T he closing of residential schools did not bring their story to an end. The legacy of the schools continues to this day. It is reflected in the significant educational, income, and health disparities between Aboriginal people and other Canadians—disparities that condemn many Aboriginal people to shorter, poorer, and more troubled lives. The legacy is also reflected in the intense racism some people harbour against Aboriginal people and the systemic and other forms of discrimination Aboriginal people regularly experience in Canada. Over a century of cultural genocide has left most Aboriginal languages on the verge of extinction. The disproportionate apprehension of Aboriginal children by child welfare agencies and the disproportionate imprisonment and victimization of Aboriginal people are all part of the legacy of the way that Aboriginal children were treated in residential schools.
Many students were permanently damaged by residential schools. Separated from their parents, they grew up knowing neither respect nor affection. A school system that mocked and suppressed their families’ cultures and traditions destroyed their sense of self-worth. Poorly trained teachers working with an irrelevant curriculum left students feeling branded as failures. Children who had been bullied and abused carried a burden of shame and anger for the rest of their lives. Overwhelmed by this legacy, many succumbed to despair and depression. Countless lives were lost to alcohol and drugs. Families were destroyed, children were displaced by the child welfare system.
The Survivors are not the only ones whose lives have been disrupted and scarred by the residential schools. The legacy has also profoundly affected their partners, their children, their grandchildren, their extended families, and their communities. Children who were abused in the schools sometimes went on to abuse others. Some students developed addictions as a means of coping. Students who were treated and punished as prisoners in the schools sometimes graduated to real prisons.
These impacts cannot be attributed solely to residential schooling. But they are clearly linked to the Aboriginal policies of the federal government over the last 150 years. Residential schooling, which sought to remake each new generation of Aboriginal children, was both central to and an emblematic element of those policies. The beliefs and attitudes that were used to justify the establishment of residential schools are not things of the past: they continue to animate much of what passes for Aboriginal policy today. Reconciliation will require more than pious words about the shortcomings of those who preceded us. It obliges us to both recognize the ways in which the legacy of residential schools continues to disfigure Canadian life and to abandon policies and approaches that currently serve to extend that hurtful legacy.
This volume examines the legacy of Canada’s policy of assimilation and the residential schools it created in five specific areas: child welfare, education, language and culture, health, and justice.
The federal government and the churches believed that Aboriginal parenting, language, and culture were harmful to Aboriginal children. Consequently, a central objective of the residential schools was to separate Aboriginal children from their parents and communities to “civilize” and Christianize them. For generations, children were cut off from their families. At the height of the system in 1953, over 11,000 Aboriginal children were in residential schools.1 The schools were in many ways more a child welfare system than an educational one. A survey in 1953 suggested that 4,313 of those students were thought to be suffering from “neglect” at home.2 From the 1940s onwards, residential schools increasingly served as orphanages and child welfare facilities. By 1960, the federal government estimated that 50% of the children in residential schools were there for child-protection reasons.3
The schools were intended to sever the link between Aboriginal children and parents. They did this work only too well. Family connections were permanently broken. Children exposed to strict and regimented discipline in the schools not only lost their connections to parents, but also found it difficult to become loving parents.
Child welfare agencies across Canada removed thousands of Aboriginal children from their families and communities and placed them in non-Aboriginal homes with little consideration of the need to preserve their culture and identity. Children were placed in homes in different parts of the country, in the United States, and even overseas. The mass adoptions continued between 1960 and 1990.4
Aboriginal children are still being separated from their families and communities and placed in the care of child welfare agencies. Like the schools, child welfare agencies are underfunded, often culturally inappropriate, and, far too often, put Aboriginal children in unsafe situations. The child welfare system is the residential school system of our day.
The residential school system failed as an educational system. Those who administered the system and many of its teachers assumed that Aboriginal children were unfit for anything more than a rudimentary elementary or vocational education. The focus on elementary level and religious training amounted to a self-fulfilling prophecy. Most students left residential schools unprepared to succeed either in the market economy or to pursue more traditional activities such as hunting and fishing. The educational impact of the government’s policy of assimilation was pervasive. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal children attending public schools received the same message about Aboriginal inferiority as students in residential schools. This helps explain why even those Aboriginal children who did not attend a residential school grew up with the same sense of humiliation and low self-esteem, and why so many Canadians have such a low opinion of Aboriginal people.
