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Canada's Residential Schools
The religious organizations that operated the schools — the Anglican Church of Canada, Presbyterian Church in Canada, United Church of Canada, Jesuits of English Canada and some Catholic groups — in 2015 expressed regret for the “well-documented” abuses. The Catholic Church has never offered an official apology, something that Trudeau and others have repeatedly called for.
My aunt tells me she and my mother are both survivors of the '60s Scoop, a period of time when government policies allowed child welfare authorities to easily take Indigenous children from their families, place them in foster homes, and in many cases adopt them out to white families. It’s all part of a cycle of trauma and I’m finally beginning to see my place within it.
It was against this backdrop that I found myself covering the confirmation of those 215 school children’s remains buried on the grounds of the Kamloops Indian Residential School, and the emotions I had so carefully kept in check all these years came unexpectedly flooding out.
I sobbed my way through the report, barely able to pronounce the words, as all of the forces that have shaped my life, and my family’s lives, and the lives of so many generations of my fellow Indigenous people, seemed to swirl around me.
Initially, I was embarrassed. But with reflection over the past few days, I realize that I have nothing to be ashamed of, but clearly a lot of work to do.I am still figuring out what that will look like, but I know it will involve an effort to reclaim my cultural identity and learn how I fit within the 'Na̱mg̱is First Nation, and establish stronger ties with my people.We also have a lot of work to do as a country, to confront the terrible atrocities that led us to this place where we are all burdened by a dark and shameful legacy that begins with the residential school system, leading to the '60s Scoop, and continuing today with blatant inequality in the child welfare and criminal justice systems.
It is time for all Canadians to learn the true history of this country’s terrible and ongoing mistreatment of Indigenous people — because only then can true healing and reconciliation begin. For me, that journey of understanding begins now.
The Chief of the Association Of Iroquois & Allied Indians said that while Ontario’s $10-million announcement is a good start, it’s a small portion of what is needed to uncover all the unmarked graves at residential schools.“It’s a good gesture for sure, and it’s going to be appreciated, but the reality is the amounts the federal and provincial governments have put in are going to be a drop in the bucket as to what will be needed,” said Grand Chief Joel Abram.
On Tuesday morning, the Ford government announced $10 million in funding over the next three years to help identify and commemorate unmarked burial sites at former residential schools.
This announcement comes in the wake of the discovery of the remains of 215 children in unmarked graves at the former Kamloops residential school.The graves have lead to calls for action investigations on the grounds of all residential schools across the county.
...
with the last relative that has the knowledge of what happened during
the time he and all of his siblings were taken from his home in the '60s scoop.
For about the first 25 years or so, when students died, they were almost
invariably buried here at the school,” said Jim Gerencser, an archivist
at the Carlisle Indian School Digital Research Center, run by nearby Dickinson College.
CARLISLE, Penn. — The remains of 10 Native American and Alaska Native children who died more than 100 years ago while attending Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania are scheduled to be returned home to their communities in Alaska and South Dakota this week, according to a notice from the Department of the Army, which oversees the cemetery.
According to Northern Arapaho Tribal Chairman, Jordan Dresser, tribal member Yufna Soldier Wolf fought for the return of three Arapaho children who are now re-buried on the reservation in Ethete, Wyo.
In light of the recent discovery of a mass unmarked children’s grave in Canada at the site of a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia, Dresser said he’d be surprised if there weren't more buried children at Carlisle.
“The records are not as accurate as we want to believe,” he said. “You’ve got to assume the worst.”
Through the Northern Arapaho Tribe’s leadership, 11 children were exhumed between 2017 and 2019. In addition to the Northern Arapaho, those children belonged to the Piegan/Blackfeet Tribe, the Oglala Sioux Tribe, Oneida Nation, the Iowa Nation and the Modo Nation.
The current exhumation will begin on June 19 and is slated to take about a month, according to a report from the U.S. Office of Army Cemeteries. The cemetery will be closed during that time. Objections from family members and public comments can be mailed to Lt Col. Scott Tasler and Capt. Jason Netteler, the OAC project managers, or emailed.
Deb Haaland, the U.S. interior secretary, is the first Native American to serve as a Cabinet secretary.
