What were Residential Schools?
to be placed in Indian Residential Schools — Painting by Kent Monkman
What were Residential Schools?
In recent months, Canadian Residential Schools have made headlines. On the site of these schools were found mass graves, a grim reminder of a dark period in the history of Canada.
So what were residential schools?
Residential Indian Schools were schools set up in both the United States and Canada during the late 1800s. They were ran by Catholic Jesuit missionaries and other religious groups to educate Indigenous People in Christianity and become “civilized”. While some may have had the pure intentions of saving souls and making the lives of the native people better, in practice, it was the attempted destruction of a way of life.
The practice also including taking the children forcibly from their homes and families. At the schools, they were stripped of their native language and culture. Often they were deprived of their given names and given “Christian names”. There was a saying amongst those that justified the practice: “Kill the Indian. Save the man.”
It is estimated that by the 1930s, about 30 percent of Candian Indigenous children lived in these boarding schools. By the 1970s, about 60,000 Indigenous children were in boarding schools in the United States.
On top of the loss of language and culture, there were also reports of abuse and a high death toll in these schools. Students were exposed to forced labor as well as physical and sexual abuse. When these children graduated from these schools, they found themselves unaccepted not only by the Indigenous communities but in the society of their home countries.
The alienation and trauma of these people are some of the reasons for the high rates of alcoholism, depression, suicide, and economic problems in these communities. The survivors of these schools still deal with the trauma they experienced all those years ago.
While there are still a few Native American boarding schools today in the United States which are run by the various Native American reservations, most of the schools in Canada were closed by the 1960s.
The Canadian Residential Schools have been in the news recently due to the discovery of unmarked graves on the grounds of several schools. It is unknown how many children died of disease, accidents, or abuse due to poor recordkeeping. Estimates put the death toll at between 3.000 and 6,000. Many children were listed as missing, their fates unknown to their families.
The practice of burying the children in unmarked graves has led to difficulty knowing the fate of the missing children. In May of 2021, 215 unmarked graves were discovered on the other 751 unmarked graves at Marieval Indian Residential School in Marieval, Saskatchewan.
Canadian officials released statements following the discovery. They emphasized that these were not mass graves but unmarked graves. They likely had markers at one time but were removed by the people who ran schools when they were closed.
The legacy of the residential is still felt in both the United States and Canada. Both countries have tried to right the wrongs of their governments on their native peoples. Whether it is closing down the schools or giving them for the people to control, there is the acknowledgment of the damage done by these schools. Government and religious leaders have issued official apologies for the treatment of the Native American peoples of both their countries.
More unmarked graves will likely be found as work on these schools to understand their history continues. And it is possible with modern DNA testing that these remains can be identified and allow these families to have closure.
The residential schools are a dark legacy of the United States and Canada and serve to teach us how the relationship of both these countries and their Native American populations has always been complicated.
While discovering the unmarked graves comes as a shock to many, we must also use it as a learning tool to see how these schools affected the people who lived through them and help them and their communities heal.