the Spanish made a number of promises. On the spiritual level, they promised Pope Alexander VI that the people Columbus had encountered would be converted to Christianity. Their efforts bore fruit. In 1493, Alexander issued the first of four bulls dealing with the Spanish claim to the Americas. The first bull (Inter Caetera Divinae) gave Spain the rights to any lands it had discovered (or would discover), provided they were not already in the possession of another Christian power and that the Spanish converted the Indigenous populations to Christianity. The second bull (Eximiae Devotionis) supported the Spanish claims, and a third (also named Inter Caetera) stated that Spanish dominion commenced at a line 100 leagues (a league was a unit of measure, approximately five kilometres) west of the Azores Islands. A fourth bull (Dudum Siquidem) further extended the Spanish claims. It also prohibited other Christian nations from trading in the waters granted to Spain without Spanish permission.57 This division was intended to give much of North and South America to Spain, while allowing Portugal to claim Brazil and the south Atlantic as part of its rights to any of the land along the westward route to Asia from Europe. The bulls of 1493 and 1494 are often referred to as either the “Alexandrine Bulls” or the “Bulls of Donation.”58
Subsequent conflicts with the papacy prompted a number of prominent Spanish writers and theologians to attempt to condone the conquest of the New World as the outcome of a just war. Arguing that a war was just if it was fought in self-defence or in defence of universal values, these authors held that Indigenous people were natural slaves and that they were committing crimes against nature, such as human sacrifice, for which they needed to be punished. War against Indigenous peoples in the New World was also just, they argued, because it would prevent the future sacrifice of innocents and spread Christianity to people whose souls would otherwise be condemned.59
While the bulls buttressed Spanish and Portuguese colonial ambitions, rulers who had been left out of the papally sanctioned scramble for empire did not accept them.60 French kings such as Francis I and Henri IV also rejected the validity of the Bulls of Donation.61 They argued that the Pope did not have jurisdiction over pagans and could not give away half the world, any more than he could give away their own kingdoms.62
Those who rejected the bulls or the authority of the papacy did not necessarily reject the Doctrine of Discovery—they simply modified it. To make a claim stick, the English argued, it was necessary to discover lands and take possession of them.63 Harman Verelst, who promoted the colonization in the eighteenth century of what is now the southern coast of the United States, wrote that “this Right arising from the first discovery is the first and fundamental Right of all European Nations, as to their Claim of Lands in America.”64 As time went on, a theory about land in what is today America developed in Europe, whereby the right of discovery created the right of pre-emption; that is, the right to acquire title by purchase or conquest.65
Even at the time, some critics pointed out that the right of discovery presumably gave the Tahitians and the Japanese the right to discover and, therefore, lay claim to Europe.66 The Spanish theologian Franciscus de Victoria (also referred to as Vitoria), in his 1532 lecture “On the Indians Lately Discovered,” wrote that there was no justification for the Pope’s granting the Americas to Spain and dismissed any right to establish by discovery, noting that “the barbarians were the true owners, both from the public and from the private standpoint.”67 Despite this, 300 years later, in Johnson v. M’Intosh, a case denying Native American land rights, United States Chief Justice John Marshall held that “all the nations of Europe, who have acquired territory on this continent, have asserted in themselves, and have recognized in others, the exclusive right of the discoverer to appropriate the lands occupied by the Indians.”68 The Johnson v. M’Intosh case, which is based on the Doctrine of Discovery, was still being cited in American courts in the twenty-first century, as is noted in a paper prepared for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues.69 The Canadian Supreme Court also cited Johnson v. M’Intosh in two Aboriginal rights cases, R. v. Sparrow in 1990, and in 1996 in R. v. Van der Peet.70
The Doctrine of Discovery was linked to a second idea: the lands being claimed were terra nullius (land belonging to no one) and therefore open to claim. On the basis of this concept, the British government claimed ownership of the entire Australian continent. There, the doctrine of terra nullius remained the law until it was successfully challenged in court in 1992.71 Under this doctrine, imperialists could argue that the presence of Indigenous people did not void a claim of terra nullius, since the Indigenous people simply occupied, rather than owned, the land. True ownership, they claimed, could come only with European-style agriculture. Seventeenth-century British political thinker John Locke held that ownership of land belonged only to those who improved its productivity. When one considered the profit that a Native American received from the produce of a fertile acre of land in North America compared to what an English landlord received from an acre in England, it was clear, he wrote, that the American acre was not worth one-thousandth of the English acre. Given such a disparity, the North American acre under Aboriginal control was little more than waste. Under this logic, it was not only permissible to seize the Aboriginal land; it was virtuous if, by so doing, the land would be rendered more productive and therefore more profitable.72 The legal writer Emeric de Vattel in 1758 argued that since the people of the Americas “rather roamed over them than inhabited them,” the French colonization of their land was “entirely lawful.”73