As I read stories about an unmarked grave in Canada
where the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found last month, I
was sick to my stomach. But the deaths of Indigenous children at the
hands of government were not limited to that side of the border. Many
Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States also has a
history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to
eradicate our culture and erase us as a people. It is a history that we
must learn from if our country is to heal from this tragic era.
OPINION: White violence not a historical truth: it’s a reality with a history
Although
slavery was abolished and much progress has been made for the First
Nations and all minority groups in these countries, the ideology of
white supremacy and the danger of white violence are still very much
with us today
News Service |
Just
a few days ago, a white man killed a Muslim family in Ontario Canada.
Though widely reported as a singular incident not connected to any other
recent or historical acts of violence, it was in fact the latest in a
long series of ideologically-driven white supremacist violence. The most
immediate connection that springs to mind, also from Canada, is the
horrifying discovery of an unmarked mass grave in which are buried at
least 215 indigenous children who had perished at the hands of white
supremacists.
The remains of these 215 children were discovered at
a site that used to house Canada’s biggest residential school for
indigenous children. It was run by the Catholic Church from the 1890s
through the 1970s, until the federal government shut it down. These
latest reports on the mass graves are part of a twenty-year effort by
Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nations people in order to find the missing
children in many of the unmarked mass graves at former school sites
such as Kamloops. Between 1883 and 1996, around 150,000 children passed
through the Canadian version of this system, which was eventually
abolished. Thousands of unaccounted-for children have yet to be found.
They were never seen again by their families. When pressed for answers,
the schools would tell families that their children had died, run away
or simply disappeared, and they would generally refuse to return the
body in case of death.
The brand of hatred that has motivated
white people to assault Muslims in New Zealand, the United Kingdom, the
United States, and Europe is intimately connected to the ideology that
created the “Indian boarding school system” in the US and Canada. Indian
boarding schools were part of America’s and Canada’s so-called
“civilizing mission”. They were the quintessential example of how white
supremacy had been at the heart of both of these countries since the
earliest days of their founding, rather than being a marginal, radical,
and fringe ideology. European settlers wanted to civilize these
“savages”, seeing their own Anglo-Saxon Christian culture as vastly
superior to the many different tribal languages and cultural practices
that the indigenous peoples had.
Richard Henry Pratt, an American
general, had captured a group of indigenous men as prisoners of war. He
taught them how to speak, read and write English, dressed them in
military uniforms and trained them to do labor. He photographed the
results of this assimilation experiment and presented them to the
federal government. This is how he was able to secure funding for the
first Indian American boarding school, set up to “kill the Indian and
save the man,” as Pratt called it. The schools quickly spread across the
US and other colonial countries like Australia, New Zealand, and, of
course, Canada.
With the aid of Christian missionaries, the
Canadian and American governments forcibly removed thousands of
indigenous children from their families and made them attend these
schools, where speaking indigenous languages and their cultural
traditions and spiritual practices were prohibited. Children who did not
comply with the rules were subjected to physical, emotional and sexual
abuse, as well as violence. According to some eyewitness accounts,
priests, for example, would rape students, and when they got pregnant
and gave birth, the babies would be killed, in some cases brutally by
being burned in furnaces.
Indigenous children were forced to cut
their braids, a very important part of their culture. Their names were
changed. As punishment for speaking in their native language, some were
forced to wash their mouths with soap, as if to imply that their mother
tongues were dirty.
Haudenosaunee boarding school survivors seek justice
Kanentiio, whose name means “handsome pine,” describes life at an Indian boarding school, also known as a residential school, in the 1960s.
The first such facility, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, was founded
in the 1870s by military Capt. Richard Pratt. It was a way to
assimilate Native American children into “white” society and, in Pratt’s words, “kill the Indian to save the man.”
“The intent was to extinguish us as
Aboriginal people and destroy whatever sense of self-worth we had, and I
can say that they succeeded to a large degree,” Kanentiio said. “They killed our spirit. They killed us.”
Many students sent to these schools went missing. Last month, 215
children’s remains were discovered in British Columbia at one of nearly
500 boarding schools in Canada and the U.S.
