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Spotlight on Residential Schools
RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS ANOTHER VIEW
By G. Campbell McDonald
(This was first published in Challenge Magazine. Great Catholic Issues November 2001. Used here January 7, 2002 with the permission of the author.)
My definition and judgment of Indian residential schools are one and the same. It was a Government of Canada segregated school system for kidnapped Indian children, run by the Roman Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian Churches. Under the system, white strangers removed native children from their families, communities and cultures and placed them in schools designed to assimilate them, against their nature, into the European and Christian cultures.
It was a hellish disaster. The lives of innocent children were shattered by culture shock magnified by physical and sexual abuse. Thousands of the surviving victims are now demanding a national accounting and due compensation for their sufferings. The Canadian public, for its part, has remained largely unmoved throughout. The reason, I believe, is because the vast majority of Canadians simply do not regard natives as people. Our New Age social conscience prompts us to stand up for caged circus animals, beached whales and abused dolphins, but when it comes to natives -- abused, alcoholic, diabetic, tubercular, gas-sniffing, suicidal natives on reserves they are out of sight and out of mind.
The media must bear some responsibility for this. Natives are rarely portrayed as people of common decency and integrity. The National Post in particular is notorious for stories denigrating First Nations’ struggles for recognition of their traditional and human rights, not the least of which is compensation for residential schools abuse.
CHALLENGE provides a case in point. Your May issue reprinted a March 17 National Post story which, unfortunately, gave credence to an already discredited attempt to whitewash the guilt-stained residential schools record. The National Post story was twice tainted. First, it misrepresented the official status of its source, John Siebert. Second, its sensational heading -- a quote attributed to Mr. Siebert -- “Contrary to popular belief, most native Canadians never entered a residential school ” -- misrepresented the nature of the residential school debate. It has never been about how many native Canadians “entered” residential school. The issue revolves around what happened to the children after they were taken into the system.
Here is how the National Post launched its factually flawed story on St. Patrick’s Day: “Indian residential schools were not the forces of cultural destruction they are widely portrayed to have been and the government would be wrong to compensate thousands of former students who allege the schools cost them their families, language and heritage, says a researcher for the United Church of Canada.” The National Post reporter, Richard Foot, then identified the alleged church researcher as John Siebert, who had “spent the past six years reading residential school records now archived at the Department of Indian Affairs.”
The front page story surprised no one more than the United Church of Canada. Senior officials moved swiftly to distance the church from Mr. Siebert’s views. In a letter to the National Post on March 22, General Secretary Virginia Coleman disavowed John Siebert’s official status. “While John Siebert was at one time an employee of the United Church of Canada and, more recently, has done [freelance] research for the church,” she wrote, “ it is important to note that he is not a spokesperson for The United Church of Canada. The views which he expressed…are his and do not reflect the policy of our church.”
The day after Ms. Coleman disowned Mr. Siebert, the church went online (at http://www.uccan.org/airs/010323.htm) and posted a six-page response to Mr. Siebert’s disinformation. “Written documents,” the church observed, “never represent anything more than a partial rendering of the truth. Written by those in charge, they rarely reflect the lived experience of those…whose voices are not heard in the archival record.” Thus: “To rely on one to the exclusion of the other gives us something dangerously less than the truth.”
Georges Erasmus, who served as co-chair of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples which reported in 1996, and who is now chairman of the Aboriginal Healing Foundation in Ottawa, was next to voice his distress over John Siebert’s destructive opinions. In a letter to the National Post on March 28, Mr. Erasmus said: “Let us concede at the outset that some students enjoyed residential school, and many school employees were dedicated and helpful people.” Having acknowledged this measure of goodness in the midst of evil, Mr. Erasmus took sharp exception to Mr. Siebert’s suggestion that “aboriginal people are lying” about their mounting abuse claims. “Or they are the dupes of unscrupulous lawyers” in the growing number of class actions for damages from the government and the four churches. Both of Mr. Siebert’s claims, Mr. Erasmus wrote, “are dismissive of aboriginal experience, and neither is proved.” He said it was “callous and arrogant” of Mr. Siebert to suggest that “thousands of people who weep when they talk about residential school, and have spent a lifetime untangling the knots of history, are weeping over nothimg.”
The United Church also declared its faith in the word of the victims. In a phrase that leapt off the page, what was described as most impressive about the experience of listening to a residential school survivor’s story was, “the direct honesty of the storyteller.”
I have listened to one of my native friends, now in his fifties, tell his story. Taken from his home near the forests of southern Ontario as a child, he was driven by white strangers in a police truck with other boys to the Mohawk Institute in Brantford. There he was subjected to hunger which drove him, half-starved, to scavenge for food in the town dump. Discipline was brutal, often sadistic. Mischievous boys were punished in public with belt-buckle beatings or whippings which left their backs bloody. My friend remembers the night he was raped. Still a child a skinny, scared nine-year-old he was smothered in his bed and sodomized by a burly attacker in the blackness of the school dormitory. My friend weeps. For him, school is never out.
Can there ever be healing? Not the National Post-Siebert way. Statistics can never reflect the anguish remaining from the residential school fallout. “Dismissal and denial, wrapped up in numbers, will only deepen the rift,” Georges Erasmus feels. Canadians, he says, must grapple with the question of the legacy of the residential school system, “not only for the purposes of litigation and compensation, but also for universal healing and reconciliation.”
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