Underlying every one of these arguments was the belief that the colonizers were bringing civilization to savage people who could never civilize themselves. This argument was used in the seventeenth century to justify an intensification of the British colonization of Ireland, which was marked by widespread dispossession, religious persecution, and the settlement of British and Scottish landlords and farmers.74 In 1610, Sir John Davies, who oversaw the colonization of Ireland, claimed that the Irish “would never, to the end of the world, build houses, make townships or villages, or manure or improve the land as it ought to be.” To leave Ireland to the Irish meant the land would “lie waste like a wilderness.” Since the British king was “bound in conscience to use all lawful and just courses to reduce his people from barbarism to civility,” Davies wrote, he had little choice but to colonize Ireland.75 Similar arguments were made by colonists around the world. In this way, colonizers convinced themselves they were spreading not only agriculture, order, and trade, but also civilization.76
The ‘civilizing mission’ rested on a belief of racial and cultural superiority. European writers and politicians often arranged racial groups in a hierarchy, each with their own set of mental and physical capabilities. The ‘special gifts’ of the Europeans made it inevitable that they would conquer the lesser peoples. Beneath the Europeans, in descending order, were Asians, Africans, and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and Australia. Some held that Europeans had reached the pinnacle of civilization through a long and arduous process. In this view, the other peoples of the world had been held back by such factors as climate, geography, and migration. Through a civilizing process, Europeans could, however, raise the people of the world up to their level.
This view was replaced in the nineteenth century by a racism that chose to cloak itself in the language of science. This view held that the peoples of the world had differing abilities. For genetic reasons, there were limits on the ability of the less-developed peoples to improve. In some cases, it was thought, contact with superior races could lead to only one outcome: the extinction of the inferior peoples.77 In 1910, Jules Harmand, who had helped oversee the French colonization of Indo-China, wrote:
It is necessary, then, to accept as a principle and point of departure the fact that there is a hierarchy of races and civilizations, and that we belong to the superior race and civilization, still recognizing that, while superiority confers rights, it imposes strict obligations in return. The basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic, and military superiority, but our moral superiority. Our dignity rests on that quality, and it underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity. Material power is nothing but a means to an end.78
Attitudes of superiority gave rise to bold and sweeping generalizations: Islam was sterile; “Orientals,” fatalistic, when not corrupt, lazy, or, in the case of the “Chinaman,” simply inscrutable; the Japanese were liars, gifted but immoral; Africans, happy and carefree, even when bound in slavery, which freed them from the white man’s burden of thought.79 Speaking of the Zulus, among whom he was carrying out his missionary work, Presbyterian Daniel Lindley wrote, “In Africans the elements of improvement are, it seems to me, fewer and feebler than in any other portion of mankind. Their degradation is unfathomable—it has no bottom.”80
This sense of superiority provided a powerful justification for intervening in the lives of others, since, it was argued, these people were not civilized enough to govern themselves and achieve civilization on their own.81 On the basis of his involvement in the nineteenth-century wars fought to open China to the British opium trade, British admiral and explorer Sherard Osborn recommended in 1860 that the Chinese should be treated “as children; make them do what they know is for their benefit, as well as our own, and all difficulties with China are at an end.”82 Twelve years later, British historian and explorer Winwood Reade argued, “The great Turkish and Chinese Empires, the lands of Morocco, Abyssinia, and Thibet, will be eventually filled with free, industrious, and educated populations. But those people will never begin to advance until their property is rendered secure, until they enjoy the rights of man; and these they will never obtain except by means of European conquest.”83
These ideas shaped global policies towards Indigenous peoples. In 1883, Britain’s Lord Rosebery told an Australian audience, “It is on the British race, whether in Great Britain, or the United States, or the Colonies, or wherever it may be, that rest the highest hopes of those who try to penetrate the dark future, or who seek to raise and better the patient masses of mankind.”84 In that same year, the Canadian government opened its first industrial residential school for Aboriginal people at Battleford on the Canadian Prairies. The schools were a living expression of these ideas.