The discovery has sparked renewed calls for justice from Indigenous
communities and for further investigations — forensic and archeological —
into more residential schools.
“It’s
high time that this American country recognizes the great value and
resource in its indigenous populations and celebrates and promotes and
supports,” said Michael Galban, curator at the Seneca Art and Culture Center at Ganondagan State Historic Site.
Last year, Democrats in the U.S. Senate introduced a bill that would
create a Truth and Healing Commission, which would investigate and
document past injustices of what they call the federal government’s
cultural genocide. So far, the bill has not progressed in any fashion.
Undoing this magnitude of injustice would take multiple long-term solutions, Galban said, starting with policy changes.
“It would involve language restoration,” he said. “It would involve environmental restorations. It would involve, in some cases, restoring people to their original homelands.”
It would also mean recording oral histories of survivors’ experiences.
“Every day, we’re losing the stories from the survivors as they age out and pass away,” he said. “Hopefully they’re sharing their stories with their families.”
Survivors’ stories Galban’s grandmother, Evelyn Evans Galban, was a residential school survivor.
In the 1920s, she was taken from her home in California and sent to
the Stewart Indian School in Nevada, where Galban said she experienced
abuse.
“The idea was that you could strip these
Indian children of their culture and their ideologies and create a new
cheap labor class that certain areas of the country could exploit,” Galban said.
During the school year, she was taught how to fold laundry, set
tables and make beds, he said. During school breaks, she couldn’t go
home.
“During the summers, these schools would
hire out the students under the guise that they would be learning how to
live amongst the whites,” Galban said. “But really, they were being farmed out to hotels and resorts to be their domestic labor.”
She attempted to run away multiple times. On one occasion, she was caught “in the middle of the winter. They took away her shoes and basically whipped her back to school with no shoes on,” Galban said.
Finally, with the help of a cousin, she managed to run away to Montana, Galban said.
No choice Indian boarding schools were compulsory at the time. It
would be another 12 years before the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978
would give Native American parents the legal right to refuse their
children’s placement in these kinds of schools off reservations.
Until then, Native leadership and families were essentially held hostage by the federal governments of the U.S. and Canada.
“If there was ever, whether it be by
leadership or families, any action to stop or take their children
(back), they were often persecuted and arrested and faced problems for
that as well,” said Mohawk Grandchief Abram Benedict.
In 1966, Kanentiio was 11 years old when police and social services
took him from the St. Regis Mohawk Reserve near Ottawa, Canada, and sent
him nearly 350 miles west to the Mohawk Institute in Brantford,
Ontario.
He’s now one of about 40 remaining Mohawk survivors.
At the school, Kanentiio said the abuse came not just from staff but
also from older students who he said were encouraged to discipline the
younger students.
After a few years, he managed to escape — first by way of expulsion: He and his classmates were non-compliant, troublemakers.
“Our rude behavior was our survival,” Kanentiio said. “We couldn’t just simply be compliant. We had to fight, physically if necessary, to stop these things from happening.”
Still, when he was expelled, he wasn’t sent back to the reservation.
He was put into foster care and bounced around from one home to the
next until he eventually managed to run away back home, he said.
More than 50 years later, Kanentiio wishes he could confront those
personally responsible for the brutal treatment, abuse, and for ripping
families apart.
“It’s a terrible thing to walk around believing that you’re not truly a human being or a complete human being,” he said. “Something deep and wonderful has been lost. And that’s the terror of this thing.”
Stephen Bronstein was suspended for one month and fined $4,000 after admitting to mishandling the cases of Sixties Scoop survivors. A
First Nation in B.C.’s Cariboo region is condemning the B.C. Law
Society’s handling of a Vancouver lawyer’s mishandling of residential
school survivor cases.
Bronstein was fined $4,000 after admitting
to mishandling the cases of residential school survivors. He was also
barred from acting as counsel for any ’60s Scoop claimants in the
future.
The
’60s Scoop was a large-scale program that allowed child welfare
organizations to remove Indigenous children from their families and
place them in the foster care system and allow them to be adopted by
white families.
The
Tŝilhqot’in Nation on Wednesday condemned the law society for not
adequately punishing Bronstein, noting that many of his clients were
from the First Nation.
