Recently I talked to woman I know personally, whose mother was a Residential School survivor who  had been adversely affected by her experience in school. She told me that the problem was that as a result of her mother’s separation from her family she never learned how to be a parent. She had no one to teach her. In fact, she was taught at the Residential School that her mother and father were incompetent parents even though that did not align with her mother’s experience. Yet her church and the government told her that was true. But, neither the school nor the government taught her mother how to be a mother. She had to learn on her own.

I think we can all agree that this would have been very difficult. This was one of the many problems with Indian Residential Schools that I knew nothing about until I read the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. This created a generational problem. Parents who never learned to be parents then raised children in less than ideal circumstances and those children later became parents of their own, and also lacked proper experience. This is how such a problem cascades through the generations.

James and Tony Charley, both students at Kuper Island Residential School, were part of a 3 generational family that attended the school on Kuper Island. Their mother attended as did her parents. But the family was not kept together at the school and the children were not allowed to bond with their kin. They were kept separate and apart.

One of the survivors of the school talked to the CBC about how efficient the order of oblates of the Roman Catholic Church were destroying the families. As soon as a child arrived at the school,  they were separated from their siblings. This is consistent with what the Canadian Prime Minister John A. MacDonald wanted. He wanted to separate children from their “savage parents.” And as the survivor told CBC radio, “they were very good at that. They did a pretty damn good job of separating us.” If two brothers were at school at the same time they were still kept apart as much as possible.  They were very good at that. They were not so good at education. Who really were the savages?

Calling the Indigenous people savages is a way of dehumanizing them. Once dehumanized murderous intent, or genocidal intent finds fertile ground.

That of course brings up the question. Why did they do this?  James had an answer: “To destroy families.” Their purpose was to destroy families! According to Duncan McCue of the CBC, 

“That is exactly why Canada’s first prime minister created residential schools. Separate children from their ‘savage’ parents. It was an all-out war on indigenous families. In many ways it worked.”

Mission accomplished!

Canadian society is still paying a heavy price for such mistakes.