One of the most far-reaching and devastating legacies of residential schools has been their impact on the educational and economic success of Aboriginal people. The lack of role models and mentors, insufficient funds for the schools, inadequate teachers, and unsuitable curricula taught in a foreign language all contributed to dismal success rates. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada has heard many examples of students who attended residential school for eight or more years, but left with nothing more than Grade Three achievement, and sometimes without even the ability to read. According to Indian Affairs annual reports, in the 1950s only half of each year’s enrolment made it to Grade Six.5
Poor educational achievement has led to the chronic unemployment or underemployment, poverty, poor housing, substance abuse, family violence, and ill health that many former students of the schools have suffered as adults.
Governmental failure to meet the educational needs of Aboriginal children continues to the present day. Government funding is both inadequate and inequitably distributed. Educational achievement rates continue to be poor. While secondary school graduation rates for all Aboriginal people have improved since the closure of the schools, considerable gaps remain with the non-Aboriginal population.
Lower educational attainment for the children of Survivors has severely limited their employment and earning potential, just as it did for their parents. Aboriginal people on average have much lower incomes and are more likely to experience unemployment, and are more likely to collect employment insurance and social assistance benefits than non-Aboriginal people in Canada.6
The income gap is pervasive: non-Aboriginal Canadians earn more than Aboriginal workers no matter whether they work on reserves, off reserves, in urban, rural, or remote locations.7 The rate of poverty for Aboriginal children is disturbingly high—40%, compared to 17% for all children in Canada.8 Overcoming this legacy will require Aboriginal education systems that meet the needs of Aboriginal students and respect Aboriginal parents, families, and cultures.
In a study of the impact of residential schools, the Assembly of First Nations noted in 1994 that
language is necessary to define and maintain a world view. For this reason, some First Nation Elders to this day will say that knowing or learning the native language is basic to any deep understanding of a First Nation way of life, to being a First Nation person. For them, a First Nation world is quite simply not possible without its own language. For them, the impact of residential school silencing their language is equivalent to a residential school silencing their world.9
Residential schools were a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that they no longer existed as distinct peoples. English—and to a far lesser degree French—were the only languages of instruction allowed in most residential schools.
Students were punished—often severely—for speaking their own languages. Conrad Burns, whose father attended the Prince Albert school, named this policy for what it was: “It was a cultural genocide. People were beaten for their language, people were beaten because … they followed their own ways.”10
The damage affected future generations, as former students found themselves unable or unwilling to teach their own children Aboriginal languages and cultural ways. As a result many of the almost ninety surviving Aboriginal languages in Canada are under serious threat. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has found that 70% of Canada’s Aboriginal languages are endangered.11 In the 2011 census, 14.5% of the Aboriginal population reported that their first language learned was an Aboriginal language.12 In the previous 2006 census, 18% of those who identified as Aboriginal had reported an Aboriginal language as their first language learned, and, a decade earlier, in the 1996 census, the figure was 26%. If the preservation of Aboriginal languages does not become a priority both for governments and for Aboriginal communities, then what the residential schools failed to accomplish will come about through a process of systematic neglect.
Residential schools endangered the health and well-being of the children who attended them. Many students succumbed to infectious disease—particularly tuberculosis—at rates far in excess of non-Aboriginal children.13 Children who had been poorly fed and raised in the unsanitary conditions that characterized most residential schools were susceptible to a variety of health problems as adults. Many would later succumb to tuberculosis that they contracted in the schools.14
Sexual and physical abuse, as well as separation from families and communities, caused lasting trauma for many others. In many cases, former students could find no alternatives to self-harm.15 The effects of this trauma were often passed on to the children of residential school Survivors and sometimes to their grandchildren.
The overall suicide rate among First Nation communities is about twice that of the total Canadian population. For Inuit, the rate is still higher: six to eleven times the rate for the general population. Aboriginal youth between the ages of ten and twenty-nine who are living on reserves are five to six times more likely to die by suicide than non-Aboriginal youth.16
Health disparities of such magnitude have social roots. They are stark evidence of federal policies that separated Aboriginal people from their traditional lands and livelihoods, confining them to cramped and inadequate housing on reserves that lacked the basic sanitary services. It was from these communities that residential school students were recruited and to them, their health further weakened, that they returned. A comprehensive health care strategy that recognizes the value of traditional healing practices is desperately needed to help close these gaps in health outcomes.
Residential schools inflicted profound injustices on Aboriginal people. Aboriginal parents were forced, often under pressure from the police, to give up their children to the schools. Children were taken far from their communities to live in frightening custodial institutions that felt like prisons. The children who attended residential schools were treated as if they were offenders and were at risk of being physically and sexually abused.
