Darren put together this amazing audio visual production of his book, with public domain visuals from the Canadian Government Truth and Reconciliation Commission. TRC. Narrated by myself (Graham Dunlop), Marissa Leblanc and Kyle Delisle (doing the testimonies of the men and women). It will be on Audible and Apple Books soon, but the full version is here for you or on YouTube. It’s Heart wrenching in places.
What is the cost of an education?
Is education an additive process or a reductive one?
How does one weigh the benefits of tradition against the threat of being at odds with the future?
How does one refuse the offer of a better life for their children?
What if the offer is compulsory?
What happens when the tree of knowledge bares rotten fruit?
While the history of Canada's Residential School program is only just beginning
to be unearthed, there are already enough first hand accounts to begin asking
some of these questions. The words of the individuals included in this book
offer just a glimpse of the results of the effort of one group of people to
educate people who were in many cases not seeking the knowledge being
offered. These are tales of lessons learned, languages lost, traditions
replaced, & charity corrupted.
Table of Contents:
00:00 - Preface and Introduction
04:53 - Chapter 1 - Before the Schools
25:37 - Chapter 2 - Kidnapped by Institutions
37:44 - Chapter 3 - Places of Refuge?
44:42 - Chapter 4 - The Journey
1:02:25 - Chapter 5 - Arriving at School
2:10:36 - Chapter 6 - Day to Day Life in a Residential School
2:58:21 - Chapter 7 - Chores
3:11:03 - Chapter 8 - Religious Indoctrination
3:24:55 - Chapter 9 - Breaking Up Siblings
3:35:27 - Chapter 10 - Student Gender Relations
3:45:42 - Chapter 11 - Contact with Parents
4:08:36 - Chapter 12 - Trauma. Emotional Neglect, and Despair
4:23:58 - Chapter 13 - Truancy, Learning to Lie, or Worse...
4:37:44 - Chapter 14 - Harsh Discipline
5:08:08 - Chapter 15 - Outright Abuse
5:31:57 - Chapter 16 - Student VS Student
5:52:58 - Chapter 17 - Warm Memories
6:02:36 - Chapter 18 - Graduation Days
6:08:32 - To Conclude
6:11:20 - Appendix - A Timeline of Residential Schools
In Canada, the Indian residential school system was a network of mandatory boarding schools for Indigenous peoples. The network was funded by the Canadian government's Department of Indian Affairs and administered by Christian churches. The school system was created to remove Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and assimilate them into the dominant European-Canadian culture. Over the course of the system's more than hundred-year existence, at least 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally. By the 1930s about 30 percent of Indigenous children were believed to be attending residential schools. The number of school-related deaths remains unknown due to incomplete records. Estimates range from 3,200 to over 30,000.
Over the last few years, the history of the relationship between Canada’s Indigenous peoples, the Government of Canada, and the church has come to the forefront of public discourse. A darker shade has been applied to the colonial history of the country which has had mixed results in acceptance from average Canadians. In the era of “wokeness”, these topics can become even more incendiary than they have been historically, and even more careful attention must be made to how they are reported and discussed. Let me be clear that the point of this book is not to throw fuel on an already raging fire, but to make sure that in the discussion the voices of the students that attended these institutions is not lost in the political noise that frequents our reality in early 2022.
Governments and Institutions have historically been the largest purveyors of human suffering and the case of the Canadian Residential School System fits the mold. The relationship between Canadians and First Nations is one that would be better served by open dialogue than with legislation. We cannot move into a better or more unified future until the mistakes of the past are, at a minimum, realized. First Nations communities find themselves still to this day reeling and recovering from a culturally traumatic experience that is less than a generation past. Poverty, substance abuse, and suicide plague many Indigenous communities to this day and unless we learn the why of the situation correcting it for future generations seems impossible.
This book will avoid policy and solutions and focus more on storytelling, though not by the author, by the testimony of hundreds of Indigenous people that attended the schools over the last 50-60 years as recounted to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada between 2008 and 2015. In their own words we can hope to come to learn the pain they experienced daily. What it was like to be taken away from your family and community and raised in the schools, sometimes not seeing your family for months or years and in still more sad and extreme cases, never again. While painful, reading these accounts offer us all a brighter future, less affected by judgement and misunderstanding, and more favourable to empathy.
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