A closer look at Indian School genocide

Thousands of Canadian Indian Residential school survivors have received proceeds from a multi-billion dollar class action lawsuit, where the churches and government shared the blame in a multi-generational orgy of sexual predation, physical and mental abuse and even murder. While many have claimed their part of the settlement, others claim they have been wrongly denied participation in the suit, and still others never bothered to claim the money, because they just don’t want to drudge up the painful memories.

For nearly 200 years, the United States and Canada have sought to eliminate the “Indian Problem” with a series of military, educational and genocidal policies, which were designed to eliminate aboriginal people as a viable threat to the Crown and to American society. In addition to a military campaign that lasted generations, both countries sought to deculturalize Natives through a series of educational and religious policies, which attempted to dissolve native culture by removing native children from their families and tribes.

The ensuing policy of removal put aboriginal children in government and church run “re-education camps”, where they were forbidden to use tribal languages, forced to adapt to “western” religions, adopt “white” clothing and hair styles, while being trained that their culture was bad and that the white man’s “civilization” was better.

In the course of their “mission” to turn aboriginal school children in to “civilized people”, the school authorities often resorted to a level of brutality, which was nothing less than war, war perpetrated within church and government sanctioned educational facilities.

The Reservation Boarding School System was a war in disguise. It was a war between the United States government and the children of the First People of this land. Its intention was that of any war, elimination of the enemy. The reason this war is difficult to recognize is because it was covered by the attractive patina of a concept called "Manifest Destiny." Manifest Destiny was a philosophy by which the white European (sic) invader imagined themselves as having a divine right to take possession of all land and its fruits. (Sonja Keohane, “The Reservation Boarding School System in the United States, 1870 –1928”)

A 1922 report by Dr. Peter Bryce, former Medical Inspector for the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) claims that the death rate of these schools was unimaginable—and was also suppressed by the Canadian government. Bryce claims that there was a death rate of nearly 50% in western [Canadian] Indian residential schools. He also reported that the evidence of these deaths was suppressed by both the Canadian government and the churches, which ran the schools. (P. M. Bryce, M.D, “The Story of a National Crime”)

According to critics, the schools generated a host of problems, and presented a danger to the health and safety of the native children who resided there. Historians note a cornucopia of deadly health issues within the residential schools:
· They were breeding grounds for potentially fatal diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis.
· Students were not allowed to practice Aboriginal customs or speak Aboriginal languages.
· They were poorly maintained to the point of posing serious safety and other health hazards.
· They were the source of great animosity between the government and Aboriginal parents who refused to let their children be taken away from them.
· They were poorly equipped to properly clothe students, particularly during the winter months.
· They were source of dangerous fires often deliberately set by problem children.
· The food served at these schools were particularly lacking in nutritional value.
· The work was physically demanding and harsh on the students.
· Teachers were often so ill equipped that they could not teach students much beyond completely alien religious ideologies.
· They were the source of great absenteeism, on both the students and teachers' parts alike. (Some students would even run away.) (http://www.canadiana.org/citm/specifique/abresschools_e.html)

In addition to the incidental problems stated above, incidental meaning not necessarily deliberate, deliberate acts of abuse, rape, sodomy, even murder reigned through many of the schools. Many survivors relate stories of having to bury infants who were the result of sexual abuse on female students. Others tell of family members being sodomized and raped by school staff, and suicides by children who couldn’t bear the pain of living in these hellholes.