Lewis Henry Morgan, the leading American anthropologist of the nineteenth century and an advocate of the assimilation of Native Americans, wrote in 1877, “The Aryan family represents the central stream of human progress, because it produced the highest type of mankind, and because it has proved its intrinsic superiority by gradually assuming the control of the earth.”85 Canadian politicians were not immune to these sentiments. In 1885, when denying the vote to people of Asian ancestry, Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald warned that if Asian Canadians had the vote, they would “send Chinese representatives” to Parliament, where they would enforce “Asiatic principles,” which he described as “immoralities” that were “abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles.”86
These views remained respectable and common well into the twentieth century. The commemorative book produced in 1926 after the British Prince of Wales’s tour of Africa said that West Africans had “accepted the superficial attributes of civilization, but would straightway shed them and relapse and revert to primitive savagery if their white mentors withdrew.”87
At the outset of the colonial era, there was no free public school system in Europe. Those schools that did exist were operated by either religious organizations or private instructors or groups. In most cases, parents had to pay if they wanted their children to attend these schools. Religious study, along with reading, writing, and arithmetic, constituted the curriculum. Children were trained primarily by their parents and they generally followed in their parents’ occupations. However, during the nineteenth century, urbanization and industrialization so changed the world that, for many countries, public schooling became both a possibility and a necessity. The Industrial Revolution drove people off the land and into the cities. It was no longer the case that children would follow in their parents’ occupations. Schools came to be seen as the solution to the needs of parents, who could no longer provide their children with the skills they required; of employers, who were looking for workers who could follow instructions and accept discipline; and of elites, who feared that without education the newly created industrial working class would not accept the existing social order and their place in that order.88 The function of the public education system was to create a workforce that was productive and loyal to the existing political regime. In eighteenth-century Britain, charity schools were praised for teaching “Industry, Frugality, Order and Regularity.”89 In 1770, a British social reformer urged that four-year-old children living in poverty be sent to workhouses. There was, he wrote, “considerable use in their being, somehow or other, constantly employed at least twelve hours a day, whether they earn their living or not; for by these means, we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.”90
The stated goal of education in the colonies was no different from the overall colonial goal of bringing Christianity and civilization to the colonized. In practice, colonial schooling was established to consolidate colonial rule, extend foreign domination, and enhance economic exploitation.91 The type of education offered, if any, depended on whether the colonists were committed to policies of extermination, enslavement, segregation, or assimilation. In colonies of occupation, where the colonists depended on Indigenous labour to exploit local resources, a typical educational goal would be to provide students with the skills needed to be good farmers or artisans. In such cases, education might be offered broadly. Elsewhere, it might be provided largely to the children of local elites, who were expected to assist in the administration of the colony.92 For example, while the British East India Company initially banned missionaries from India, educational services were extended to allow the colonial administration to staff the lower ranks of the civil service with Indians.93
Many settler colonies took steps to separate children from their parents while providing them with some measure of a Western education, usually with the goal of assimilating the children into a subordinate role within colonial society. Colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, were urged to take Native American children into their homes to educate them. Authorization was even given to the colonists to imprison Native American religious leaders, so as to prevent them from opposing the missionary work.94 In the nineteenth century, authorities in Australia began separating Indigenous children from their parents, raising them in dormitories until they were fourteen, when they were to be found jobs as farm labourers or domestic workers.95 In the twentieth century, the Soviet Union operated residential schools for members of the twenty-six so-called small nationalities, not with the goal of Christianizing and civilizing them, but with the Soviet equivalent of these goals: converting them to socialism and forcing them to settle in communities.96