The bill codifies provisions from the federal Indian Child Welfare Act in state law and will ensure that Oregon's practices better serve Indian children, ...
Phyllis Webstad was 6 years old when the new orange shirt she chose for
her 1st day of school was stripped off her back. It was the early 70s
& she was the 3rd generation to attend St. Joseph’s Residential
School in Williams Lake, BC.
While the suggestion is daunting, the 53-year-old member of the
Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation said she cannot help but think about a
picture of a bridge hanging on her living room wall that her Aunt Agnes
Jack purchased at a yard sale.
“The bridge is woven together with rope and tree roots,” she said.
“It’s not pretty, it’s not perfect, but it’s enough that you could walk
across it.”
Webstad said she keeps thinking about that.
“That’s been my life it seems because I grew up on the reserve, I’m
half Secwepemc, I’m half white and I have lighter skin so I’ve been more
readily accepted in the non-Indigenous community and I’ve been able to
be a bridge builder or gap person.”
She described the time period since the announcement confirming the
remains of 215 children buried at the former Kamloops Indian Residential
School as a whirlwind.
Webstad’s mom Rose Wilson gave birth to her in July 1967 at her grandmother Lena Jack’s home in Dog Creek. She found her birth father in Kamloops a few years ago. “I have eight other siblings, one passed away, so there are seven. They all live in Kamloops.”
Tina Taphouse is pictured in Langley, B.C., Monday, June 7, 2021. Photo by: The Canadian Press/Jonathan Hayward
#Langley woman says her mother gave her up for adoption to spare her
residential school experience. #residentialschool #Sixtiesscoop
LANGLEY, BRITISH COLUMBIA, B.C. — Tina Taphouse has spent a lot of
time lately reflecting on the impact the Kamloops Indian Residential
School has had on her life's path.
Taphouse didn't go to the school because her mother, who worked there and had also grown up in residential school, made theimpossible decision to put her up for adoption so she wouldn't have to attend.
While Tina escaped the horrors that many survivors of the '60s Scoop and residential schools endured, Taphouse said she also wasn't brought up in her culture, with her family or her traditions and she felt lost.
She began reconnecting with her roots after her biological father reached out to her through an adoption reunification registry in 1994. Over time, she has learned more about her own family and story, although she said she doesn't push her mother to share sensitive details.
Warning: The information and material here may trigger
unpleasant feelings or thoughts of past abuse. Please contact the
24-hour Residential School Crisis Line at 1-866-925-4419 if you require
emotional support.
DHS/Border Patrol is using helicopter rotor wash to try to clear out activists out from an occupied #Line3 pump station north of Park Rapids. More than 24 activists are locked down to equipment inside. @MPRnewspic.twitter.com/ArTN6FAqwC
Authorities said the risky low-flying maneuver was used to warn demonstrators to disperse, but the reasoning doesn’t hold up.
The largest civil disobedience yet against new pipeline construction in Minnesota was met by a furious response — and a cloud of debris. A Department of Homeland Security Border Patrol helicopter descended on the protest against the Enbridge Line 3 tar sands pipeline, kicking up dust and showering demonstrators with sand, in an unusual attempt to disperse the crowd.
“I couldn’t see because it got in my eyes,” said Big Wind, a 28-year-old Northern Arapaho organizer with the anti-pipeline Giniw Collective, who was there when the helicopter swooped over the civil disobedience action. “After it pulled up there were a lot of people who were ducking, who were in the fetal position, just because they didn’t know what was going to happen and were trying to protect themselves from the sand.”
***
The anti-pipeline protests are in response to plans from the Canadian
energy firm Enbridge to ramp up construction as a springtime hiatus
lifts. Enbridge is preparing to drill under northern Minnesota rivers
that are central to the lifeways of local Ojibwe people — and are
protected by treaties between tribes and the federal government.
Pipeline opponents have for weeks asserted that this weekend’s Treaty
People Gathering would draw more than 1,000 people to northern Minnesota
to fight the tar sands pipeline.
