Category Archives: Indigenous–Indian Residential Schools

Propaganda Canadian style

Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

There are not many photographs of school children at Kuper Island Residential School, but there were many formal portraits of the school bands. Children stood ramrod straight posing for the photographs. The schools showed off the bands as a way of showing the general public the good works at the schools. It was part of the program of propaganda. Propaganda Canadian style. The media ate it up and fed it to the Canadian public without any critical thought to what was happening. The media like the rest of us were blissfully ignorant. But they helped spread the government’s message about how lucky the young Indian children were to be going to Montreal from Kuper Island British Columbia on a trip with their band.

As Duncan McCue the host of the CBC podcast pointed out,

“The media was complicit in helping to manufacture support for residential schools. In one feature the missionaries are portrayed as fighting an uphill battle in their efforts  to educate children because ‘as soon as a boy or girl returns to a home environment they lose all ambition, and initiative, reverting to the reserve to become drunks.’ Though the reporter does acknowledge there was a certain prison atmosphere to Kuper Island.”

 

This propaganda showed the public what great things the churches and government were doing for the benefit of Indians. Who could not be impressed? Especially when young children who had often never been away from their home reserves went to big cities like Montreal. Imagine that! What a thrill that must have been for the Indigenous kids.

The bands from Kuper Island residential school played all over Vancouver Island and even the mainland. Every Remembrance Day and many other events throughout the region had a band from that school. Canadians responded enthusiastically to those bands.

Remarkably, Father Brian Dufour, an Oblate brother from Kuper Island Residential school,  hatched a plan to take the band to perform at Expo 67. I remember as a young lad recently graduated from High School I drove to Montreal for that festival with a bunch of friends. We were also incredibly excited by that. I sadly, don’t remember if I heard that band or not. We did hear musical performances. The only band I remember was a group called Three’s a Crowd. My friends and I were much more interested in drinking at bars and looking for young ladies. The bars were illegal for us, but that did not stop us. The girls largely and sensibly  ignored us rubes from the prairies.  We had a lot of fun. We were not concerned about “Indians”. We were pitifully ignorant.

Tony Charley was invited to join the band and got to go on this exciting trip to Montreal, the largest city in Canada at the time. For the big trip to Expo the children were dressed up in Hollywood “Indian” garb-buckskin and feathers. It did not matter to anyone that it looked nothing at all like traditional west coast regalia. After all, it was all a show wasn’t it?

But the kids were a hit at Expo, led by the charismatic Father Brian Dufour. The school raised more than $10,000.

Everyone was happy. Well, most were happy. Mayor Drapeau welcomed them to Montreal. It was a place for mutual understanding and peace Drapeau said.

Tony and his brother James were invited by Brother Dufour to stay an extra month. What lucky guys. It was a surprise and they jumped at the chance. They had no parents to ask for permission. In other words they were the most vulnerable of the vulnerable. They just agreed to stay with Brother Dufour into August. August was when I arrived with my buddies in Montreal. I often wonder if we somehow crossed paths.

Brother Dufour asked James to sleep with him one night and Tony the next. They were very inexperienced young boys. Tony was about 15 years old. His brother James was younger. Each of the boys confided to the other that Brother Dufour did “funny things to them at night.”  They did not know what they meant, but both were very uncomfortable with what happened.

Brian Dufour was actually pretty young at the time as well. He was well thought of as a devoted young Christian working hard to better “Indian” children.  According to the CBC podcast, Dufour’s parents were very proud of their son and his work, but they did not know that he would visit boys in their bedrooms during the night to sexually abuse them. After all his parents were good Catholics and thought their son was as well.

Dufour was grooming the boys. That expression was not known in 1967. At the end of the summer, Brian Dufour was transferred to another residential schools and wrote a public letter saying how much he would miss the children of Kuper Island.

Of course, the troubles for Tony and James did not end there. Dufour was gone, but there were other predators in the residential school and they were vulnerable. The propaganda paved the way for the abuse.

Changing the Child

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Tony Charley one of the young children who had attended Kuper Island Residential school,  told CBC reporter Duncan McCue that the children in the school were constantly praying. They would wake up and and then were expected to start praying for a good day. Then they would pray to go to lunch. Constant prayer.