Many colonists thought that, when it came to Indigenous people, a little learning was a dangerous thing. George Simpson, the Hudson’s Bay Company’s North American governor, wrote in 1822, “I have always remarked that an enlightened Indian is good for nothing; there are several of them about the Bay side and totally useless, even the half Breeds of the Country who have been educated in Canada are black-guards of the very worst description, they not only pick the vices of the Whites upon which they improve but retain those of the Indian to the utmost extent.”97 In 1873, the British colonial secretary issued an instruction that in West Africa, “I would have nothing to do with the ‘educated natives’ as a body. I would treat with the hereditary chiefs only, and endeavour as far as possible to govern through them.”98 The curriculum of French schools in Vietnam was similarly limited, for fear that the supposedly ‘devious’ Vietnamese would surely convolute and misconstrue their learning.99
The general attitudes of the colonizers shaped the curriculum. In the early twentieth century, the French, convinced that Africans had little capacity for abstract thought, provided only a basic education in the primary schools they operated in their West African colonies.100 Indigenous languages were also judged as inadequate. Thomas Macaulay, a British politician, lawyer, and historian, served as the secretary of the Board of Control, the government agency that supervised the British East India Company. He took the lead in a campaign to make English, rather than Sanskrit and Persian, the language of education in government-supported schools in India.101 His 1835 paper supporting this policy argued that “a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.” The languages of India, in his opinion, were irrational, giving support to barbaric and false beliefs. English, on the other hand, offered “access to all the vast intellectual wealth, which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations.” Although he was a gifted linguist, Macaulay managed to reach these conclusions without having bothered to familiarize himself with any of the languages he was judging.102
This attitude towards languages spread to culture. In school, the Vietnamese were taught that, compared to dingy, unhealthy, poorly ventilated houses of the Vietnamese, French houses were large and well planned. Colonialism itself was explained as arising from France’s desire to protect the Vietnamese “from themselves and their own shortcomings such as gambling, excessive superstitions of all sorts and their love of chicanery which ruins both their savings and their health.”103 General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the head of the Hampstead Institute in Virginia, held similar views. He believed that the African American and Native American students who were sent to his manual training school in the 1880s were members of races that were a “thousand miles behind us in moral and mental development.”104
Not surprisingly, it was not uncommon for this sort of education to breed self-hatred, alienation, and cultural instability.105 In his book Decolonising the Mind, Kenyan writer Ngugi Wa Thiong’o argues that this education annihilates “a people’s belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland.”106 Writing of the North American experience, Mohawk activist Taiaiake Alfred describes how colonialism disconnected Indigenous people “from our responsibilities to one another and our respect for one another, our responsibilities and our respect for the land, and our responsibilities and respect for our culture.”107 Colonialism also impacted the colonists. In 1857, the British executed those who had taken part in the Indian Mutiny by firing cannons at them at point-blank range. One young British soldier wrote to his mother, “You can’t imagine such a horrible sight.” A month later, however, he confided that “I … think no more of stringing up or blowing away half a dozen mutineers before breakfast than I do of eating the same meal.”108 Aimé Césaire, who led the anti-colonialist movement in the French colony of Martinique, called this colonization’s “boomerang effect,” arguing “that the colonizer, who in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal, accustoms himself to treating him like an animal, and tends objectively to transform himself into an animal.”109
