Indian Residential Schools: a disaster from the beginning

Excerpt from the autobiography of Dahn Alexander Batchelor

As a young nation in the 1880s striving to educate its native population, Canada's government contracted with churches to save heathen souls by setting up a network of boarding schools throughout the country. Early residential schools were similar to religious missions. As the system grew, children from entire Indian villages were rounded up, separated from their parents and sent away to learn the white man's ways. By the time the last of the schools, known as "residential schools," closed in 1996, sordid tales of physical and sexual abuse by teachers, administrators and clergy were beginning to surface in a litany of lawsuits. The era of the "Indian Residential School" lasted close to one hundred and fifty years. For those who attended these school across Canada, all 105,000 of them, many now deceased and many still alive, their memories haunted them and for those still alive, still do.

About half of the nation's 100 schools were run by Roman Catholic orders. A quarter were run by Anglicans. The remainder were operated by Presbyterians, Canada's United Church, and other Protestant denominations and independent churches.

Canada's two largest Protestant denominations were satisfied with a decision by the country's Supreme Court that stipulated how religious groups and the federal government was to divide the cost of compensating tens of thousands of native Canadian sex-abuse victims.

The Supreme Court of Canada ruled October 21, 2005 that the federal portion of responsibility for abuse that took place at schools for Indians should be 75 percent, while the church should pay 25 percent. Both the churches and the government operated the schools.

Canada's United and Anglican denominations, which together have about 1.3 million members, had already worked out arrangements with the federal government to pursue more than 600 out-of-court settlements of lawsuits brought by natives.

Both denominations had followed a formula in which the church pays 30 percent and the federal government 70 percent for damages inflicted at the now-defunct residential schools, which were attended by more than 125,000 Indians. This decision confirmed that the government had the greatest responsibility for the schools, and the churches also face some responsibilities.

More than 15,000 people had launched lawsuits over their treatment at about 85 of Canada's federally regulated residential schools. Most of the lawsuits focus on sex-abuse complaints.

Judgments that followed drove dioceses throughout the nation to the brink of bankruptcy, and the Canadian government faced potential payouts of billions of dollars to Indian victims - a liability that ultimately was passed on to taxpayers.

There were approximately 10,000 Canadian Indians bringing civil lawsuits against the government for horrors suffered in 100 residential schools that the government contracted out to Catholic and Protestant church groups. Ninety percent of the claims pending against the federal government - some of which named churches as third parties - claimed some level of sexual or physical abuse.

The overall abuses heaped upon many of the children in the Indian residential schools was horrendous. Examples of these abuses included, sexual assault, including forced sexual intercourse by men or women in authority and girls and/or boys in their charge; forced oral-genital or masturbatory contact between men or women in authority and girls and/or boys in their charge; sexual touching by men or women in authority of girls and/or boys in their charge; performing private pseudo-official inspections of genitalia of girls and boys; arranging or inducing abortions in female children impregnated by men in authority; sticking needles through the tongues of children, often leaving them in place for extended periods of time; inserting needles into other regions of children's anatomy; burning or scalding children; beating children into states of unconsciousness; beating children to the point of drawing blood; beating children to the point of inflicting serious permanent or semi-permanent injuries, including broken arms, broken legs, broken ribs, fractured skulls, shattered eardrums, and the like; forcing sick children to eat their own vomit; unprotected exposure (as punishment) to the natural elements (snow, rain, and darkness), occasionally prolonged to the point of inducing life-threatening conditions (e.g., frostbite, pneumonia); withholding medical attention from individuals suffering the effects of physical abuse; shaving children's heads. (as punishment) using electrical shock devices on physically restrained children. Several people talked about the electric chair that was used in the girl's playroom. It seems odd how an electric chair can find its way into a residential school; however, it seems to have been brought to the school for fun. Nevertheless, all the people who remembered the electric chair do not remember it in fun, but with pain and horror.

Then there were the psychological/emotional abuses such as the administration of beatings to naked or partially naked children before their fellow students and/or institutional staff; public, individually directed verbal abuse, belittling, and threatening; performing public strip searches and genital inspections of children; shaving their heads (as punishment); withholding presents, letters, and other personal property of children; locking children in closets (as punishment) I never saw these kinds of abuses at the three schools I worked at but this doesn't mean that they didn't exist prior to my arrival and after I left them.

In addition to charges of physical and sexual abuse, the Indians' lawsuits accused the government of "cultural genocide." According to the plaintiffs, the government and participating churches sought to strip Indian children of their language, culture and family ties in a system of forced assimilation. Children were taken from their parents, usually rounded up in August and in many cases, transported by train, plane or bus to the residential schools, which were hundreds of kilometers away. Speaking no English, having never ridden in a car or truck, having never eaten anything other than meat, fish, bannock and perhaps the occasional sweet treat, aboriginal children as young as six left the world of their families and were sent into the unfamiliar world of the white man. They were separated from their brothers, sisters and friends and herded together according to age level.

At Indian residential schools, everything was different for Native children. Their hair was cut short, uniforms were mandatory, and punishment could be cruel and unusual and there was hunger to deal with. Documents in the National Archives in Ottawa detail the extent of malnutrition and other food-related problems at the schools.

