This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States
448
This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States
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Overview
At the end of the nineteenth century, Indigenous boarding schools were touted as the means for solving the “Indian problem” in both the United States and Canada. With the goal of permanently transforming Indigenous young people into Europeanized colonial subjects, the schools were ultimately a means for eliminating Indigenous communities as obstacles to land acquisition, resource extraction, and nation-building. Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the “Indian problem” as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the “solution” of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico through complex chains that included multiple government offices with a variety of staffs, Indigenous peoples, and even nonhuman actors such as poverty, disease, and space. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences.
Inspired by the signing of the 2007 Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement in Canada, which provided a truth and reconciliation commission and compensation for survivors of residential schools, This Benevolent Experiment offers a multilayered, comparative analysis of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. Because of differing historical, political, and structural influences, the two countries have arrived at two very different responses to the harm caused by assimilative education.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803284418 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Nebraska |
| Publication date: | 09/01/2015 |
| Series: | Indigenous Education |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 448 |
| File size: | 5 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
This Benevolent Experiment
Indigenous Boarding Schools, Genocide, and Redress in Canada and the United States
By Andrew Woolford
UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of NebraskaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8441-8
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
In the 1940s, when Mary Courchene was only five, she and her brother were brought to Fort Alexander Indian Residential School by their mother. It was not a far walk. Her family lived only a few minutes down the road from the school. Mary remembers her excitement at the prospect of learning a new language — a language that she had heard on the radio and seen in speech bubbles in comic books. Her parents had always refused to teach her this language, and they spoke only Ojibwe at home.
Despite Mary's excitement, her mother appeared to be withdrawn. When a nun came to the door of the school to let them in, Mary's brother began to cry. He was frightened by the figure in black and white with a red heart dangling from her neck. Mary, taking charge, kicked him in the shin. But during this moment of sibling confrontation, her mother disappeared without saying good-bye. "I learnt later," Mary recounts, "that that was the reason, because you see my mom was [a] first-generation residential school [survivor]. And she could not bear to talk to her children and prepare her children to go to residential school. It was just too, too much for her. So rather than tell us she, she just [left], because by then it was the law. I mean this was the 1940s, ... and it was law for us to be in school, to be institutionalized."
After that first day, the excitement about school quickly disappeared. Mary was subjected to personal humiliation and the degradation of her culture. And she learned to despise her Indigenous identity. She recalls that, when she was eleven years old, upon arriving home from school one summer,
I just absolutely hated my own parents. Not because I thought they abandon[ed] me; I hated their brown faces. I hated them because they were Indians; they were Indian. And here I was, you know, coming from [the school]. So I, I looked at my dad, and I challenged him, and he, and I said, "From now on we speak only English in this house," I said to my dad. And you know when we, when, in a traditional home where I was raised, the first thing that we all were always taught was to respect your elders and never to, you know, to challenge them.
Indigenous peoples were subjected to forced assimilation and other forms of violence through boarding schools in both the United States and Canada. In each country, missionary societies established the first boarding schools in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, followed in the late nineteenth century by government-supported or government-run schools. During this latter period, conversations occurred across the border, as lessons and information traveled between the two nations, with both equally convinced of their need to contend with the so-called Indian Problem. Yet, though both the American and Canadian governments committed to assimilative Indigenous education in the late 1800s, there has been little comparative analysis of how these two systems came into being, developed and instituted schooling policy, responded to challenges, adapted to changes in educational and colonial philosophies, and currently address the aftermath of these schools. In this book, broad-level similarities and differences between the two systems are identified and analyzed; however, specific attention is also given to local boarding school variations that are not simply the products of national differences but permutations of what I describe below as the settler colonial mesh. In brief, this approach is designed to avoid oversimplifying the boarding school experience in North America, which is always a risk when one reduces it to distinctly national (i.e., Canadian and American) patterns. Indeed, regional and temporal differences among Indigenous boarding schools are as significant and interesting as those that exist between the two countries. Therefore, the comparative approach that I use in this book will not be strictly national; instead, I will also seek to capture intranational and local discrepancies.
Although Indigenous boarding schools were often touted as a "benevolent experiment," such claims to benevolence are belied by the sheer destructiveness of these institutions.6 In this book, benevolence and destruction are understood not as pure opposites but as potentially related terms, since perceived acts of benevolence, guided by an absolute moral certainty, can be experienced by the targets of such benevolence as painful and destructive. However, I also argue that benevolence was not the primary, motivation behind assimilative schooling, for discourses of benevolence were underwritten by a settler colonial desire for land, resources, and national consolidation. For this reason, in titling this book This Benevolent Experiment, the emphasis is more on the word experiment than it is on the claims of benevolence made by settlers to rationalize their interventions in Indigenous lives. Indigenous boarding schools, as institutions imagined and guided by a diversity of individuals with motivations ranging widely in their benevolent or sinister intent, comprised a complicated experiment in the forcible transformation of multiple Indigenous peoples so that they would no longer exist as an obstacle (real or perceived) to settler colonial domination on the continent. Like any complicated experiment, Indigenous boarding schools coordinated competing visions, organized multiple institutional auspices, enrolled a variety of actors, and enlisted sets of technologies, forces, and things (e.g., space, time, disease, food) within an overarching framework — in this case, a framework orchestrated around the theme of resolving the Indian Problem. The successes and failures of this experiment are many and must be examined empirically to gain as clear a picture as possible of the respective boarding school systems in the United States and Canada.
