Term Paper on "Female Aboriginal Survivors of Residential Schools in Canada"

Term Paper 16 pages (4224 words) Sources: 8 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Aboriginal Survivors

Female Aboriginal Survivors of Residential Schools in Canada

In 1993, many Native Indian women stood up before a Joint Commission to explain their hurt and despair resulted from their stays at Canadian Residential Schools. More recently the Canadian government asked the Law Commission of Canada (LLC) to investigate child abuse within the schools. The LLC report, "Restoring Dignity: Responding to Child Abuse in Canadian Institutions" was released in 2000. The report dealt with the history, the legacy and the demands for reparations for Native Aboriginal survivors of the residential boarding schools and reparation for the child abuse which took place there.

Paying increasing attention to disparities in health status between U.S. ethnoracial groups, one study by Gone examined cultural practices, including disparities in mental health status in American Indian communities. He found that the American or Native Indians had higher stress levels than any other ethnoracial groups, and suffered from alcoholism, drug use, suicide and depression (Gone 1).

The Residential home school system in use in Canada between 1892 and 1996 was an operational partnership between the government of Canada and the Roman Catholic, the Methodist, the Anglican, the Presbyterian and United Churches to bring Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian society. Native Indian children, both girls and boys, were sometimes forcibly, sometimes willingly removed from their parents' homes and placed into residential dorimitories. There they would live, work and sometimes play, under conditions reminiscent of the scenes in a Charles Dickens novel. As to discipline, physical and sexual abuse was common, as was starvation. The mortality rate was as high as 50% in some schools. (Tungilik 1).

The Canadian government paid the families an allowance while their children were in the schools as an incentive to send them. When incentives did not work, legal force was used. The reason behind the movement to place all Native Indian children in residential schools was to immerse them in the European/Christian culture so that their indigenous culture would be removed, replaced by what was considered a "better life." They were not allowed to speak their native language under threat of severe punishment (having tongues stuck to frozen fences, being whipped, locked up or ridiculed). They were not allowed to wear their native clothes or practice their native religion. They received a number by which they were called, rather than their name (Tunglik 1).

The political support from the government came from Indian Affairs, which perpetuated this cruel and demeaning way of incorporating the native inhabitants into the ruling population. Duncan C. Scott, head of Indian Affairs made the statement in 1920 that he wanted "to get rid of the Indian problem. Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed" (Tunglik 1).

The first "Home for Indian Girls" was established at Port Simpson in the mid-1800s. The Rev. Thomas Crosby felt that the condition of "Indian" women on the Pacific coast was so deplorable and degrading that in order to save some of them, he gathered them into a home to be looked after by Christian people, and safeguarded against violence. Conditions were so bad for these young women that Rev. Crosby risked his own financial situation to finish what was only partially financed by donations from his friends for a building to house them (Miller 217).

Food, clothing and money were requested of the good townspeople of Toronto. These homes were exclusively for females, who were also chosen for their aboriginal race and low class stature. Although race, class and gender affected the general townspeople's prejudices, the idea of protecting women was seen as a positive thing to do. There were reasons for this - the officials and missionaries who had come into power in Toronto perceived females to be the weaker sex and as a matter of course, they should be sheltered.

The school was modeled after the Euro-Canadian schools, in that the social relationships of the persons in the school were expected to be similar to the prevailing customs of the occupying culture. The way that the administrators perceived aptitudes, destinies and the roles of both male and females were deeply instilled in the operation of the institution. Eventually, the natives who were part of the school population and many members of the missionary staff appreciated the power and presence of these gender roles.

In Post-Confederation schools in Canada, there were differing expectations of females and male students. Unlike the Ursulines in New France and the Jesuits, who assumed both sexes need to be educated, the administrators of the Canadian schools of Native Aboriginals reserved the industrial schooling for the males. Ottawa designed the residential institutions to replace an economy largely dependent upon buffalo with an economy based on industry. Aboriginal schools located in Mount Elgin and Wikwemikong, Ontario housed both males and females, while the Catholic schools at Libret, High River and Battleford were primarily for males who wished to learn a trade, though Libret and High River also housed a small group of girls.

Women were, according to the Victorian ideals of the day, to be the center of the home and would be the ones who influenced the children, so should be ethically and practically educated, for they would become the bedrock of future generations. Therefore a good education for women was the goal of the clerics and school administrators. Peter Jones, a Methodist Mississauga missionary, appealed for funds in 1835 to provide girls with "proper instruction in work... And other domestic duties," because the poverty they lived in created for them a situation in which, "when they leave the schools and become parents themselves [they] are very little prepared to take care of a family" (Miller 218).

Edward Blake, in 1883, voiced the same opinion when he criticized the Tory's initial provisions for industrial schools for boys only, urging schooling for girls as well. Father Hugonnard of Lebret also found that a school for females was "absolutely necessary to effect the civilization of the next generation of Indians." He felt that only educating boys, who would then marry uneducated and unindoctrinated women, would ensure "reversion to 'heathen' ways. 'It will be nearly futile to educate the boys and leave the girls uneducated"(Miller 218).

The current Prime Minister agreed with this attitude toward schooling of the Native Aboriginals and within a year of the institution of these schools conceded that the education of women was "of as much importance as a factor in the civilization and advancement of the Indian race, as the education of the male portion of the community." Citing the example and influence of the mother in a household, he pointed out that her advice and instruction has as much influence as the example set by the father. He feared the result of any marriage where a male residential school graduate married an unschooled woman would be either they would relapse into savagery or the children of these marriages, following the teachings of the mother, would probably adopt "the life and habits of the pure Indian." (Miller 219).

The idea of coeducational schools, however, was quite different in the 1800s than it is today. In the mid-1800s, boys and girls scarcely saw each other, they were so fanatically segregated. The Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs in 1895 announced that the department was opposed to coeducation, unless separate buildings were built for boys and girls "or by some other perfect arrangement they can be kept from the possibility of access to each other." Communication between the sexes was shunned and any breach was met with a severe reproof, if not corporal punishment. In 1993, a former female student of the Williams Lake Catholic school said "I was whipped for talking to my brother. He was my brother, for God's sake!" She was testifying at an open hearing of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. Another group of sisters recalled sneaking out in the evenings to meet their brother in the bushes to visit. Nowhere was there allowed any kind of communication between the sexes, not in the playrooms, tables in the dining halls, pews in church and sometimes not even in the classrooms. For children used to freely playing with each other to arrive at and be severely segregated in a residential school where boys and girls could not even talk to each other seemed harsh and alien.

The term "industrial" replaced "residential" in defining the role of the schools in the early part of the 20th century. In Toronto during the 1880s and 1890s, charitable organizations and philanthropists created places where "vicious" children from poverty-stricken neighborhoods might be housed and educated. In 1874, Ontario passed an Industrial Schools Act which set up limited provisions for neglected children to be educated. In 1887 the Industrial Schools Association of Toronto opened the Victoria Industrial School (Miller 252).

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