As McCue said, this constant prayer was part of a system to “change the child.”  They wanted to change the “savages” into good Christian children. As McCue said,

“this religious and patriotic indoctrination was part of a system designed to change the children. Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott said so in 1920 when he made residential schools compulsory. He said, ‘I want to get rid of the Indian problem. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and there is no Indian Department.”

 

Of course, this idea was very congenial to the federal government, for as McCue pointed out,

“If there were no Indians there would be no treaty payments, no Indian reserves, no indigenous land rights. Residential schools were not created to deliver a proper education. They were created to assimilate Indians and went hand in hand with other federal policies to steal land. And it was little kids sleeping in rows upon rows of bunkbeds who paid the price.”

Assimilation is sometimes thought of as a benign policy imposed on Indian children for their own good. After, all what could be better for them than to be like us? It is true that many of the non-Indigenous staff thought they were doing the Lord’s work.

This was really Canadian government policy for a long time. Even the liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and his minister of Indian Affairs Jean Chretien offered Indigenous people something very similar in 1969 in their White paper. Trudeau and Chretien were shocked that their offer was turned down by indigenous leaders. They didn’t want to be just like the whites. They liked who they were. They saw no need to change who they were. It was the system they didn’t like.

For many years I, like most Canadians thought it was a good idea for Indigenous people to be just like us.

 

Rife with Sexual Predators

Abuse of Power, Colonialism, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, as we now know, were rife with sexual predators that attacked boys or girls.  As always they chose the most vulnerable.

There were not just a few rotten apples among the religious leaders, like many Canadians believed. I know that was my initial opinion when I first heard about Indian Residential schools as an adult. I thought it must be just a few bad apples. The system could not be abusive. Could it? I was wrong.

The schools were infested with sexual predators. For decades children were kidnapped by legal authorities, taken against their will from their parents and families to get rid of the “savage” influence from parents, and dumped into residential schools often far from home, where the children were isolated from their families and then were vulnerable victims of horrid abuse.  It is not coincidental that where victims are powerless, the exploiters find a safe haven.  That is how abuse works. In fact for decades the Canadian governmnent knew what was going on, but little to stop it.

As CBC series host Duncan McCue said, “The abuse poisoned every aspect of school life, even stuff that was supposed to be fun.”

That is how Canada tried to change “savages” into good Christian citizens

Nights on the Boys Side

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools, racism

 

It was not just girls that were targeted for abuse at Kuper Island Residential School.

In June of 1966 Tony Charley, a 15-year-old boy at Kuper Island Residential School was told that a young boy had hung himself in the gym.  Duncan McCue a CBC journalist returned many years later to investigate what happened at that school. Why had so many children died there?  After all, it is highly unusual for children to die while in school. At least it is highly unusual for children that are non-indigenous. For indigenous children it was much more common. They actually had a grave yard at the school for children. That too is highly unusual for non-non-indigenous children, but for indigenous children it is not rare at all. Why is that? Duncan McCue wanted to know. So do I.

 

The boy who died was named Richard Thomas. According to Tony Charley, Richard was   “nice and gentle.”  Such boys should not die. No boys should die for that matter. But nice and gentle boys are not usually targets of others. Much about this case though was not usual.

 

The brothers who ran the school belong to the order of Oblates.  These brothers told the students at the school that  Richard  had hung himself because his parents wanted to separate and he did not want that. He wanted his parents to stay together. That was not true.

He had basically been separated from them for most of the time since he had been in the residential school. That was part of the plan in residential schools—separate the children from their families. That is considered a crime against humanity. It should be. What can be more horrid than that? The authorities did not want the children to learn bad habits from their parents who were basically assumed to be unfit parents. Savages in other words.

The nuns and brothers took young kids to see the body of Richard. Again, that seemed strange. Is it possible that nuns and priests took young children to see a dead body hanging in the gym. Why would they do that?

Another strange thing about this was that Richard was days away from graduating from school and was excited to be graduating. Why would such a boy kill. Himself? Friends told McCue Thomas had been looking forward to graduation, as were most children in residential schools. Yet supposedly he killed himself. So McCue investigated further and reported on his findings in this podcast.