I chart the uneven development of Indigenous boarding schools in North America through a multilevel approach. In brief, I conceptualize settler colonial practices of assimilative education as a series of nets that operates at macro-, meso-, and microsocietal levels. These nets tighten or slacken as they stretch across space and time, and when brought together, one on top of the other, they form a settler colonial mesh, which operates to entrap Indigenous peoples within the settler colonial assimilative project. But it is also important to understand that this mesh is prone to snags and tears. That is, at specific points in the settler colonial mesh, relations among the actors and institutions engaged in processes of settlement and assimilation are such that they allow for a loosening of this mesh and for the emergence of resistance and subversion, even if the settler colonial power imbalance is such to prevent outright removal of the mesh.
The various planes of colonial netting represent the different levels of analysis from which I approach the topic of Indigenous boarding schools. At the macrosocietal level, my emphasis is on the broader social terrain, comprised of fields such as economics, law, governance, culture, and science. It is from here that a conceptualization of the Indian as a problem was formulated and policy interventions implemented by state institutions were derived. At the upper meso- or institutional level of the settler colonial mesh, various governmental and nongovernmental institutions contributed to a more precise formulation of and intervention in the Indian Problem. Here education as an institution had an obvious role to play, but its effects were complemented by other relevant governmental institutions, such as law (e.g., through laws that compelled Indigenous attendance at boarding schools), welfare (e.g., through the denial of social supports to parents who did not ensure their children's enrollment in boarding schools), health (e.g., through the provision of health services in boarding schools), and policing (e.g., through the use of officers to apprehend truants, nonattenders, and unenrolled students).
The lower mesolevel consists of the various boarding schools as well as their competitor and feeder organizations. This network is where multiple schooling organizations — boarding schools (both reservation and nonreservation), mission schools, public schools, and day schools — worked in competition and cooperation to provide assimilative education to Indigenous children. Finally, at the microlevel, a specific boarding school can be conceived as a network of interactions and a site where school officials (e.g., principals, teachers, staff) innovated specific techniques to interact with students, their parents, and their communities and all parties formed relationships and alliances with other agents as well as nonhuman actors such as territory, food, and disease. Inclusion of these nonhuman actors in our considerations is important for two reasons. First, it takes us beyond the human-centric limits of Eurocentric sociohistorical analysis, introducing a potentially decolonizing approach more in keeping with Indigenous epistemologies. Second, it allows for a more complex and multifocal analysis of social interactions and the mediated consequences of human intention.
I treat these multiple levels of analysis as a series of nets coordinated to forcibly transform Indigenous peoples and thereby destroy these groups. I suggest that this coordinated effort is consistent with sociological understandings of the concept of genocide. But these nets did not simply tighten and enact their destructive potential in an undifferentiated manner. Instead, resistance happened in different times and places, and at different levels, forcing openings in the mesh that allowed for the continued survival of Indigenous groups in North America. Therefore, I should stress up front that genocide is conceived in this book as a process and not as a total outcome. In most cases, Indigenous groups were not wholly destroyed, though many experienced destruction "in part," and all, to some extent, have experienced, and continue to experience, the settler colonial mesh.
Comparing Boarding Schools in the United States and Canada
Despite the statement above about the need for attention to intranational differences, it is worthwhile to conduct a cross-national comparison of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada. This is because distinct patterns of Indigenous educational policy, its application, and experiences of assimilative schooling can be discerned, particularly at the macrolevel and upper mesolevel in each country.
To date, very little effort has been made to compare and contrast boarding schools in the United States and Canada. The literature that does exist tends to offer only brief comments, as in Reyhner and Eder's American Indian Education, which points out a few of the key differences between Canadian and American schools:
(a) Canadian residential schools lasted, on average, longer than American residential schools;
(b) Canadian policies were unrelentingly assimilationist, since no reformist period occurred in Canada as it did in the United States in the 1930s;
(c) Indigenous parents in Canada had less say regarding to which schools their children were sent; and
(d) some Canadian religious denominations lobbied vigorously to prevent diminishment of their control over or the closing of boarding schools.
The cumulative effect of these differences, Reyhner and Eder suggest, is that Indigenous children in Canada typically entered boarding schools at an earlier age than their U.S. counterparts, and the Canadian system affected more generations of Indigenous children, in a more brutal form, than was true for most parts of the United States.