Here’s the story from @dan_kraker and I about everything that happened at the #Line3 pump station yesterday. Listen for it on Morning Edition too https://t.co/cVNjH1U5E9
Author: Beverly Jacobs, Acting Dean and Associate Professor, Law, University of Windsor
Two young children sit next to shoes left in front of a statue
of Egerton Ryerson, who was instrumental in the design and
implementation of the Indian Residential School System.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
Like others who have been speaking out, I want the ground-penetrating radar that was used at Kamloops Indian Residential School to be used at all other former residential school sites.
What happened to Indigenous children is genocide, and the legacy of that continues through denial and inaction.
Legally speaking, this genocide consists of a composite wrongful act
that triggers the responsibility of the Canadian state under
international law. Canada has breached its international obligations
through a series of actions and omissions taken as a whole, and this
breach will persist as long as genocidal acts continue to occur and
destructive policies are maintained. Under international law, Canada has
a duty to redress the harm it caused and to provide restitution,
compensation and satisfaction to Indigenous peoples.
I have watched and felt the aftermath of this genocide. I’ve felt it
all my life and I know my parents and grandparents felt it too. My
grandmother went to a residential school and didn’t talk about it until
she was sick and dying. She told my aunt that she saw a child being
buried beside the laneway to the Mohawk Institute, also known as the Mush Hole, in Brantford, Ont.
The Mohawk Institute is
one of the last standing Indian Residential Schools in Canada. It has
since been turned into the Woodland Cultural Centre.
Resiliency and survival
As a lawyer working with Sunchild Law, I represented residential school survivors at their Independent Assessment Process (IAP) hearings.
The IAP was established to resolve claims of serious physical, sexual
or emotional abuse suffered at Indian Residential Schools.
While advocating for survivors, I found this process not only
difficult as an Indigenous lawyer and intergenerational survivor, but as
someone who had to witness the re-traumatization of survivors. I also saw and felt their amazing strength as they persevered through this process.
As a professor of law at the University of Windsor, I am grateful our students have been able to learn Indigenous Legal Orders from Indigenous faculty with specializations in Haudenosaunee, Nêhiyaw and Anishinaabe laws.
We have done a lot at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law to implement the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action 28
— which calls upon “law schools in Canada to require all law students
to take a course in Aboriginal people and the law.” We’ve done more
than establish one course and in fact have established an Indigenous Law
Stream Certificate. It’s not nearly enough, but it is a start.
‘Ohero:kon Under the Husk’
by Katsitsionni Fox shows young Mohawk women who are on a spiritual,
emotional and physical journey to womanhood through their traditional
rites of passage.
Ongoing genocide
I’ve seen and felt the strength of our people to recover and heal
from the impacts of genocidal, colonial laws and policy — like The Indian Act and the ‘60s Scoop — that have been happening for decades. These feelings of pain and trauma are not new.
But first and foremost, Canada’s violation of one of the most
fundamental rules of international law necessitates an obligation of
cessation: Canada must put an end to its perennial pattern of violence
against and oppression of Indigenous peoples.
Orange fabric cut in the shape of
shirts are pinned to string at the Human Rights Monument in Ottawa,
during a vigil to honour the 215 children whose remains were found at
the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School.THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
The discovery of the remains of Indigenous children must be
investigated as a crime against humanity and further investigation must
happen at other former residential school sites. The perpetrators must
be held accountable so that genocide will stop and healing and
reconciliation can occur.
I urge all Canadians to care, learn, listen, respect and unlearn the
lies that have been told. I wish for all Canadians who are unaware of
this genocide to learn the truth and accept that they’ve benefited from
Canada’s genocidal policies and laws that have tried to erase us from
existence.
Our children and survivors have to be celebrated, honoured and respected.
Byron Louis, Chief of the Okanagan Indian Band in British Columbia,
posted on LinkedIn a message that should stay with all of us:
“Do not lower your head and cry, hold your head up in praise and
honour them and most importantly support them. This is what they
rightfully deserve in their service to our People. They need our praise
not pity!”
If you are an Indian Residential School survivor, or have been
affected by the residential school system and need help, you can contact
the 24-hour Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line: 1-866-925-4419
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
Beverly Jacobs does not work for, consult, own shares
in or receive funding from any company or organization that would
benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations
beyond their academic appointment.
