Residential Schools

            On Monday morning while listening to Shouty McWheelchair hacking down on the street in front of my building, I thought about how when the Coffeetime closes a month from now there will be no more danger of him coughing up a lung and tossing it through my window.

            I copied the chords for the C7 version of  “Le complainte du progres" by Boris Vian.

I finished posting "Titicaca" by Serge Gainsbourg on my Christian’s Translations blog and listened to “Pamela Popo”, the next Gainsbourg song I'll be learning. This one is about a stripper with a unique act and every line ends in a word that rhymes with “oh”. I haven't included the word “Negro” in my translation because I don't think it's necessary. 

My right index fingernail still hurt but it was manageable. However my index finger is having some bad luck lately as when I closed my living room window that morning I did it too fast and my index fingernail got jammed. Now in addition to there being a little cut near the top it's blue and purple near the base. On the positive side the tip of my finger under my fingernail hurts less now that my finger under the base hurts more.

I worked some more on my Indigenous Studies essay, mostly reading and taking notes from parts of The Law of Nations by Emer de Vattel that relates to treaties.

I went to bed for an hour so I’d be fresh for Indigenous Studies class and the tutorial that follows.

While waiting for class I read about the Métis, but the book still doesn’t explain why some tribes like the Haudenosaunee have full members that are mixed whereas the Métis are not just Cree.

Our lecture was about residential schools. The United States generally used the name “Boarding School” for the same thing but residential schools were also in Buffalo.

Residential schools were a thing unto themselves.

They were not cross cultural but about total indoctrination leading to assimilation. It was easier with children because they could be made to believe anything.

They go all the way back to the beginning of treaty language.

There were also day schools in the states going back to colonial period. They wanted to change the culture through education. The plan was they would compensate indigenous people for having lost territory by educating them. The day schools lasted from 100 to 175 years. They changed to boarding schools that were at first nearby and so the children got to come home for the weekend.

Churches divided communities in competition for which ones got control of the minds of natives.

Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt founded the influential Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He is associated with the first use of the word “racism” to criticize racial segregation. He also coined the phrase, “Kill the Indian and save the man”. Carlisle started out as an industrial school designed for boys from three to seventeen. They learned farming, manufacturing skills and marching. It sounded like the professor said they wore “SS military uniforms” but when I asked him he seemed pissed off and said, I wouldn’t have said that!”

How could I possibly know what he “would" have said? My question was about what he did say. Maybe he said, “Yes, yes … military uniforms” but if he did why didn’t he just tell me what he’d said? Maybe he said it and didn’t remember.

Carlisle became the model for 26 Bureau of Indian Affairs boarding schools and hundreds of private religious boarding schools.

The professor said that his great grandfather went to Carlisle and that the discipline was passed down to him so that he could bounce a quarter off a made bed now.

It was decided that the only way to remove children was far away because that would make it more difficult for the parents to visit. Natives needed special approval to leave the reservation. It was an act of war to leave without a permit.

General Philip Sheridan is attributed with saying, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead” which over time became popularized as “The only good Indian is a dead Indian”.

Ironically the idea of killing Indian culture in the young happened at the same time as ethnographers began desperately gathering Indigenous knowledge from elders.

Canada’s apology was very public while that of the US was buried in paperwork and it was not legally binding.

The Canadian government is pushing back on compensation for the sixties scoop. To be fair, it seems the government is not against the recommended compensation package but rather just wants to study the right way to deliver it to survivors.

There are generations of recent victims.

The United States shut down its boarding schools in the 1920s and 1930s while it took Canada until the 1960s.

There was criminal child abuse that might even be considered war crimes.

Professor White addressed the fact that we are frustrated with his United Statescentric and apologized. He excused himself by claiming that for Indigenous people the border does not exist.

One would be hard pressed to find anywhere in the United States or Canada an Indigenous community that has not been touched by residential schools.

Some former students say they were not bad while others say they were very bad.

There is generational trauma. Those that were abused as children are more likely to abuse their own and the cycle continues.  Canadian residential schools lasted until the 1990s and so there is more trauma in Canada.

The acquisition of titles and lands is a problem but treaties are ongoing in Canada.

Parents could have been jailed in Canada for not submitting their children to education.

The professor said that he learned after his father died that he spoke fluent Mohawk but never admitted it to anyone.

We watched several videos about residential schools but there was a ten-minute or so delay because the professor couldn’t get the audio working.

The first three videos were parts one to three of Unseen Tears and the third was a preview of Canadian Residential Schools.

Unseen Tears is about the Thomas Indian School and Mohawk Institute or the Thomas Asylum of Orphan and Destitute Indian Children, also known as the Mush Hole in Erie County, New York.

The movie begins with several students of the school singing “Ten Little Indians”. A person interviewed said it’s a song about dead Indians. To be fair, some die and others just leave for various reasons like to get married.

When the kids arrived they had their heads shaved. When they went home the other kids called them “Mush Hole Baldies”.

A man tells how the day he was brought there he never saw his mother again for ten years.

Their mouths were washed with soap and they were given cold showers if they were caught speaking their language. One woman said if she couldn’t speak her language she wouldn’t speak English and so she didn’t speak for two years.

They were given numbers.

The administrator came from working in a prison. They were trained in a military style.

Children were molested.