The Canadian legal system failed to provide justice to Survivors who were abused. When, in the late 1980s, that system eventually did begin to respond to the abuse, it did so inadequately and in a way that often re-victimized the Survivors. The Commission has been able to identify fewer than fifty convictions stemming from abuse at residential schools, a small fraction of the more than 38,000 claims of sexual and serious physical abuse that were submitted to the independent adjudication process that was established to assess and compensate residential school abuse claims.17
In many ways, the residential school experience lies at the root of the current over-incarceration of Aboriginal people. Traumatized by their school experiences, many succumbed to addictions and found themselves among the disproportionate number of Aboriginal people who come into conflict with the law.
Once Aboriginal persons are arrested, prosecuted, and convicted, they are more likely to be sentenced to prison than non-Aboriginal people. In 2011, Aboriginal people made up 4% of the Canadian population, yet they accounted for 28% of admissions to sentenced custody.18 Of those admitted into provincial and territorial custody in 2011–12, Aboriginal females accounted for 43%, compared to 27% for Aboriginal males.19 And in the same year, 49% of girls below the age of eighteen admitted to custody were Aboriginal, compared to 36% of males.20
There is a troubling link between the substance abuse that has plagued many residential school Survivors and the overincarceration of Aboriginal people. Fetal alcohol spectrum disorder (FASD) is a permanent brain injury caused when a woman’s consumption of alcohol during pregnancy affects her fetus.21 The disabilities associated with FASD include memory impairments, problems with judgment and abstract reasoning, and poor adaptive functioning.22 Studies from Canada and the United States suggest that 15% to 20% of prisoners have FASD. A recent Canadian study found that offenders with FASD had much higher rates of criminal involvement than those without FASD, including more juvenile and adult convictions.23 Diagnosing FASD can be a long and costly process and the lack of a confirmed diagnosis can result in the unjust imprisonment of Aboriginal people who are living with a disability. In this way, the traumas of residential school are quite literally passed down from one generation to another.24
As well as being more likely to be involved as offenders with the justice system, Aboriginal people are 58% more likely than non-Aboriginal people to be the victims of crime.25 Aboriginal women report being victimized by violent crime at a rate almost three times higher than non-Aboriginal women—13% of Aboriginal women reported being victimized by violent crime in 2009.26 The most disturbing aspect of this victimization is the extraordinary number of Aboriginal women and girls who have been murdered or are reported as missing. A 2014 RCMP report found that, between 1980 and 2012, 1,017 Aboriginal women and girls were killed and 164 were missing. Of these, 225 these cases remain unsolved.27
The Commission is convinced that genuine reconciliation will not be possible until the broad legacy of the schools is both understood and addressed. Canada has acknowledged some aspects of the ongoing legacy and harms of residential schools; the Supreme Court has recognized that the legacy of residential schools should be considered when sentencing Aboriginal offenders. While these have been important measures, they have not been sufficient to address the grossly disproportionate imprisonment of Aboriginal people, which continues to grow, in part, because of a lack of adequate funding and support for culturally appropriate alternatives to imprisonment. There has been an increase in Aboriginal child welfare agencies, but the disproportionate apprehension of Aboriginal children continues to increase because of a lack of adequate funding for culturally appropriate supports that would allow children to remain safely with their families.
Many of the individual and collective harms have not yet been addressed, even after the negotiated out-of-court settlement of the residential school litigation in 2006, and Canada’s apology in 2008. In fact, some of the damages done by residential schools to Aboriginal families, languages, education, and health may be perpetuated and even worsened as a result of current governmental policies. New policies may be based on a lack of understanding of Aboriginal people similar to that which motivated the schools. For example, child welfare and health policies may fail to take into account the importance of community in raising children. We must learn from the failure of the schools to ensure that the mistakes of the past are not repeated in the future.
Understanding and redressing the legacy of residential schools will benefit all Canadians. Governments in Canada spend billions of dollars each year responding to the symptoms of the intergenerational trauma of residential schools. Much of this money is spent on crisis interventions related to child welfare, family violence, ill health, and crime. Despite genuine reform efforts, the dramatic overrepresentation of Aboriginal children in foster care, and among the sick, the injured, and the imprisoned continues to grow. Only a real commitment to reconciliation and change will reverse the trends and lay the foundation for a truly just and equitable nation.
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The following chapters include Calls to Action as developed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Calls to Action in this volume are numbered according to the order in which they appear in Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Also see the Calls to Action in this volume.