Non-Indigenous people were taught to be proud of the empire. Henrietta Marshall wrote a series of history books that were used in schools throughout the British Empire. At the beginning of her 1908 history of the empire itself, Our Empire Story, she acknowledged, “The stories are not all bright. How should they be? We have made mistakes, we have been checked here, we have stumbled there. We may own it without shame, perhaps almost without sorrow, and still love our Empire and its builders.”110 Throughout her works, Indigenous peoples are either savages or misguided children (although a Maori chief was “no ignorant savage, for the missionaries had taught him much”).111 In Canada, according to her chapter on Louis Riel, “the Métis were very ignorant” and Riel was “a clever but half-educated man” who, in 1885, was able to get not only the Métis but also the “Red Man” to follow him. “Tribe after tribe smeared their faces with war-paint, danced the war-dance, and set out to join the rebels. The North-West was full of the nameless horror and terror of the Red Man, as Canada had been long years before.”112 Marshall’s books remained in print into the 1950s. And their attitudes had a far longer life: a 1969 study of 143 Ontario school texts observed, “To take the term most frequently applied to each group, we are most likely to encounter in textbooks, devoted Christians, great Jews, hardworking immigrants, infidel Moslems, primitive Negroes, and savage Indians.”113 A decade later, the Manitoba Indian Brotherhood released The Shocking Truth about Indians in Textbooks, a study that underscored the continuing stereotypical portrayal of Aboriginal people in textbooks.114 Writing in 2007, Penney Clark, a Canadian educator, identified the following six categories into which Aboriginal people were still being slotted by Canadian textbooks. They could be spectators who were not part of the main story of Canadian history; exotic, savage warriors; uniquely spiritual people; members of the ‘Indian problem’; protestors; or simply invisible.115 In short, much of Canadian education has been colonial education.
The Canadian residential school experience is part of the history of imperialism of the past 500 years. In particular, it is part of the history of settler colonialism—and that history is not over. By the twentieth century, colonized people throughout the world began turning one European concept—mass nationalism—to their benefit. Wars of national liberation and campaigns of peaceful protest led to the collapse of the era of formal political empire. Between 1945 and 1965, the British, French, Dutch, German, Belgian, and what was left of the Spanish empires collapsed. Others, such as the Portuguese and Russian empires, lingered a little longer, but were gone by the end of the century. This period gave birth to over 100 new sovereign states.116 Those states are still living with the legacy of empire, and engaged in the difficult work of decolonizing their societies and grappling with their place in an economy that imperialism made global. The Indigenous people in settler societies have also participated in this global reaction to colonialism. In the 1980s, American Indigenous activist Edward Benton-Banai wrote of a generation of Indigenous people who were seeking to rescue and revive “what was left by the trail” by collecting and recording teachings, learning and reviving languages, participating in once-banned spiritual practices, and asserting an Indigenous right of self-government.117 So, while the age of territorial empire may be over, we are not yet living in a post-colonial world.
No process of reconciliation or decolonization can take place without first recognizing and addressing the legacy of colonialism. To begin this process, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada wishes to make explicit a number of points. Colonialism was undertaken to meet the perceived needs of the imperial powers. The justification offered for colonialism—the need to bring Christianity and civilization to the Indigenous people of the world—may have been sincerely and firmly held beliefs, but as justifications for intervening in the lives of other peoples, they do not stand up to legal, moral, or even logical scrutiny. As Spanish theologian Franciscus de Victoria stated nearly 500 years ago, the papacy had no authority to give away lands that belonged to Indigenous people. The Doctrine of Discovery cannot serve as the basis for a legitimate claim to the lands that were colonized, if for no other reason than that the so-called discovered lands were already well known to the Indigenous peoples who had inhabited them for thousands of years. Extending the Doctrine of Discovery to say that occupation provides a claim is merely saying that colonial claims were legitimate because colonists were successful in establishing colonies. The wars of conquest were not just wars; Indigenous peoples were not subhuman, and they were not living in violation of any universally agreed-upon set of values. There was no moral imperative to impose Christianity on the Indigenous peoples of the world, they did not need to be ‘civilized.’ Indigenous peoples had systems that were complete unto themselves and met their needs. Those systems were dynamic; they changed over time and were capable of continued change.118 There is no hierarchy of societies. Taken as a whole, the colonial process was justified on the sheer presumption of taking a specific set of European beliefs and values and proclaiming them to be universal values that could be imposed upon the peoples of the world. This universalizing of European values—so central to the colonial project—that was extended to North America served as the prime justification and rationale for the imposition of a residential school system on the Indigenous peoples of Canada.