In , the landmark Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples drew attention to the lasting harm that was done by the residential schools. A growing number of Survivors and their descendants came forward to tell their stories and demand action. Through their courage and persistence, an eventual legal settlement was reached between Survivors, the Assembly of First Nations, Inuit representatives and the defendants, the federal government and the churches responsible for the operation of the school.
It is important to acknowledge that the Settlement Agreement was not comprehensive. A separate settlement was reached with Survivors from Newfoundland and Labrador in A settlement agreement with Survivors of federal Indian Day Schools was not reached until In September , Parks Canada announced that Residential Schools had been designated an event of national historical significance.
Such designations mark aspects of Canadian history, whether positive or negative, that have had a lasting impact on shaping Canadian society. The Canadian Parliament passed legislation, Bill C-5, to create a national day of commemoration to honour residential school Survivors and promote understanding of residential school history. Residential School Timeline. A similar picture emerges when we look at the kind of health care provided to residential school students who were diagnosed with TB—a disease with effects that were made worse by the conditions within residential schools.
Indian hospitals and sanatoriums, like residential schools, were funded at a much lower rate—often just 50 percent of the per capita cost for non-Indigenous patients in provincial and municipal hospitals and sanatoria—meaning that the health care provided to Indigenous child patients with TB was substandard.
Indigenous patients, some as young as newborns, were also more likely to receive permanently debilitating surgeries and were kept in hospital for much longer than non-Indigenous patients.
The longer patients, and particularly child patients, remained in the Indian hospital, the more likely they were to lose their Indigenous languages and connections to their home communities. Many families still have no idea what happened to loved ones who left for these institutions and never returned.
Many children did die of TB as well as epidemics of measles, influenza and other infectious diseases. But it is clear that these chronically and intentionally underfunded institutions actually caused the high death rates among students. This is an opinion and analysis article; the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American. Ian Mosby is a settler historian and assistant professor in the Department of History at Ryerson University in Toronto.
His research explores the history of medical experimentation on Indigenous peoples and the long-term health effects of the residential school system. Erin Millions is a settler historian whose research examines Indigenous health history, children's history and commemoration. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options.
The devastating effects of the residential schools and the needs and life experiences of Indigenous students were becoming more widely recognized. In the s the drastic overrepresentation of Indigenous children in the welfare system consolidated, and authorities would constantly place Indigenous children with white middle-class families in an attempt to acculturate them.
In , the Department of Indian Affairs took exclusive control of the system, marking an end to church involvement in residential schooling.
Yet the schools remained underfunded and abuse continued, and many teachers and workers continued to lack proper credentials to carry out their responsibilities. In the meantime, the government decided to phase out segregation and began incorporating Indigenous students into public schools. Although these changes saw students reaching higher levels of education, problems persisted.
Many Indigenous students struggled in their adjustment to public school and to a Eurocentric system where Indigenous knowledges were excluded, fostering discrimination by their non-Indigenous peers. Post-secondary education was strongly discouraged for Indigenous students because those who wanted to attend university would have been enfranchised. The process to phase out the residential school system and other assimilation tactics was slow and not without reversals. The residential school system in Canada lasted officially for almost years, and its impacts continue on to this day.
In part, this is the legacy of compromised families and communities left by the residential schools. Starting in , residential schools in Canada began to decline in numbers.
In , the Department of Indian Affairs calculated fifty-six remaining schools, excluding the Northwest Territories. By , the same institution reported sixteen, and one decade later, eleven. By , the Department of Indian Affairs registered no remaining residential schools in operation.
In many ways, this is a misconception. According to the Report of the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry of Manitoba , several generations of Indigenous Peoples were denied the development of parenting skills not only through their removal from communities and families but also from the severe lack of attention paid to the issue by school officials.
The residential schools were operational through several generations of Indigenous Peoples so the process of healing from these damages will also take several generations -a process that has already begun, but has not been easy nor has it been simple. The historic, intergenerational, and collective oppression of Indigenous Peoples continues to this day in the form of land disputes, over-incarceration, lack of housing, child apprehension, systemic poverty, marginalization and violence against Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA peoples, and other critical issues which neither began nor ended with residential schools.
Generations of oppressive government policies attempted to strip Indigenous Peoples of their identities not only through residential schools but also through other policies including but not limited to: the implementation and subsequent changes to the Indian Act; the mass removal of Indigenous children from their families into the child welfare system known as the Sixties Scoop ; and legislations allowing forced sterilizations of Indigenous Peoples in certain provinces, a practice that has continued to be reported by Indigenous women in Canada as recently as ; and currently, through the modern child welfare systems which continue to disproportionately apprehend Indigenous children into foster care in what Raven Sinclair has called the Millennium Scoop.
It is a tool in the genocide of Indigenous Peoples. I have just one last thing to say. To all of the leaders of the Liberals, the Bloc and NDP, thank you, as well, for your words because now it is about our responsibilities today, the decisions that we make today and how they will affect seven generations from now. My ancestors did the same seven generations ago and they tried hard to fight against you because they knew what was happening.
They knew what was coming, but we have had so much impact from colonization and that is what we are dealing with today. Thank you for the opportunity to be here at this moment in time to talk about those realities that we are dealing with today.
What is it that this government is going to do in the future to help our people? Because we are dealing with major human rights violations that have occurred to many generations: my language, my culture and my spirituality. I know that I want to transfer those to my children and my grandchildren, and their children, and so on.
What is going to be provided? That is my question. I know that is the question from all of us. That is what we would like to continue to work on, in partnership. Read the full transcript and watch the video here. The residential schools heavily contributed to educational, social, financial and health disparities between Indigenous Peoples and the rest of Canada, and these impacts have been intergenerational.
It was not until the late s that the Canadian legal system began to respond to allegations of abuse brought forward by Survivors, with fewer than fifty convictions coming out of more than 38, claims of sexual and physical abuse submitted to the independent adjudication process.
Clarke, in which eight former students of St. In , twenty-seven Survivors from the Alberni Indian Residential School filed charges of sexual abuse against Arthur Plint while also holding Canada and the United Church vicariously liable. In addition to convicting Plint, the court held the federal government and the United Church responsible for the wrongs committed. Meanwhile, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples had been interviewing individuals from Indigenous communities and nations across Canada about their experiences.
However, some Indigenous people felt the government apology did not go far enough, since it addressed only the effects of physical and sexual abuse and not other damages caused by the residential school system. The St. George and Alberni lawsuits set a precedent for future cases, proving that the churches and the government of Canada could be sued as an entity.
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