Reyhner and Eder's points are a useful starting point for a more intensive investigation of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada; however, few scholars have taken on this challenge. Moreover, the efforts at comparison that do exist are too often sweeping in their approaches to the schools, offering little attention to regional and temporal differences in the development, application, and experience of Indigenous boarding school policy in the United States and Canada. Such is the case with Ward Churchill's book Kill the Indian, Save the Man. Churchill brings useful critical insight to the topic of colonial genocide through his return to Raphael Lemkin's original understanding of the term that placed cultural genocide on par with physical and biological forms of destruction. However, on an empirical level, Churchill fails to attend to the complexity of settler colonial genocidal processes. For example, he largely ignores the rise of John Collier to the role of commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) in 1933, which heralded a boarding school system much different from that in Canada during the same period. The Collier era certainly needs to be addressed more critically than it has been in some of the U.S. literature, but the reforms of this period must also be thoroughly addressed in any serious comparison of Indigenous boarding schools in the two countries, since the Collier years have important consequences for how schools were experienced in the United States (see chapter 3) as well as for the urgency felt in terms of creating redress policy in each nation (see chapter 9).
Andrea Smith also offers a broader comparison of Indigenous schooling and forced assimilation in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and several other countries. In her report for the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues, she outlines the common assimilative and genocidal purpose of schooling and child removals in each nation. Like Churchill, however, she focuses less on local and specific variations in attempts to assimilate Indigenous young people and more on a general pattern of destructive interventions in Indigenous communities.
In contrast to these strongly critical comparative examinations, Charles Glenn's American Indian/First Nations Schooling offers a near-redemptive overview of Indigenous education in North America, treating European schooling as a good that was simply mismanaged for Indigenous pupils. Glenn discusses the hardships of the schools but is less interested in arguments of cultural genocide since he does not see clear intent in the actions of colonial agents. Nonetheless, he correctly observes a key difference between Canadian and American schools:
There is a significant difference between the schools in the two countries. Residential schools in Canada were operated by various Christian denominations, with inadequate per-pupil funding from the federal government in Ottawa, until well after the Second World War. In the United States, while church-operated boarding schools have always played a role, by the 1890s public funds were being used almost exclusively to support government- operated schools; the big residential schools like Carlisle were created and operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and seem in general to have been more adequately funded than their counterparts in Canada.
This difference alone is not sufficient to account for the variances between American and Canadian schools (or among schools in the same country), and it overstates the "adequacy" of funding in U.S. schools. But it does touch on two key issues to which I give greater attention in this book: the roles of religion and funding in the schools on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border.
Although comparative discussion of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada is sparse and overly general, there is a wealth of historical work on Indigenous boarding schools in the two countries. Some of this work aspires to a comprehensive narrative overview of settler colonial schooling policy, with illustrative examples of how these policies were enacted, as well as of how students adapted to, resisted, and/or suffered from their time at the schools. More recently, the historical trend has been to focus on specific schools. Such was always the case with Indigenous boarding school memoirs. But current historians of Indigenous education more regularly seek to capture local characteristics of the schooling experience and to offer portraits of how specific Indigenous groups, rather than an assumed homogeneous Indigenous people, lived their boarding school days. Some, such as Miller and Edmund Danziger Jr., argue that only through the study of local communities and schools is it possible to achieve a full and "balanced" understanding of the impact of residential schools.
Most of these recent works are generally critical of schooling policy (some more than others), but they also seek to show the uneven application of this policy across time and space. It is within this unevenness that they locate examples of students who enjoyed aspects of their schooling experiences, connected with certain teachers or staff members, and went on to use their education for positive purposes unexpected by policy makers, such as by reinforcing rather than shedding their Indigenous identities or becoming leaders in the pursuit of Indigenous rights. Others go further to emphasize how Indigenous students, parents, and communities came to claim and use boarding schools for their own purposes.
By invoking the term "genocide," this book might seem to ignore the historical sophistication and debate engendered by these contemporary scholars. However, the opposite is the case. My effort, in part, is to show how genocidal processes themselves are uneven and uncertain. Like all grandiose modernist projects of state building, Indigenous boarding schools were prone to inconsistencies, variable applications, local resistances, and subversions. My concern is with the negotiation of genocide: that is, how groups intending to destroy other groups seek to mobilize their destructive powers, face obstacles and resistances, and either succeed (in whole or in part) or fail in their efforts. In particular, this book explores and analyzes the crucial role played by assimilative Indigenous boarding schools in the genocidal processes that unfolded in North American settler colonial nations.
For these reasons and others discussed below, I will argue that a nuanced understanding of the term "genocide" can offer a lens through which settler colonial impositions on Indigenous societies can be held to account, but also understood as imperfect projects carried out by imperfect actors, leaving space for the wide variety of actual experiences of Indigenous boarding school life, including those characterized by resistance to and subversion of the overarching purpose of the schools.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from This Benevolent Experiment by Andrew Woolford. Copyright © 2015 Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Preface,
1. Introduction,
2. Settler Colonial Genocide in North America,
3. Framing the Indian as a Problem,
4. Schools, Staff, Parents, Communities, and Students,
5. Discipline and Desire as Assimilative Techniques,
6. Knowledge and Violence as Assimilative Techniques,
7. Local Actors and Assimilation,
8. Aftermaths and Redress,
9. Conclusion,
Notes,
References,
Index,