The atrocities are so horrendous that many people simply cannot imagine the scope of the horror, and, for a great many Americans and Canadians, the impact of the residential schools are beyond imagination. There were obviously effects on the immediate victims who were interned in the residential schools. The treatment they received was unimaginable: they were treated as scatterbrained and as dirty savages. They were beaten with fists, whips or batons for simple things like getting up at night, wetting the bed or speaking in their mother tongue. Many children were also victims of sexual abuse (oral sex, rape, sodomy, etc.). More than 10 000 complaints were submitted to the Indian Residential Schools Solution Canada. (http://www.deal.org/content/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=894&Itemid=1069

In 1920, researchers noted that attendance at Canadian residential schools was made mandatory for Canadian aboriginal children. Henceforth, the entire population of Canadian Indian children was exposed to the often-deadly school environments where many died due to smallpox, tuberculosis, measles and abuse. Researchers say this was nothing less than a collusion of genocide, directed from the very top echelon of the Canadian government. Despite a growing death rate due to tuberculosis, caused by the murderous practices documented by Dr. Bryce, DIA Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott abolished the post of Medical Inspector for Indian Agencies in February, 1919, with the result that death from tuberculosis among Indians. (Ibid)

Attendance in these death-trap "schools" was then made compulsory for all native children in Canada, under a federal law. Thus, the schools often became incubators of deadly diseases, plagues, which the children, if they survived to the ‘graduation’ age of 16, then took back to their native villages, furthering the decimation of their tribes and culture.

In addition to the physical diseases carried from the schools, the children also brought home a host of dysfunctional behavior and socialization problems. Children who have never seen healthy adult relationships, or don’t remember how healthy adults act, or know how to parent from seeing their parents and elders interact with children, have a hard time being parents and spouses. Children who have been raped and molested have issues with intimacy and trust.

Survivors remember being afraid to go to sleep, knowing the predators did their “best work” at night. A residential school survivor told her interviewer:

In the evenings what I remember is, when all the girls were put to bed, we had night watchmen that would take care of the building. I always had the fear of having a night watchman coming in and shining the flashlight around, because I knew that's when things were happening with the little girls. I guess that's where the abuse had started. (http://www.wherearethechildren.org)

Other survivors feel abandonment, anger at their parents for allowing them to be taken to the schools. Some feel shame, because as bad as some of the schools were, home was often worse. Referring to the sense of betrayal she felt, another survivor said she actually hated her mother, hated the woman who gave her birth, until her dying day:

I hated her. I always hated my mother. Until her dying day I asked her "Why did you do this to me?” and she could never answer me because she was also brought up in a mission. I didn't understand that. I'm beginning to understand how and why they brought us up this way, and why they put us in a mission. Because they didn't know any better. They thought that it was good for us. We needed discipline and we had better food than they did. I know a lot of people say they were better off at home. But in our area I don't think that was the case. Living was hard. (Ibid)

As painful as the memories are, many survivors say they feel obligated to tell their stories for this generation, because the history has already been forgotten by so many, as this survivor relates:
Even if you're holding an important position, whether in your tribal council or in your community, you shouldn't be ashamed. That's what I'm doing right now. I'm not scared to come out and say what happened to me. That's the only way I'm going to get better. Because if you keep it inside, like many of my friends and my relatives, you can die from it or you get into drugs and alcohol. That's not the answer right there. The answer is to talk about it. (Ibid)

Many children ran away from the schools. Some froze to death. Others simply disappeared, never to be heard from again. Some went to the authorities, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police—the Mounties and reported the abuse:
"In 1936 a fifteen-year-old girl from the nearby Shubenacadie Reserve refused to return to the school and gave the following statement to the agent and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police:
"I have been going to Indian school for the past five years.... Before my holidays this year I was employed in kitchen for eleven weeks.... In the eleven weeks ... I spent a total of two weeks in school. The Sister has beaten me many times over the head and pulled my hair and struck me on the back of neck with a ruler and at times grabbed ahold of me and beat me on the back with her fists. (We Were Not the Savages, Daniel N. Paul)

For many whites, then, and today, the price the Natives paid for “being civilized” was well worth the cost. However, they were not and are not the ones paying the price in terms of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome, psychological trauma, alcoholism, drug use, early death and identity loss.

Many erroneously attribute the dysfunction in Native communities to an inherent fault or inferiority within aboriginal peoples, thus denying the “success” of their own governments’ deculturalization programs. For the supremacists, the problems with Native communities are “proof” of the inferiority of aboriginal people, “proof” that “Indians can’t be civilized”.

