George Jonas: Residential Schools Were a Savage Solution to a Lingering Problem
By George Jonas
Liberal Justice Minister Irwin Cotler called it “the single most harmful, disgraceful and racist act in our history” and he was right. He was talking about Canada’s attempt to assimilate its indigenous population through compulsory residential boarding schools for native children. Such programs operated in various forms between the mid-1880s and the late 1940s, and merited Cotler’s description in every particular. It’s important to note that the residential school programs were disgraceful, not just from the perspective of our times, but from the perspective of their own. Forcibly removing children from their families to place them in an alien, loveless, institutional environment and deliberately deprive them of their language and culture, even without subjecting them to routine humiliation and frequent physical or sexual abuse, would have been viewed as cruel, inexcusable, un-Christian and very possibly criminal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries no less than in ours. The reason we didn’t view our own conduct in this light at the time was due to civilizational arrogance, combined with a type of social engineering fallacy that gives people a licence to do evil when they think they’re doing good. One might call it a missionary’s licence to do the devil’s work or a do-gooder’s exemption from common decency. The very names we gave to some of our legislation, such as the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act (it included, among other measures, gifting 50 acres of arable Crown land to indigenous males who completed elementary schooling) reflected this smug fallacy. We wanted our “Indians,” as we called them, to be more like us, little understanding how flawed we were as role models. Of course, a “missionary licence” has never been unique to Western Europeans or Christians. Ottoman warriors used to kidnap non- Muslim children to raise them for their elite force of Janissaries. After all, it allowed the unbelievers’ children to share Islam’s blessings. We felt similarly justified in civilizing the “heathen savage” with conduct we would have considered savage, and rightly so, if others had inflicted it on us. The roots of the problem go deep. Not all of history occurs in the same time zone. The European infiltration and eventual conquest of North America wasn’t a clash between contemporaneous people. The indigenous population lived in the hunting-gathering upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic period of mankind, harsh but idyllic at the same time, while the European arrivals, rooted in the agricultural late Neolithic, weren’t only past antiquity and the Middle Ages by the time they landed on North America’s shores, but had reached the early edges of the industrial age. In short, it was history encountering pre-history, with neither side realizing what was about to occur. If the Europeans or the natives had been Martians, little green people with antennae growing out of their heads, they might have been prepared. As it was, they looked too similar to realize how different they were. This is a factor that has made both integration and the possibility of an independent existence for First Nations more difficult. It’s possible for a First Nation to exist in separation from Canada on the map, but it’s harder for it to exist in separation from the 21st century. Even if it were possible, it may not be enough. A time machine may have to go back to 10,000 BC to address the problems First Nations face in the modern world. If money alone could solve the problems illustrated by Idle No More-type upheavals, by now they would be solved. We’ve spent billions to maintain remote communities in dysfunction and despair. No one can make up for the hurt of residential schools, but we tried. A $1.9-billion compensation package the Liberal government of Canada announced in 2005 became the basis of the Settlement Agreement of 2006. Then-deputy prime minister Anne McLellan has been quoted as saying that the government made good on everyone’s “shared resolve to deliver what I firmly believe will be a firm and lasting resolution of the Indian school legacy.” They became famous last words. In 2008 Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a public apology on behalf of Canada’s government. The pope apologized for the role played by the Catholic Church. A list of others got into the act: Apologies have become fashionable. But apologies help as little as money. Here’s why. It was the despicable residential schools that asked the right question, even if they gave a hideously wrong answer. The ultimate solution, if there is one, is to end special status and unite Canada with its aboriginal inhabitants. This means fashioning an entry for native Canadians into the mainstream of society: A good version of the same model of which the residential schools were a bad, indeed abominable, example. The alternative, which is having the government maintain some sort of Paleolithic Garden of Eden for natives in post-industrial Canada, isn’t just unaffordable but unworkable. Unless people join the century in which they live, they will be alienated and displaced. For aboriginals no less than everyone else, Canada must be a first nation.
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