Residential Schools – Thomas Peace

July 12, 2021October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

Want to Understand Egerton Ryerson? Two School Histories Provide the Context

In 1842, at the Dawn settlement near Dresden, Ontario, Josiah Henson built the British American Institute (BAI), a school for peoples who had escaped their enslavement. Five years later, about 75 kilometers from the BAI, on the banks of the Deshkan Ziibiing near London, Methodist missionary Kahkewaquonaby (Peter Jones) – a Mississauga leader from Credit River (western Toronto) – built the Mount Elgin Institute, a manual labour school for Munsee-Delaware and Anishinaabeg children.

Both schools were short lived, failing to live up to the hopes of their founders (though Mount Elgin reopened in 1867 with less community involvement).

What is important here is the agency deployed by Black and Indigenous people like Josiah Henson and Kahkewaquonaby in seeking out, and controlling, robust systems of education for their communities.

Making their situation much more complex, however, is that the educational philosophies these men espoused have common roots with the development of the residential school system as well as two elite American colleges.

Understanding this historical context reveals an important turning point in the history of racism and exclusion in Canadian law and society. In this moment, some Black and Indigenous peoples hoped schooling might help navigate the developing settler colonial state while – at the same time – those efforts were thwarted and co-opted by government and churches to entrench racial hierarchies that privileged White English-speaking settlers. Egerton Ryerson falls right in the middle of these divergent interests.

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June 11, 2021October 17, 2023 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts, Translation

Residential Schools: How Quebec Colonized the West

By Catherine Larochelle

Trigger Warning: This article discusses the residential school system and the Roman Catholic Church. The National Residential School Crisis Line is 1-866-925-4419.

With the Quiet Revolution, identity in Quebec shifted from an association with French Canada to one more tightly bound by the province’s political borders. Quebec’s so-called national history similarly refocused to emphasize histories of Quebec rather than histories of francophones living elsewhere in North America. Along with this transition was buried the shared history between Quebec and the Prairies. As a consequence, many Quebecers today have difficulty associating Quebec with Canada’s colonization of the west.

Memorial statue of Father Albert Lacombe, one of many French Canadians who worked on the Prairies during the 19th and 20th Century. (Wikimedia Commons)

Although the media has begun to discuss Quebec’s twentieth-century residential schools, too often in Quebec, when we learn about tragedies like the one at Kamloops Residential School, we continue to hear common refrains that absolve Quebecers of their participation within this genocidal system.

Some say: “It was the Federal government!” As if Quebecers do not elect their members of parliament and participate through them in the government… don’t forget about Hector-Louis Langevin.

Others reflect: “It was the church! And the church also oppressed French Canadians.” As if priests and nuns were not themselves French Canadians… don’t forget about Albert Lacombe.

And yet others lament: “We have suffered under the British yoke. French Canadians were friends with Indigenous peoples.” As if the desire to eliminate these peoples did not begin in the seventeenth century… don’t forget about the narrative of New France’s Golden Age.

These are not old pre-Truth and Reconciliation Commission claims. From his perch at the Journal de Montreal, columnist Mathieu Bock-Côté made just these arguments earlier this week.

And yet…

The history of residential schools in Western Canada is part of Quebec’s history. The history of genocide is part of Quebec’s history.

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February 10, 2020April 5, 2021 Thomas Peace ActiveHistory.ca Posts

If we had only known… whistle blowers, Florence Nightingale, and residential schools

This post was originally published on ActiveHistory.ca

It appeared of great importance to ascertain, if possible, the precise influence which school training exercised on the health of native children…
The Indian schools in Canada afford a total annual death rate of 12 ½ per 1,000 for both sexes; but the mortality of girls is nearly double that of boys…
Making allowance for native children dying at home, we shall be within the truth in assuming the mortality of native children at school as double that of English children of the same ages [emphasis added] …
Florence Nightingale, Sanitary Statistics, 1863.

In 1863, Florence Nightingale – best known as the founder of modern nursing – published a statistical report on the health of Indigenous students in day and boarding schools across the British Empire. As these selections from her text suggest, the situation looked bleak.

I came across Nightingale’s work over the weekend, after listening to Lynn McDonald on CBC’s Fresh Air discuss the famous nurse’s turn to statistics and her concern with the plummeting populations of peoples whose land was increasingly occupied and commodified by Britain, its emigrants, merchants, and industrialists.

Florence Nightingale (middle) in 1886 with her graduating class of nurses from St Thomas’ outside Claydon House, Buckinghamshire (Wikimedia Commons)

What struck me most in this CBC interview was a sense of missed opportunity in the nineteenth century for a change in policy and approach. At its core, Nightingale’s argument in the report is this: colonial statistics are poor – almost useless – but what statistics she could compile suggest real health problems for Indigenous children attending colonial schools. While she does not directly blame settler colonialism for these health issues, her short report called for reform in how these schools were run.

As the TRC’s final report reminds us in vivid detail, in Canada, reform did not come until the late 1960s – over a century later.

What may surprise some readers, though, is that despite its 1863 publication date – indeed, it was penned several years before residential schools became a systematic, government-led form of oppression and re-education – Nightingale was neither the first, nor last, to call attention to the risks colonial schooling posed for Indigenous students.

In 1822, Anglican social reformer, Walter Bromley, blew the whistle on Canada’s first residential school: the New England Company’s academy at Sussex Vale, in New Brunswick.

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