Residential Schools & the Theft of Native American Children
Duck Lake is in the center of Saskatchewan, population 579, most of them Cree.
It was the home of one of St. Michael's Indian Residential School, one of the last operating schools in the Canadian Indian residential school system, which closed in 1996.
The point of the school, and of all residential schools, was forced assimilation, which is a form of cultural genocide.
"They picked us up here in a truck in Sturgeon Lake. It was kind of a cattle truck. And they loaded us up. My mom was crying. My dad was turning away, didn't want to look at us being herded in. There was an RCMP officer, a priest and the Indian agent, and they told my parents that they have to go to a Catholic school in St. Michael's. And if you don't send them to school, you will end up in jail. That's what they told our parents. And the priest says, "We will look after your children. We will love your children. I will be the father to your children. And we have nuns and sisters in school over there. They will be the mothers of your children." (from the podcast Stolen).
"I will be the father to your children. And we have nuns and sisters... They will be the mothers of your children" is a statement of erasure. It says that the Indigenous families will be replaced by abusive white priests and nuns, under the authority of the Canadian government, and under threat of imprisonment by the police. This symbolizes the intent behind these schools: to assimilate Indigenous children into Western culture, severing their connections to native nations and thereby stripping them of their languages and traditions. By replacing the parents, the system aimed to erase the cultural and familial bonds these children had.
Instead of a school bus, authorities sent a cattle truck to remove the kids, dehumanizing them.
The priest promises to look after the kids, but everyone, including the priest, knew that was a lie. The children would be physically, emotionally and sexually and abused, and as many as one in four would die.
The mother crying and the father turning speak to the pain, helplessness, and trauma experienced by Indigenous families as their children were taken from them. They had no choice.
"The extinction of the Indians as Indians is the ultimate end" of the Canadian Indian Policy said A.G. Harper in 1999.
"The United States government was very clear in its Indian policy. It was the express purpose of the United States government to eliminate all vestiges of tribal and cultural identity for American Indian people. One of the main vehicles for this annihilation was education." writes Maureen Smith in her paper “Forever Changed: Boarding School narrative of American Indian Identity in the U.S. and Canada” (2001).
Kill the Indian, save the man.
In 1819 the U.S. Congress passed The Civilization Fund Act.
Residential schools were a means of enforcing the “civilization process".
"Educate him in the rudiments of our language. Teach him to work. Send him to his home, and tell him he must practice what he has been taught or starve. It will in a generation regenerate the race. It will exterminate the Indian, but develop a man." - Charles Mix, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1860
In the residential schools, children were taught that they and their lifestyle were a sin and an abomination to God, and that the only escape was for them to become like whites. Everything Indigenous was viewed as negative.
“With education will come morality, cleanliness, self-respect, industry and above all, a Christianized humanity, the foundation stone of the world's progress and well-being.” -Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Jones.
These schools, and their aim of “civilizing” Indigenous people by severing them from their culture, continued through the 1990s.
Cultural Genocide.
Every 14 days, another Indigenous language dies.
With that death comes the loss of cultural knowledge, the loss of cultural identity, and of individual identity as people become cut off from their ancestors, their traditions, and their land, the loss of worldview, including ways of thinking, categorizing, and valuing aspects of life, the loss of history, and the loss of community cohesion and self-esteem, which translates directly into socio-economic loss.
In other words, with the death of Indigenous language comes the death of Indigenous culture. And that is known as cultural genocide.
Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico combine to one of the hotspots of Indigenous language extinction, researchers say. There are 40 languages in danger of becoming extinct. There are only five elderly speakers of the Yuchi language, which may be unrelated to any other language in the world. When they die, the Yuchi culture dies with them.
The youngest fluent speaker of Cherokee is in his early 40s. Most of the 2,000 or so people who speak Cherokee are over the age of 60, 4 or 5 a month dying of old age. Indigenous Americans have the lowest life expectancy of all groups in the United States. Life expectancy of the Lakota Sioux on the Pineridge Reservation is 48 years for men, 52 years for women.
Cultural genocide.
Sexual Abuse.
“Virtually from the outset, a shockingly large proportion of the 150,000 Indigenous children sent to residential schools were subjected to rape and molestation from principals, teachers, dormitory supervisors and even maintenance workers and janitors. At some schools, upwards of 70 per cent of students faced some form of sexual abuse.” (National Post)
The Catholic Church ran most of the residential schools in Canada. The United States Indian Residential School System eclipsed that of Canada in size, and most of those schools were also run by the Catholic Church.
Former Indian Residential School dorm supervisor Arthur Plint was tried and convicted in 1995 for a nearly 20 year sexual abuse spree at the Alberni Residential School on Vancouver Island.
“Nothing more than institutionalized pedophilia” is how Justice Douglas Hogarth, who presided Plint’s sentencing, described the Indian residential school system. He added that the children forced to attend these schools were “not only in a school situation but also prisoners.”
The horrifying revelations at Plint’s trial pushed Canada towards a public reckoning with the traumatic legacy of Indian Residential Schools. In 2016, private investigators hired by the Canadian government uncovered more than 5,300 people believed to have committed sexual abuse in the Canadian Residential School System. Fewer than 50 were ever convicted. The point of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was to identify former victims they could pay off in exchange for those victims signing away the right to sue the government for having been abused. In order to qualify for a pay-off, the victims would need to appear before the committee, relive their victimization, and then the committee would decided whether or not they deserved compensation.
After six years of study, The Truth and Reconciliation Committee issued their findings. They determined the Residential School System was a form of cultural genocide.