The final report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 identified 3,200 children who died as a result of residential schools, including 38 in Quebec. But Indigenous leaders and other experts believe the true figure could be far higher.
In her testimony before the TRC, Marthe Basile-Coocoo recalled the grey day when, as a six-year-old, she first saw the school at Pointe-Bleue.
"The
nuns separated us, my brothers, and then my uncles, then I no longer
understood," she said. "That was a period of suffering, nights of
crying. We all gathered in a corner … and there we cried."
The Roman Catholic school in Fort George was the first residential school in Quebec. It opened in 1931. (Truth and Reconciliation Commission/Deschâtelets Archives)
Pope Francis met with two Canadian Cardinals on Saturday amid mounting pressure on the Catholic Church to take responsibility for Canada’s residential school…
Some 150,000 First
Nations, Metis and Inuit children were forcibly sent to residential
schools, where many suffered abuse and even death.
The Missionary
Oblates of Mary Immaculate ran about 47 per cent of Canada’s
residential schools, including the one in Kamloops. The Oblates have
refused to release their records to help identify the remains.
Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau also put pressure on the Catholic Church
Friday, calling on officials to “step up” and take responsibility for
its role in the system and urging the release of records related to the
schools.
Trudeau said he was “deeply disappointed” by the
position the Catholic Church has taken, adding that he personally asked
Pope Francis in 2017 to consider apologizing for the institution’s part
in the government-sponsored, church-run schools.
“It’s something we are all still waiting for the Catholic Church to do,” Trudeau said.
“The judiciary should conduct criminal investigations into all
suspicious death and allegations of torture and sexual violence against
children hosted in residential schools, and prosecute and sanction the
perpetrators and concealers who may still be alive,” the experts said in
the release.
The signatories to the release included Mama Fatima
Singhateh, an expert on the sexual exploitation of children, and
Francisco Cali Tzay, an expert on the rights of Indigenous people.
The call from former Senator Murray Sinclair, who chaired the TRC from 2009 to 2015, comes after the remains of 215 children were recently found in an ...
Part of that agreement is the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. READ MORE: Canadian control. Authorities are lining up agencies to deal with the ...
... provinces and territories have recently made changes to their curriculums in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, or are working to ...
Oral histories and documents collected by the Truth and ReconciliationCommittee tell the shocking stories of the misery of generations of Indigenous ...
Veronica, we adult adoptees are thinking of you today and every day. We will be here when you need us. Your journey in the adopted life has begun, nothing can revoke that now, the damage cannot be undone. Be courageous, you have what no adoptee before you has had; a strong group of adult adoptees who know your story, who are behind you and will always be so.
Did you know?
lakota.cc/16I9p4D
Did you know?
New York’s 4o-year battle for OBC access ended when on January 15 2020, OBCs were opened to all New York adoptees upon request without restriction. In only three days, over 3,600 adoptees filed for their record of birth. The bill that unsealed records was passed 196-12.
click to listen
Listening to The Other Side of Adoption with Trace A DeMeyer by Fire Talk Production https://t.co/6SGuMcotmn
click to read and listen about Trace, Diane, Julie and Suzie
Happy Visitors!
ADOPTION TRUTH
As the single largest unregulated industry in the United States, adoption is viewed as a benevolent action that results in the formation of “forever families.” The truth is that it is a very lucrative business with a known sales pitch. With profits last estimated at over $1.44 billion dollars a year, mothers who consider adoption for their babies need to be very aware that all of this promotion clouds the facts and only though independent research can they get an accurate account of what life might be like for both them and their child after signing the adoption paperwork.
Initially, I was embarrassed. But with reflection over the past few days, I realize that I have nothing to be ashamed of, but clearly a lot of work to do.I am still figuring out what that will look like, but I know it will involve an effort to reclaim my cultural identity and learn how I fit within the 'Na̱mg̱is First Nation, and establish stronger ties with my people.We also have a lot of work to do as a country, to confront the terrible atrocities that led us to this place where we are all burdened by a dark and shameful legacy that begins with the residential school system, leading to the '60s Scoop, and continuing today with blatant inequality in the child welfare and criminal justice systems.
