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District of West Vancouver mayor Mary-Ann Booth said in light of the devastating news of the discovery of the remains of children at the Kamloops Residential School in late May, the district considered cancelling Canada Day celebrations. Seeking guidance, Booth spoke with Squamish Nation leaders and asked for their suggestions as to what the district should do for Canada Day.
In response, the district created a webpage to help residents learn more about First Nations history, including a link to watch the recommended National Film Board of Canada film We Were Children. On July 1, from 6 to 7 p. Meanwhile, both the city and district of North Vancouver leave the organization of Canada Day events to Rotary clubs. Like last year, the Rotary Club of Lions Gate North Vancouver has organized a scaled-down virtual celebration to meet COVID safety protocols, which includes a line-up of local musicians and performers live online from 1 p.
Reflecting on past years, Little said as a community, the district has always come together to celebrate and were often joined by their neighbours and partners from the Tsleil-Waututh and Squamish Nations. But the truth is we can do better by each other. This reporting beat is made possible by the Local Journalism Initiative.
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Canadian Indian residential school system - Wikipedia.
Signing up enhances your TCE experience with the ability to save items to your personal reading list, and access the interactive map. Residential schools were government-sponsored religious schools that were established to assimilate Indigenous children into Euro-Canadian culture. Although the first residential facilities were established in New France , the term usually refers to schools established after Residential schools were created by Christian churches and the Canadian government as an attempt to both educate and convert Indigenous youth and to assimilate them into Canadian society.
However, the schools disrupted lives and communities, causing long-term problems among Indigenous peoples. The last residential school closed in Grollier Hall, which closed in , was not a state-run residential school in that year. Since then, former students have demanded recognition and restitution, resulting in the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement in and a formal public apology by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in This is the full-length entry about residential schools in Canada.
Residential schools have a long history in Canada. The first residential facilities were developed in New France by Catholic missionaries to provide care and schooling. However, colonial governments were unable to force Indigenous people to participate in the schools, as First Nations people were largely independent and Europeans depended on them economically and militarily for survival. However, residential schools became part of government and church policy from the s on, with the creation of Anglican , Methodist, and Roman Catholic institutions in Upper Canada Ontario.
The oldest continually operating residential school in Canada was the Mohawk Institute in what is now Brantford, Ontario. This began as a day school for Six Nations boys, but in it started to accept boarding students.
These colonial experiments set the pattern for post- Confederation policies. Beginning in the s, both the federal government and Plains Nations wanted to include schooling provisions in treaties , though for different reasons.
Indigenous leaders hoped Euro-Canadian schooling would help their young to learn the skills of the newcomer society and help them make a successful transition to a world dominated by the strangers. With the passage of the British North America Act in , and the implementation of the Indian Act , the government was required to provide Indigenous youth with an education and to assimilate them into Canadian society.
The federal government supported schooling as a way to make First Nations economically self-sufficient. Their underlying objective was to decrease Indigenous dependence on public funds. The government therefore collaborated with Christian missionaries to encourage religious conversion and Indigenous economic self-sufficiency. This led to the development of an educational policy after that relied heavily on custodial schools.
These were not the kind of schools Indigenous leaders had hoped to create. Beginning with the establishment of three industrial schools on the prairies in , and through the next half-century, the federal government and churches developed a system of residential schools that stretched across much of the country.
New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island had no schools, apparently because the government assumed that Indigenous people there had been assimilated into Euro-Canadian culture. At its height around , the residential school system totalled 80 institutions. The Roman Catholic Church operated three-fifths of the schools, the Anglican Church one-quarter and the United and Presbyterian Churches the remainder.
Before , the Methodist Church also operated residential schools; however, when the United Church of Canada was formed in , most of the Presbyterian and all the Methodist schools became United Church schools. Overall, students had a negative experience at the residential schools, one that would have lasting consequences. Students were isolated and their culture was disparaged or scorned. They were removed from their homes and parents and were separated from some of their siblings, as the schools were segregated according to gender.
In some cases, they were forbidden to speak their first language , even in letters home to their parents. The attempt to assimilate children began upon their arrival at the schools: their hair was cut in the case of the boys , and they were stripped of their traditional clothes and given new uniforms.
In many cases they were also given new names. Christian missionary staff spent a lot of time and attention on Christian practices, while at the same time they criticized or denigrated Indigenous spiritual traditions. In , at the age of twelve years, I was lassoed, roped and taken to the Government School at Lebret.
After my haircut, I wondered in silence if my mother had died, as they had cut my hair close to the scalp. I looked in the mirror to see what I looked like. I ran away from school, but I was captured and brought back.