One man said that his brother got away after five years and they never found him.

A woman talks about having been raped as a girl there but when she reported it she was beaten for accusing someone that they didn’t believe would do such a thing.

Everyone had their tonsils removed and they were kept in bottles. All of the boys were circumcised.

Older girls received regular virginity checks.

A woman tells the story of how they put on a play of Little Black Sambo and the darkest skinned Native child would always play Sambo.

Families lost bonding and after they grew up they passed on the regimentation to their own children.

One man asked what the good would be of receiving a hollow apology.

Another short video was about a residential school at Portage La Prairie. It was run by a Presbyterian women’s organization. There was deprivation of food, beatings and rape. In 1925 the United Church of Canada took over. The staff had the best food.

A woman tells how another girl that threw up her dinner was forced to eat her vomit.

The greatest pain is loneliness.

Although US federal schools closed down in the 1930s, some states continued running boarding schools.

The US military had spent $1 million trying to catch Geronimo and so brainwashing was cheaper.

The before and after photos of Native children were a very effective tool for fundraising.

Four generations were in the boarding schools.

There is no human society that does not educate its children to teach them to survive and to pass on cultural knowledge.

Not all high school diplomas are equal.

A student said that it’s more lucrative to be a schoolteacher in Canada. That seems to be generally true.

The schools only trained Indians for servitude roles.

L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, called for the extermination of Indians in two articles he wrote in 1890. His mother in law was a white woman adopted into the Iroquois Council of Matrons.

The professor claimed that the racism of the United States is more out there whereas Canada hides its racism.

Someone said that Native communities in the way of the CPR route were starved into moving.

The United States resists the genocide compact.

Trudeau owned it and apologized but said it costs too much. He didn’t say that. He didn’t argue against the amount but that more former students should be compensated than the court ruling indicates.

Records only show part of the picture. For example he said that there are only two records that indicate his religion. One is his baptismal record and the other is from the declaration he was expected to quickly make when he joined the military.

Student records will be destroyed if they don’t come forward to say they don’t want them destroyed.

In tutorial Safia said that in Atlanta, Georgia people will call you “N****r” straight up. I think that’s called racism.

She added that two hours from Toronto there’ll be racism in your face as well.

She wrote some questions on the board:

What were the assumptions behind the Indian Act?

What were the goals of the residential schools?

What can the goals of residential schools say about the European view of Indigenous cultures?

What consequence do those view have on Indigenous people?

She mentioned the five stages of colonization and decolonisation by Poka Laenui: Rediscovery and recovery; mourning; dreaming; commitment and action.

Some students were talking about First Nations House. I asked where it was and when someone said it’s on Spadina I thought at first that the Native Centre had changed its name. They are different places.

Robin and another Native woman said Native people are lactose intolerant. I hadn’t known that. I said it would be genetic and cited the fact that I’m Scandinavian and we are the most lactose tolerant people on the planet. The woman said, “Good to know!” but I don't know if she was being sarcastic.

Safia gave us a tip that this course always has questions on the Indian Act and on Residential Schools.

Safia said there couldn’t be competing oppressions, as in “I suffered too!”

She quoted Steven Biko that the most potent weapon of the oppressed is the mind.

I was surprised to hear that from 1920 to 1951 every school age Indigenous child was in a residential school. My research shows that’s not true or even possible. The most residential schools operating in Canada all at once numbered eighty in 1931, with an enrolment of 1700 students. I can't see how it would be possible that in 1931 there would have been only 1700 school age Status Indian school age children in Canada. There were probably at least a quarter of a million status Indians here at the time. Also there were no residential schools in New Brunswick or Prince Edward Island. It's very difficult to find any information on Native children attending non-residential schools because any searches are dominated by Residential school results.

There were 150,000 residential school students over 150 years.

50,000 students died and some of those died while trying to escape into the remote areas that surrounded the schools.

St Anne’s Residential School in Fort Albany, Ontario on James Bay had a homemade electric chair for shocking students as punishment.

40% of staff had no professional training.

The residential school syndrome results in self-abuse, identity crises and inter-generational trauma.

There have been incidents of forced sterilization of Native women after giving birth in Manitoba.

On my way home I stopped at Loblaws where I bought grapes and Earl Grey tea. The cashier was physically very slow. A woman ahead of me was buying the same kind of grapes as me and she disputed the price. She thought that they were $2.79 and that was the same price that I'd read. The cashier told her they were $3.99 and so she finally decided not to take them. I disputed the price too and finally a staff member asked me to show her where I'd seen the price. I went there and discovered that the $2.79 had been for the mangoes and the grapes were displayed in another section. I bought some lower quality red grapes instead. Really, I think I would have just paid for the more expensive grapes if the woman ahead of me hadn't argued about them.

I had a piece of chicken and some yogourt for a late lunch.

I typed some of my lecture notes.

That night I made some more chicken gravy.

I had a potato, some chicken and gravy for dinner while watching Zorro.

In this story a gambler arrives in Los Angeles with an eagle feather in his head, suggesting that he is part of the criminal organization the Brotherhood of the Eagle. He cheats a wealthy landowner out of his livestock, land and money and then opens up a leather tannery that pollutes a shared spring. Zorro comes to force the gambler to play a fair game so the landowner can win his assets back. The soldiers try to capture Zorro but he gets away.