 

Canada’s 3rd National Day of Reconciliation

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Yesterday Christiane and I were a bit lazy. Earlier in the week we had celebrated Reconciliation Week with our local Seniors group. Yesterday, we spent an afternoon watching on television the ceremonies and programs from Ottawa on Parliament Hill.

When Mr. Justice Murray Sinclair, the Chair of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commissions of Canada delivered the report to the Canadian Parliament he made the following statement: “We have delivered to you a mountain. We have shown a way to the top, but we call upon you to do the climbing.”

As always, he was wise.

Last year, after the 2nd National Day of Reconciliation I was filled with the spirit.  When I saw the Seniors’ Centre in Steinbach filled with white seniors wearing orange shirts,   I was shocked by how far we had come as a country. I was proud. I am still proud. Steinbach has come a long way. This year there were not as many participants. Perhaps there has been some compassion fatigue. That is too bad, though it is understandable. We must remember we have only made a start on the way to reconciliation. We have just started a long journey. We must not quit now.  We still have a long way to go.  We can’t stop now. We are nowhere near the summit.

I really enjoyed the performance from Ottawa of Ry Moran’s song “Feel you.” This song was played as a large group of indigenous people carried a very long banner that listed every known person who died in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools. There were approximately 4, 100 names on that list. Many more died but the names are not known. This was our history in this country. It  was deeply moving.

I also really enjoyed the performance of a Mítchif  singer song writer Willows. The song was called, ‘T’wé chu-il. Another highlight, was Mi’Kmaq singer song writer  Emma Stone who performed her song was “Honour Song” which she sang in her own native language. Each year I attend such a national holiday I am impressed at how many indigenous people are trying to reclaim their native language. Each year there seems to be more.  Finally, Oji-Cree performer sang his song “We were here,’ and was joined by other performers as he sang.

I also saw a sign a listener carried: “Indigenous children desire to become indigenous adults.”

A Residential School Survivor told us this about her residential school: “It was a very scary place filled with sadness…but we were there for one another…we had no words…but today I see change.”

One of the participants read part of a letter from Bishop Grandin of Winnipeg to the government of Canada about the Roman Catholic Residential schools in Manitoba:

“If you bring us 100 Indians and half-breeds to the mission convent, when they leave they will no longer be Indians. They will be become good citizens, earn a just living,  and be useful to the country.”

It really was an inspiring day. I wish more Canadians participated, but I was happy to see so many who did.

 

Raised by Psychopaths

Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

As one of the survivors of Kuper Island Residential school told Duncan McCue of the CBC, “we were raised by psychopaths.”  The children were actually taught by religious leaders in the school to inflict violence on each other. Boys in particular were taught to be bullies against their younger cohorts. They were taught by example and they were separated from their parents (called savages by John A. MacDonald) so no one could teach them that what their religious leaders in the school were teaching them was wicked.

The children were raised in very aggressive and violent places and learned to become aggressive and violent in turn.  In fact, the priests or other religious leaders taught the students how to be aggressive towards other students. The older children were taught to be bullies. That is how they were often raised. And many of those children had been ripped out of their parents’ homes often without genuine consent. Those children were also taught that their parents were incompetent parents who did not deserve respect.

Can you imagine what those students learned in that school? Can you imagine what those children were like when they became parents. Can you imagine what the children of their children were like?

 

A School they Called Alcatraz

Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

Kuper Island was an island, surrounded by ocean. Yet children tried to escape. And like Alcatraz it was very difficult to escape. One of those children, Emil William escaped in 1907 but drowned in the ocean as a result. This really was a case of ‘sink or swim’.

CBC reporter Duncan McCue reported in his podcast about Kuper Island as follows: “By the 1940s and 50s, school officials were writing about an epidemic of violence. One case threatened to expose the depth of the problem.”

Then there was  the  case involving two  indigenous girls, Patricia and Beverley Joseph who untied a boat and sailed for freedom. Sadly, they never made it. The body of one of the girls was found in the ocean. The other disappeared completely. An inquest was held but the jury did not  ask why girls would try to flee by boat in the night and dead of winter.   What made it so bad there that they would take such a chance? After 15 minutes of deliberation, they ruled the deaths accidental. It was the fault of the young girls. The victims were blamed. Pretty simple right?