I made two more attempts, but with no better luck. Realizing that there was no escape, I resigned myself to the task of learning the three Rs. Until the late s, residential schools operated on a half-day system, in which students spent half the day in the classroom and the other at work.
The theory behind this was that students would learn skills that would allow them to earn a living as adults.
However, the reality was that work had more to do with running the school inexpensively than with providing students with vocational training. Tasks were separated by gender. Girls were responsible for housekeeping cooking, cleaning, laundry, sewing , while boys were involved in carpentry, construction, general maintenance and agricultural labour. Funding was a pressing concern in the residential school system.
From the s until the s, the government tried constantly to shift the burden of the system onto the churches and onto the students, whose labour contributed financially to the schools. By the s, it was clear to many that the half-day system had failed to provide residential students with adequate education and training. However, the half-day system was not eliminated until the late s, when more funding became available owing to a strong economy.
School days began early, usually with a bell that summoned students to dress and attend chapel or mass. Breakfast, like all meals, was spartan, and eaten quickly in a refectory or dining hall.
This was followed by three hours of classes or a period of work before breaking for lunch. The afternoon schedule followed a similar pattern, including either classes or work, followed by more chores before supper.
Time was also set aside for recreation, usually in the afternoon or evening. Some schools had small libraries, while many schools offered organized sports as well as musical instruction, including choirs and brass bands. The evening closed with prayer, and bedtime was early. It was a highly regimented system. On weekends there were no classes, but Sunday usually meant more time spent on religious practices.
Until the s, holidays for many of the students included periods of work and play at the school. Only from the s on did the schools routinely send children home for holidays. Therefore, many students in the residential school system did not see their family for years.
I, p Overall, students received a poor education at the residential schools. This was true both in terms of academic subjects and vocational training.
Students had to cope with teachers who were usually ill-prepared, and curricula and materials derived from and reflecting an alien culture. Lessons were taught in English or French , languages that many of the children did not speak. In the workplace, the overseers were often harsh, and the supposed training purpose of the work was limited or absent. Moreover, the attempted assimilation of Indigenous students left them disoriented and insecure, with the feeling that they belonged to neither Indigenous nor settler society.
John Tootoosis, who attended the Delmas boarding school also known as the Thunderchild school in Saskatchewan, was blunt in his assessment of the residential school system:. There he is, hanging in the middle of two cultures and he is not a whiteman and he is not an Indian. They washed away practically everything from our minds, all the things an Indian needed to help himself, to think the way a human person should in order to survive.
Many students suffered abuse at residential schools. Impatience and correction often led to excessive punishment, including physical abuse. In some cases, children were heavily beaten, chained or confined. Some of the staff were sexual predators, and many students were sexually abused. When allegations of sexual abuse were brought forward — by students, parents or staff — the response by government and church officials was, at best, inadequate.
The police were seldom contacted, and, even if government or church officials decided that the complaint had merit, the response was often simply to fire the perpetrator. At other times, they allowed the abuser to keep teaching. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission TRC , at least 3, Indigenous children died in the overcrowded residential schools.
Due to poor record-keeping by the churches and federal government, it is unlikely that we will ever know the total loss of life at residential schools. In May of , results from a ground survey at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, BC, uncovered the remains of children buried at the site.
The TRC was told that only 50 deaths had occurred at the institution. The school officially closed in after the federal government took over control in There have been findings using ground penetrating technologies at very few residential school burial sites due to the sensitive process and impact on communities.
It is presumed that historical records pertaining to deaths at the institutions are flawed due to some Catholic orders withholding statistics on the institutions.
As a result, similar findings, such as those at the Kamloops Indian Residential School could occur in the future. Underfed and malnourished, the students were particularly vulnerable to diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza including the Spanish flu epidemic of — Food was low in quantity and poor in quality, in large part due to concerns about cost.
Moreover, research by food historian Ian Mosby published in revealed that students at some residential schools in the s and s were subjected to nutritional experiments without their consent or the consent of their parents. These studies were approved by various federal government departments and conducted by leading nutrition experts. Overall, the experiments do not seem to have resulted in any long-term benefits.
Nutritional deficiencies and overcrowding led to regular outbreaks of diseases at the schools. Tuberculosis and influenza were the major killers, but students were also affected by outbreaks of smallpox , measles, typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia and whooping cough.
In the winter of —27, for example, 13 children died from a combination of measles and whooping cough at the Lytton school. We were always taken to see the girls who had died. The Sisters invariably had them dressed in light blue and they always looked so peaceful and angelic. We were led to believe that their souls had gone to heaven, and this would somehow lessen the grief and sadness we felt in the loss of one of our little schoolmates.