Many of the school survivors, blamed years of childhood abuse at the hands of nuns, priests, teachers, administrators and Indian supervisors for years of drug and alcohol addiction. The Indians blame the residential school system for many of the problems they suffered after they left the schools and tried to fit into the world as adults.

Aboriginal communities across Canada are plagued with alcoholism, drug abuse, sexual abuse, family violence, prostitution, AIDS and virtually every other social pathology that can be named - a direct result of the government's policy, according to many lawsuits that cite abuse in schools as a primary cause. There may be some truth in their belief that these problems can be traced back to their lives in residential schools.

Removing the children at a tender age from their homes and subjecting them to a life in a residential setting invariably makes it impossible for them as adults to understand and cope with the complexities of a normal home life. Certainly the children lost basic parenting skills as a result of living in residential schools because they didn't see how children were raised in a home setting. It seems obvious that the abuse has been a significant impediment to the advancement and even survival of many Native Canadians who, after spending much of their lives away from their families at residential schools, entered adulthood with no sense of how to organize their lives or care for their children, with predictably troubling results for them and their families.

I would be remiss if I didn't include in this piece the words of Rev. John Johnstone, the former principal of the Gordon Indian Residential School who in a letter he sent me on October 1, 2000, explained what life was like in the reservations to those children who didn't go the residential schools.

He wrote in part; "A point that most writers miss these days is that reserve life was very different in the 40's and 50's. There were very few communities that had electricity, proper water and sanitation. In most of the northern reserves, families lived in substandard housing. Usually they lived in one room in either mud and pole shelters or roughly tarpaper shacks, heated by wood-burning stoves. The numbers of native people in Canada was declining due to malnutrition, disease and the slow drift from the reserves to the cities and towns of those who wanted to escape the poverty and apathy of reserve life for a brighter future in the wider Canadian community. However, this created new problems. Space in the Reserves was limited and as their numbers grew, it became obvious that the growing population could not be sustained by traditional means. The movement of non-native people into the North reduced the amount of trapping and fishing that could be carried on. It became apparent to the natives that more and more of them would have to move away from the Reserves. There were very few day schools at that time and so, if the young people were to be given the education and training that they would need to survive in the wider community, residential schools would have to be provided. The federal Government built the schools but unfortunately, one of the factors that reduced the number of teachers and supervisors, especially married couples willing to dedicate their lives in this venture, was that the Government chose Roman Catholic orphanages as the model. As such, the staff quarters were for the most part, only designed for single, celibate men and women. This ruled out many of the really ideal people who could have served their government, their church and most importantly, the Indian children attending these schools.” unquote

Unfortunately, what might have been a noble cause, turned out to be a disaster for these children. They were forced to perform menial labor, such as cleaning floors with toothbrushes. They were beaten if caught speaking their native tongues, fed watered-down gruel barely fit for consumption, beaten with what seemed like sadistic pleasure, sexually and physically assaulted and abused with impunity - all under the watchful eye of the Canadian government. Subjecting them to sexual abuse when they are children haunted them for the rest of their lives and many of these young victims ended up as sexual abusers and in some cases, perverts when they became adults.

However, one of the reasons, and an important one as I see it, as to why these Indian children became alcoholics, prostitutes and victims of AIDS is because, notwithstanding that they left the schools as educated young adults, they were denied employment by a predominantly white society and as a result, many of them committed crimes and resorted to a life of prostitution which in itself brought them AIDS as a direct consequence.

Edmund Gordon, a Cree Indian and former student at the Anglican Church's Gordon Indian Residential School, about two hours north of Regina, conducts AIDS, drugs and prostitution outreach for people who live on the streets of Regina. Most, he said, are Indians or their children who survived the residential school system.

When I was the senior boy’s supervisor at that school he attended in the mid 1950s, (Edmond Gordon wasn’t at that school then) the principal at that school treated the children far better than the principals at most of the other Indian residential schools in Canada. Reverend John Johnstone was a child psychologist and he learned their language and permitted the children to speak Cree and one night a week, they could do Indian dancing. The children who finally left the school as older teenagers, despite their education and the proper treatment they were given at that time, they still would have had difficulty finding work in that era and as a result, the problems described by Edmond Gordon would have still plagued these unfortunate graduates of the Gordon Indian Residential School at the Gordon Indian Reservation. However, the principals that followed were not as enlightened as Rev. Johnstone was and I can see how the abuses heaped upon the children by some of them would create the problems Edmond Gordon spoke of. The Gordon Indian Residential School later became one of the worst. It was run by William Starr, who was convicted of sexually abusing Indian children and sent to prison.