The girls were Belvie’s cousins. McCue interviewed her for the series. Belvie, like her cousin,  did not like the food at the school. Now I know students often don’t like the food at their schools.  But the complaints at Residential Schools were in a class of their own. If you don’t believe me  read the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. It was eye-opening.  She was fed bowls of raw, sour, lumpy porridge. She said she was always hungry. This was a very common complaint at residential schools. One time when government inspectors were coming they each got 2 pork chops. When the inspectors failed to arrive, they had to give their pork chops back. But did the girls take such dangerous chances because of bad food? Probably not.

Other girls in the school warned Belvie that there were dangerous people in and around the school. When she was 11 years old, she was told to bring the towels down to the laundry room. While there she heard a sound near the laundry that scared her. So, she ran, but fell down and hit her head. When she came to, she was naked lying on the towels and she felt like she had been riding a bike and had fallen down on the bicycle bar. She didn’t know what happened. We can guess what happened. But we don’t know.

Belvie  said pretty well every girl who was more than 10 years old was sent to bring towels to the laundry room. In time they all learned what happened there. She said, “This brother was raping them all.”

Can you blame young girls for trying to escape?  Is it their fault if they drown? Or it perhaps, more complicated than that? The School was called Alcatraz.

2023 Reconciliation Day

Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools, Indigenous--Reconciliation

Today was Reconciliation Day.  Many of us still don’t know what that means. We want to  support reconciliation but don’t know how to do it. I am not saying I do. I remember though what Niigaan Sinclair  a well-known indigenous spokesman in Manitoba told me af few years ago when I asked what an old white guy could to to participate in a small way towards reconciliation.  He said it was not up to him to tell  an old white guy from Steinbach what he should do to. He said it was not his business to tell me that. It was up to me to offer something. It was not up to the offended to tell me what to do.

Sinclair though did give a hint. He said I could talk to white friends.  Many of those, he said, would not listen to him, or read his articles in the paper, but the white guys might listen to me. I assured him not many would, but I thought then, and do now, that this made sense.  I should reach out to white guys and women and just offer my point of view.  For what its worth (I know not much as I am certainly not an influencer) but I might reach a couple of people. Maybe not convince them but to engage them. That is one of the reasons I have continued to blog about some of these issues.

Today I accepted an invitation to the Seniors club in town to attend a dinner in recognition of truth and reconciliation. We were entertained first by 2 young indigenous hoop dancing girls Kimberley and Charisma Mason. The girls were 14 and 15-years-old.  They were descendants of residential school survivors. Trauma from such schools, one of them said, had changed the lives of the student. For example, it disconnected them from the love of their parents, kin, and communities. That was not surprising. Until fairly recently, indigenous people were not even allowed to practice or share their ceremonies, including dancing or potlucks. Who ever though such a prohibition was a good idea?

They explained how pleased they were to present to us Steinbachers as for many years indigenous people were not allowed to perform their own dances or ceremonies. They also explained that the dancing “told a story.”  For example, with the hoops they made images of an eagle fledging from a nest. Or a hunter firing a bow.

Later Lorne, an indigenous  male dancer also performed in full regalia. He said he was a professional dancer who was paid a lot of money to dance.  As well he had spoken to music students at Yale University to explain his form of dancing and how it was related to music. He said he had used the example of a baby at a powwow falling asleep to the beat of loud drums, because the baby felt it like the mother’s heart beat in the womb.

The most interesting thing for me was seeing how thrilled the performers were to share their culture.  They were very proud to do it and were very happy to have us old white people from a seniors club in Steinbach see them perform.

Reconciliation, no doubt, will take generations. Probably as long as the abuse took, which is about 150 years. But it was nice to participate, even in a very small way.

Meegwetch

Kuper Island Residential School: A School with a Graveyard

Exploitation, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools

 

 

On the CBC podcast about Kuper Island, Right off the bat, Duncan McCue had a question for us listeners: “They called it a school, but what sort of school has a graveyard?”

The first school I attended in Steinbach after kindergarten was affectionately (or not) called “Miss Kornelsen’s school”. It was named after the longtime spinster principal of many years. Frankly, I always thought Miss Kornelsen was a bit deranged, but she was not sociopathic. That school was in Steinbach for more many years, but it did not have a graveyard. I never heard of any school that had a graveyard. Have your? There were no rumors circulating that it did. Kuper Island Residential School had a graveyard! Why? That is a pretty good question.