For a compelling and horrifying deep dive into this subject, you might consider reading “Killing the Indian in the Child: Materialities of Death and Political Formations of Life in the Canadian Indian Residential School System” by Bryanne Huston Young. The podcast Stolen examines one school in Saskatchewan.
Mass Graves.
In 2021, 215 bodies were found in a mass grave at the Kamloops Indian Residential School on Vancouver Island, which operated from 1890 until the late 1970s.
182 unmarked graves were found at another British Columbia school, this time in Cranbrook, and 751 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Residential School on the Cowessess reserve in Saskatchewan.
As of 2022, over 1,700 unmarked graves have been discovered in Canada.
The Truth and Reconciliation Committee estimates that 4,100 children died from disease due to overcrowding, malnutrition and poor sanitation, or died after being abused or trying to run away while attending Canadian Residential Schools, and are buried in unmarked graves. The real number is likely considerably higher.
Often, children were made to dig the graves for their former classmates. Other classmates just “disappeared”, never to be seen or heard from again.
Tearing children from their families and their culture has had devastating effects on Indigenous populations. The children were never assimilated into white settler culture, but lost their Native culture.
“Our communities still feel the impacts of these institutions in our everyday lives. We're way over-represented in child welfare and adoptions and foster care. We're way over-represented in the prisons. You can draw a direct line with that to these places and the pain of that, that has been passed on from generation to generation.” (CBS News)
That, once again, is cultural genocide.
The United States lags behind. It wasn’t until 2021 that U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland (who is Laguna) announced an initiative to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of having forcibly removed “hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities” in the United States.
(Note: Deb Haaland is the first Native American ever to lead a cabinet-level agency. Native American nations are not represented in Congress; the United States is only now considering the possibility of honoring a two hundred year old treaty by seating a delegate from the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.)
MK Ultra and medical experiments.
Twenty of the twenty three defendents at the Nuremberg Trials were medical doctors charged with war crimes for performing medical experiments, without the subjects consent, on prisoners of war and civilians of occupied countries, in the course of which experiments the defendants committed "brutalities, cruelties, tortures, atrocities, and other inhuman acts." The Nuremberg Code was established in response.
MKUltra was an illegal human experimentation program conducted by the CIA with the aim of discovering techniques and identifying drugs that could be used for forcing confessions through brainwashing and psychological torture during interrogations.
Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and William Brennan both said that MKUltra defied the Nuremberg Code.
The CIA experiments in the United States mostly famously involved use of LSD. There were additional experiments undertaken in Canada, by Scottish psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron, who was fascinated and influenced by the Nuremberg trials. Cameron distinguished populations between "the weak" and "the strong". He promoted “removing” the weak from society, which is eugenics. In the meanwhile, he would perform medical experiments on them, without their consent, of course.
Cameron's experiments were done at McGill University in Montreal, jointly funded by the CIA and the Canadian government. In addition to the subjects at McGill University in Montreal, women inmates at Kingston's Prison for Women were dosed with LSD and subject to electroshock therapy, as were Indigenous children in residential schools. Vaccines, vitamins, and medications were also tested for side-effects on Indigeneous children. Some of the many disappeared Indigenous children have been linked to McGill University, and there is evidence of unmarked graves at McGill University's Royal Victoria Hospital, where many of the experiments were untaken.
The Canadian government has been fighting a group of Mohawk Mothers who want to to check the hospital grounds for unmarked graves. Some remains have already been found. The government would like to prevent the search in order prevent the discovery of more Indigenous children’s remains.
Cultural Genocide has failed.
Settler colonialism requires the erasure of Indigenous people. Some of this was done through slaughter. Some of it was done through starvation. For the past century, a primary means has been cultural genocide - the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements that make one group of people distinct from another.
A lot of this cultural destruction was done by forcing children from their homes and families and people and sending them to schools that were run like Catholic prisons, where they would be beaten for speaking their own language, starved, raped, and, on occasion, nonconsenting subjects of medical experiments.
In the minds of many white settlers, this has worked.
We are taught, and largely believe, that Indigenous people are a thing of the past, and that those who remain exist primarily as living museums, their identities reduced to a set of stereotyped cultural traits, practices, or artifacts stuck in some 18th or 19th century past, meant to be consumed by tourists. The belief of many of us white folks seems to be that without tourism, Indigenous culture would vanish altogether.
Of course, we are wrong.
Despite settler’s best efforts, Indigenous culture has not died, and Indigenous resistance remains strong. And this is very good news.
It’s astounding to me sometimes that those of us who would defend the Ballona Wetlands in Los Angeles to protect endangered butterflies and birds really don’t care about endangered Indigenous peoples. As long as white folks survive, we reckon humanity is fine.
If everyone on the planet lived like white Americans, we would need 4 to 5 Earths to sustain the population. We have proven to be disastrous stewards of, well, everything. We have treated and still treat this planet, and this planet’s non European, non Christian people in a way as devastating as our genocidal treatment of Indigenous people in the Americas. Decolonization becomes imperative. For our own survival, we cannot be left in charge.
Reading List
Reckoning with the theft of Native American children - Deb Haaland is investigating the history of hundreds of boarding schools that tried to “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
The U.S. history of Native American Boarding Schools - The Indigenous Foundation
Forever Changed: Boarding School Narratives of American Indian Identity in the U.S. and Canada - Maureen Smith
New Docs Link CIA to Medical Torture of Indigenous Children and Black Prisoners - Truthout.org
Montreal MKULTRA Experiments - the Canadian Encyclopedia
Listen
Stolen: Surviving St. Michaels - Gimlet Media
MKUltra and the kidnapping of Native children w/ Mohawk Mothers - The Red Nation Podcast