The chain of events over nearly two centuries continues its onslaught, as six-plus generations of Indian school attendees endured the trans-generational result of school generated self-hatred, identity confusion and trauma. The psychological, sexual, and physical abuse, which many students endured in those residential schools has resulted in a pattern of programmed self-destructive behavior, which continues to wreak havoc in Canadian and US tribal communities.

Native women are more likely to be raped or suffer sexual abuse than women of other ethnic groups. Native men are more likely to be imprisoned than other men. Native languages are rapidly disappearing, leaving people disconnected with their tribal past and hanging on to ties with the majority culture by a thread.

In Canada, after the fall of New France (and the pre-eminence of the Catholic Church in Canada), Protestant denominations, including the Church of England assumed operation of the Indian Residential Schools.

After the fall of New France, the first religious schools for Aboriginals were Methodist and Anglican, opening in Upper Canada during the 1830s. The British colonial administration and colonial office gradually began to turn towards a policy of assimilation. (http://www.canadiana.org/citm/specifique/abresschools_e.html)

Those policies culminated in the creation of residential schools, institutions, which were run by the governments of Canada and the US, as well as by a variety of Catholic, Church of England and Anglican, and other denominational entities. The resulting abuse, murder and psychological torture of these remote church and government operated residential schools have been well documented by hundreds of interviews and statements from survivors.

Many of the schools were far from native reservations, by design. Many were cesspools of the worse kind of abuse. They were also operated under the aegis of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as the Anglican Church of Canada and the Church of England. The Canadian government has assumed the greatest burden of the class action lawsuit, which was filed by survivors of the Residential schools, but the fate of thousands of children who attended the schools remains unknown.

For that reason, activists have targeted church authorities, including several Canadian Catholic bishops and the Queen of England, who is titular head of the Church of England. Survivors and families of school children demand to know what happened to more than 15,000 children who never returned from the residential schools. In short, they literally want to know where the bodies are buried.

A demand letter to the Queen was personally delivered to a representative of the Crown by Carol Martin, a First Nations elder, as denoted by an excerpt of a press release below:

Elizabeth Windsor, the Queen of England, was issued a Letter of Demand yesterday that requires that she identify the fate and burial sites of all the children who died in Indian Residential Schools established under the authority of the Church of England and the British Crown.

The Letter was handed personally to Governor-General Michaelle Jean by aboriginal elder Carol Martin at the Downtown Eastside Womens’ Centre in Vancouver in the afternoon of Wednesday, January 23. Ms. Martin asked the Governor-General to deliver the Letter of Demand to the Queen on behalf of residential school survivors, and the Governor-General accepted the Letter and assured her that she would. (Press Release)

No matter what happens, survivors will still have to deal with the guilt, anger, fear of intimacy, and abandonment issues which they, their grandparents and children endure on a daily basis. After more than 100 years of "education for extinction," the "Indians" have refused to die, but the native community is not without its problems.

In the words of then-Assistant Secretary of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Kevin Grover, acknowledging the 175th anniversary of the Agency:
This agency forbade the speaking of Indian languages, prohibited the conduct of traditional religious activities, outlawed traditional government, and made Indian people ashamed of who they were. Worst of all, the Bureau of Indian Affairs committed these acts against the children entrusted to its boarding schools, brutalizing them emotionally, psychologically, physically, and spiritually. Even in this era of self -determination, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs is at long last serving as an advocate for Indian people in an atmosphere of mutual respect, the legacy of these misdeeds haunts us. The trauma of shame, fear and anger has passed from one generation to the next, and manifests itself in the rampant alcoholism, drug abuse, and domestic violence that plague Indian country. Many of our people live lives of unrelenting tragedy as Indian families suffer the ruin of lives by alcoholism, suicides made of shame and despair, and violent death at the hands of one another. So many of the maladies suffered today in Indian country result from the failures of this agency. Poverty, ignorance, and disease have been the product of this agency's work