160 unmarked graves were found at that school located in a community of about 300 people. Why so many graves?

The school operated from 1889 to 1997. That is 108 years which is a long time, but why 160 graves? Doesn’t that seem like a lot?  How many children died at your elementary school?

Of course, in the last couple of years that many Indian Residential Schools (as they were called) had graveyards.  How many schools with mainly white children had graveyards?

Kuper Island Indian Residential School  was a school that was meant to “kill the Indian in the Child” since that was the deliberate policy of the Canadian government. If you don’t believe, that read the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. It is eye-opening. You will be confronted with some uncomfortable truths. See how much truth you can stand. But these schools killed more than “the Indian in the child.”

This is CBC series is the story mainly about 3 children from that school. 2 of them were survivors. 1 was not. It is also about a small community that is haunted by what happened there. It is a story about children who were wrenched away from their family, their language and their culture to be raised in an uncaring (by and large) institution. It was done because Canada thought this would be for the good of the children.

One of the survivors was much more blunt. He said “the children there were sent to be raised by psychopaths.” It was a chilling thought. How was that? Waht happened there?

The series of podcasts uncovered truths that had been buried—pun intended—for too long.

The school was burned to the ground in 1980 because the community could not stand having it around after it was closed. It housed too many awful memories.

 

Canada’s Alcatraz: Kuper Island Residential School

Colonialism, Exploitation, Genocide, Indigenous--Indian Residential Schools, Residential Schools

 

Penelakut Island, formerly known as Kuper Island and renamed in 2010 in honour of the Penelakut First Nation people, is located in the southern Gulf Islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland Pacific coast of British Columbia, Canada.  The Penelakut First Nation people are part of a larger group called Hul’qumi’num people. The island has a population of about 300 members of the Penelakut Band. It is not a large community, but it has suffered largely. Through no fault of its own.

The island and the Indian Residential School were the subject of a CBC radio series turned into podcasts. It is worth listening to it.

 

The host of the show, Duncan McCue travelled to Penelakut where the Kuper Island Residential School was located.  Some people called the school “Alcatraz.”  Think about that for a moment. A school supported by a church and the government of Canada was called Alcatraz. Canada’s Alcatraz.

 

Long after the Kuper Island Residential School was torn down, the survivors are still haunted by what happened there. Investigative reporter Duncan McCue of the CBC  exposed buried police investigations, confronted perpetrators of abuse as well as victims of abuse.  He also witnessed a community trying to rebuild — literally on top of the old school’s ruins and the unmarked graves of Indigenous children. The podcast he helped produce is well worth listening to as long as you can stand uncomfortable truths. I know that many of us can’t while others are tired of hearing about them. Some of these say, ‘Why can’t we get over it?’

That is a good question. Others say that their people also suffered abuse. Mennonites, for example, in some cases make such claims too. And they are right. But I don’t want to get into a suffering Olympics.  The point is not who suffered worse. I just want to point out it is difficult for survivors of residential schools, and even their descendants who have suffered inter-generational trauma, to  “get over it.”  We should learn about what happened to them first. The rest of us should be sympathetic before we become critical. Not many people in Canada had inflicted upon them schools where they had to attend even though they were designed to disparage their parents, inflict physical, emotional, and sexual abuse upon the children.  These schools were part of a Canadian system of oppression. Some even called it genocide. Who knows how we would react to such a situation.

 

The rest of us are lucky sit didn’t happen to them. Even though this happened for many decades, it was kept secret. I went to school in Canada for 20 years, including 7 years at university, and never heard of it once until after I had left that university. When I first heard about residential schools  found it hard to believe and later I thought it was a case of a few bad apples. It was more than that. More than 130 residential schools operated across Canada. As the Canadian Museum for Human Rights has described them, “The schools were a deliberate attempt to destroy Indigenous communities and ways of life. They were part of a broader process of colonization and genocide.”

I have read the executive summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. I recommend all Canadians do the same. This history was hidden from us. I want to learn about that history. I think it is important for us to know that history.

Right now, I ust want to look at what happened in one residential school.  1 school out of 130. It was Kuper Island Residential School.