The findings of a 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal People that began to uncover the abuse, reads like a war crimes indictment of the Canadian government and the nation's churches.
Ninety percent of the claims now pending against the federal government - some of which name churches as third parties - claim some level of sexual or physical abuse. One study in the Northwest Territories found that eight out of 10 girls younger than 8 had been molested and 50 percent of the boys the same age had endured some kind of sexual abuse. The children were from a marginalized population. The schools were isolated geographically and for this reason, they attracted pedophiles and bullies who liked having power over others. It certainly didn’t help that some of the principals of these schools were sexual deviates and bullies themselves. I remember when I went to the Gordon Indian residential school as the senior boy’s supervisor; I was replacing the previous supervisor who was fired because he was sexually abusing some of the children. Had he been employed there when a principal that followed Johnson was at that school, the supervisor would have remained at the school and continued to sexually abuse the children.

There will always be sexual predators in institutions. Society has to be watchful and perhaps one way this problem can be solved is for each institution to have a committee of citizens who visit the institutions once or twice a month to speak to the wards of the governments so that if there are abuses in the institutions, the victims have outsiders they can talk to. This won't cut all abuses out of the system but it will at least curtail a great deal of it. If the Indian and non Indian residential schools had citizen committees visiting them, I believe that much of the abuses that the children suffered from in the last two centuries wouldn't have happened.

It’s difficult to pin-point the reasons why so many male employees sexually assaulted their wards in the institutions that employed them. It seems to me however that one of the main reasons this was happening was because many of these men who sexually abused their wards were required to live in the institutions day and night except for one a day off a week and for this reason, they had little opportunity to meet women who were willing to have sex with them. It follows that priests who are celebrate face the same frustration in their lives and that is why so many of them were also convicted of sex crimes against children. It’s unnatural for men to be cooped up like these men were and this may explain why they behaved in the way they did. I am not justifying what they did to these children, only explaining why they did it.

I don't think that the government's policy was initially malicious, but by today's standards it was totally wrong. The churches on the other hand saw the schools as a way to spread the word of God but unfortunately preaching the gospel to a captive audience is not conducive to turning ‘sinners’ into ‘saints’.

Their stated policy from the very beginning was to turn savage and uncivilized natives into good Canadians. The Indians would gain entry into heaven and further, they would be educated and become consumers.

I don’t know whether or not they became destined to heaven but I they certainly didn’t become good consumers. Often when I was walking along the streets of Kenora, Ontario while working at an Indian residential school there, I would see many of the former students of that school on the streets bumming for handouts. So much for consumerism for educated Indians. Fortunately, that problem today isn’t as intense as it was then.

In the Nineteenth Century, it was an age without antibiotics, and thousands of children died of tuberculosis and other communicable diseases. In many schools, the death rate ran as high as 50 percent. The kids would have survived for the most part if they had remained in their villages. Even in the next century, the schools were incubators for disease. In the prairies in particular in the inter-war years, a ferocious battle was fought against tuberculosis, both in the schools and on the reserves at large.

When I went to the Gordon Indian Residential School from Toronto, the Asian flue was spreading around the world. Hundreds of thousands died. I got it and didn’t know it at first and when I arrived at the school, no one at the school had it. Within a week, they all had it. Fortunately, we were all given appropriate drugs to fight it and other than being sick and having to remain in bed, we all got well within six or seven days.

The opening of the Indian residential schools was a disaster, of that, there can be no doubt. But we have to ask ourselves, what would have happened if they weren’t opened? Well for one thing, the kids would have grown up for the most part as trappers but how far would that get them in life?

I don't want to downplay the trauma that these children experienced. It was terrible. It should never have happened. But while they attended these schools, they were given an education----something they couldn't get while living at home during those years.

Thousands upon thousands of non-Indian kids in Canada were sent to residential schools by their parents. I know. I was one of them. We were all suffering from the trauma of being separated from our families. The trouble facing the federal and provincial governments at that time was that there weren't enough ordinary schools in the areas where the Indian children lived and a great many of them lived in areas were it was impossible to bus them to the nearest schools. If the children remained at home during their school years, they would not be able to cope in the so-called white man's world. Fortunately, that has changed. All the Indian communities now have day schools so the children can live at home. It’s too bad that the government didn’t think of that back in the nineteenth century. If it did, the taxpayers of today wouldn’t have to pay out the billions of dollars they are now paying to the victims of these Indian residential schools.

One of Canada's largest law firms representing the Presbyterian and United Churches in Canada re claims against those churches by former Indian students, consulted with me in September 2000 on what it was like to be in those schools as a child care worker (supervisor) in the late 1950s and more specifically in the Cecelia Jeffrey School in Kenora.

In a letter I sent to the law firm, I summed up my thoughts on the Indian's loss of culture by writing to them in part;

"I am still of the belief that the Churches and the federal government were wrong in trying to assimilate the Indian children into our society at the expense of their culture. We wouldn't permit that in this era and it shouldn't have been permitted in the last two centuries either. I think the words, 'cultural genocide' is a bit strong but the words do import the real message of the Indians who suffered because of the loss of their culture. But when a society attempts to destroy the culture of another society, one is forced to wonder if there is another phrase that will serve as a suitable substitute. I think not. We owe it to the Indian nation to rectify a problem that Canadians acting as another distinct nation created for them. The payment of that debt can begin with recognizing the Indian nation as being distinctive. If we don't do that right from the beginning, than we will forever be in their debt."

I am still of the same frame of mind. We must never let this happen again.