The following is made available by Native Americas Journal, published by Akwe:kon Press at Cornell University's American Indian Program. For information on how to stay informed of emerging trends that impact Native peoples visit our website at http://www.nativeamericas.com. For subscriptions call (800) 9-NATIVE. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ FOR RELEASE: FEBRUARY 6, 2001 Contact: Leslie Logan/Managing Editor Office: (607) 254-4955 E-Mail: ll88@cornell.edu http://www.nativeamericas.com EDUCATION-THE NIGHTMARE AND THE DREAM A SHARED NATIONAL TRAGEDY, A SHARED NATIONAL DISGRACE BY BRUCE E. JOHANSEN / © NATIVE AMERICAS JOURNAL Even after decades, the memories of Native people who were forced to attend Canadian boarding schools have a searing quality. "It was like jail," Warner Scout, age 54, told the Calgary Herald. "The scar will be there for the rest of our lives." Scout, one of 2,000 Canadian Natives seeking legal redress for boarding-school abuse, recalled regular beatings and taunts that he was "an ugly savage." Scout was taken from his adoptive family to attend the Saint Paul residential school, operated by the Anglican Church of Canada on the Blood Reserve, near Lethbridge in southern Alberta. There, he said, "teaching...was beaten into us." The abuses he spoke of were vile and humiliating, acts considered criminal today. He said that those who spoke the Blackfoot language had their heads shaven. Canadian law at the time gave the Indian agent on each Native reserve authority to invade homes and order children aged seven or older into residential schools. Parents who did not cooperate were threatened with jail. Canada's federal government and some of the churches with which it contracted to operate roughly 80 schools now have apologized for the abuses. The Canadian apologies and their legal fallout raise similar issues in the United States-especially because the boarding-school model originated here, under the aegis of Richard Henry Pratt. Beginning at Carlisle, Penn., in 1879, the U.S. government established several Indian boarding schools, with the avowed purpose to incorporate American Indians into the lower strata of the industrial wage labor force. Pratt ran the boarding schools on an army model. By 1886, with Pratt's program established as official government policy, 531 schools had enrolled 21,231 Native pupils. The paternalistic assumptions that built Pratt's schools also informed Canadian educational policies. Canadian officials studied boarding schools in the United States before establishing their own system. In 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was established and recently published a multi-volume study of the many ways in which First Nations peoples have been deprived of their rights and lands throughout Canadian history. Part of this report documented the abuses of the boarding schools, providing a basis for establishment of a $350 million "healing fund" by Canada's federal government, as well as a host of lawsuits. The Royal Commission found that abuse was systemic, not occasional or accidental. Thousands of Native young people are said to have died in the schools and thousands more were scarred for life. On January 7, 1998, Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart read a statement of reconciliation into the record of Canada's federal Parliament at Ottawa, acknowledging the damage done to the Native population. As a country, we are burdened by past actions that resulted in weakening the identity of aboriginal peoples, suppressing their languages and cultures, and outlawing spiritual practices. We must recognize the impact of these actions on the once self-sustaining nations that were...disrupted, limited or even destroyed by the dispossession of traditional territory, by the relocation of aboriginal people, and by some provisions of the Indian Act. Some aboriginal leaders were not satisfied with the reconciliation statement. Representatives of Native women's groups, Inuits and Metis said they did not believe the apology was strong enough or that the money offered in recompense was sufficient. Other non-Indian Canadians complained that the surge of lawsuits about residential-school abuse would clog the court system, bankrupt religious denominations and strain the Canadian federal budget, requiring new taxes. By the close of 2000, the Canadian federal government had paid out roughly $27 million in individual compensation, including awards to several victims of the staff at the government-run school at Saskatchewan's Gordon reserve. Late in 1998, the federal government and the Catholic Church reached an out-of-court settlement with 11 men who were abused by Oblate priests at St. Joseph's residential school near Williams Lake, B.C., during the 1960s. In October 1998, the United Church of Canada, the country's largest Protestant body, issued an apology for physical and sexual abuse of Native students at boarding schools it operated. The apology was made shortly after disclosure of evidence indicating that church officials knew of the abuse as early as 1960 and did nothing to stop it. In 1990, the Toronto Globe and Mail reported that the abuse revealed to date was "just the tip of the iceberg." A 1989 study sponsored by the Native Women's Association of the Northwest Territories found that eight out of 10 girls and 50 percent of boys under the age of eight had been victims of sexual abuse. The Royal Commission called for a full investigation into Canada's residential-school system. Although not the forum the Royal Commission may have intended, such a public inquiry has begun to unfold, case by case, in Canadian courtrooms. Only after the survivors of Canadian boarding schools have won redress in the courts will the true dimensions of aboriginal sufferings inflicted during the course of this failed experiment in forced acculturation truly pass into history. And every word spoken in those Canadian courtrooms may some day reverberate in the United States, where the same experiment also failed-in many of the same ways. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The above article is an abstract of a feature published in the Winter 2000 issue of Native Americas Journal. Call (800) 9-NATIVE, or visit http://www.nativeamericas.com, for information on obtaining this feature article.