Native and Non-Native Voices on the Residential School Issue and Historical Revisionism: Writing Between the Times
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Native and Non-Native Voices on the Residential School Issue and Historical Revisionism: Writing Between the Times
Wayne A. Holst
University of Calgary
Calgary (Alberta)
HISTORIOGRAPHY TO THE PRESENT
2. Non-Native Academic Critique
Missionaries have grown used to criticism from academics. With the development of the social sciences in Canadian universities during the past century, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, educational theorists and religious studies specialists have often taken a dim view of the efforts of the Christian missions.
For various reasons, however, secular Canadian academics have been slow to address Oblate residential school concerns. Perhaps marginality of the schools and the low priority Canadians have traditionally placed on Native education may account for some of this. Thus, until recently, Canadian society has tended to ignore the subject.
One of the first contemporary academics to challenge the status quo was Brian E. Titley, currently of the University of Lethbridge. His book A Narrow Vision (Titley, 1986) was a mid-80s attempt to investigate the history of Indian education policy and pedagogy in Canada. He writes one chapter on residential schools and notes a few recorded cases of abuse from records of the Department of Indian Affairs. Overall, his study focuses on the administrative relationship between Indian people and department officials. It is quite apparent, assessing his work fifteen years ago, that Titley's approach was more an attempt to critique the pedagogy of schools established to assimilate Natives into the wider culture than to expose ethical indiscretion on the part of the missionaries.
Only gradually did it come to dawn on non-Native academics that the schools played a very troubling and destructive role in relations between Natives and non-Natives.
Katherine Pettipas (1994), historian, anthropologist, and curator of Native Ethnology at the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature has written extensively about government repression of indigenous religious ceremonies on the Prairies. Her thesis is that church and state colluded to formulate and implement Indian policy with devastating results. Pettipas argues that opposing spiritual and cultural values were at the core of the Native / non-Native conflict. For example, Native people were communal and generous in nature. EuroCanadians were individualistic and accumulative. When church and state collaborated in the development of legislation to suppress Native religious rituals and dances, they did so being fully cognizant that they were undermining the fundamental structures of Native societies. Native people were inclusive spiritually while non-Natives were exclusive. Even when the ban on practising Native rites was lifted (Indian Act, revision of 1951), this was done out of concern for the human rights of Natives. There was no attempt to show interest or respect for Native spiritual traditions. These traditions continued to be viewed as pagan and backward.
Pettipas' book uses Protestant rather than Catholic archival sources, but the philosophy guiding both mission efforts was similar. Progressive thinking of the time suggested that Native culture was dying in the wake of a superior EuroCanadian civilisation. The answer to the "Indian problem" was to "transform red persons into white ones." The focal point of this transformation was seen as taking place in the residential schools.
The most comprehensive study of Canadian Native residential schools to date and considerably more extensive than the seventy-six pages devoted to the schools in the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (Canada, 1996, vol. I, p. 333-409) is James R. Miller's six hundred page account entitled Shingwauk's Vision (Miller, 1996). Miller researched residential school documentation in the archives of both government and church. In addition, he interviewed dozens of living Native attendees of the schools throughout the land. He participated in celebrations, conferences and healing sessions, as well as other formal and informal events. In his accounting, he explains why the schools were set up, describes how they functioned and testifies to their current consequences.
The philosophy and motivation of those who established and ran the schools is juxtaposed to the views and experience of the students for whom the schools were intended. Frequently, intentions were at variance with results. Native people initially consented to involvement in the schools in order to get an education. They saw education as the primary means of preparing themselves as Natives for a changing world. Non-Native society viewed the schools as a way of assimilating Natives into the larger culture, but this differed from the Native understanding of the purpose of the schools. James Miller concludes that religious conversion of the "pagan Indian" to Christianity, a higher civilisation and eternal life and not primarily learning for this life, was the main reason why many of the churches participated in the schools (Host, 1997).
The author claims repeatedly that the motives of the First Nations peoples were more authentic than those of government and church. With some obvious and notable exceptions, many of his examples broadly reinforce this perception. That is one of the more significant contributions of the book.
A positive and ironic side effect was that the residential schools were responsible for for the early training of many Natives who subsequently became political and cultural leaders who have now challenged the schools. Thus, in spite of the generally "wrong-headed and failed nature of the school system," a certain number of "success stories" emerged with a variety of educational benefits accruing to Native people who were able to make the cross-cultural transition. These were exceptions, however, not the rule (Miller, 1996, p. 430).
Who was responsible for the damage done, and who should compensate? The author concludes that the Native people were essentially victims and not to blame for what happened. While a number of denominations have apologized and sought to make healing reparation, there is still much the churches need to do to make amends. But it is the government and the people of Canada upon whom James Miller (1996) lays the major blame and the burden of responsibility.
First Nations initiative will now be required to take more complete control over their education; to create centres that are more self-consciously Native and workable within the larger Canadian ethos. This is, only now, within the realm of possibility (Holst, 1997).
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