J.R. Miller, Residential Schools and Reconciliation: Canada Confronts Its History; University of Toronto Press, 2017.
This is an interesting description of the long process, beginning in the early years of this century, of negotiation between the federal government and the Anglican, United and Roman Catholic churches on one side and Aboriginal people – primarily Indian – on the other, of compensation for the injuries, mental and physical, suffered by aboriginal students of the Residential School system imposed on them by the federal government between the late 19th century and the closing years of the 20th.
The compensation involved money, much of which went to lawyers representing the plaintiffs, and apologies offered by the government and churches to affected people.
I was struck by:
- the focus on money as if that could compensate for the long- lived effects on school students and their descendants of the abuse and denigration of aboriginal culture imposed by the residential school system; and
- the cultural gap between the aboriginals and the negotiators for the crown and the churches that undoubtedly accounted for the dominant role played by non-aboriginal lawyers in the negotiations;
- the fact that it has taken so long for us – the settlers – to recognize the damage we have done to aboriginal peoples since overtaking them, their land and their culture in the 19th century.
With respect to the last point there is a quote attributed to John Crosbie – a Conservative minister in the government of Brian Mulroney – in the front of the book, a comment made to the Editor, National Post, 18 January 2003:
“The need to bring …. Aboriginal peoples into our national consciousness, to deal fairly and equitably with them, to reconcile them as part of the Canadian mainstream and to deal with their problems, [is] likely the most important policy issue of the 21st century.”
That conditions in residential schools, academic and otherwise, were bad had been recognized early on in their history by religious and government officials, Miller notes, but little was done to ameliorate them. Moreover, such schools continued to exist until the 1990’s.
The churches began to apologize for their treatment of aboriginal children in the 1990’s and the federal government “opened up the question of the country’s broader treatment of Indigenous Peoples with the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People’s (RCAP)” which was created following the standoff between government authorities and indigenous people at Oka in 1990. The Commission recommended only that a public inquiry be convened into the treatment of indigenous children in the residential schools.
Miller states, “In part because the federal government’s response to RCAP was so limited, former residential school students turned to the courts to seek justice. But litigation would prove no more effective than church apologies or a royal commission recommendation, for the simple reason that the courts, like royal commissions, could not provide the acknowledgment of wrongdoing and the compensation for cultural loss that motivated much of the litigation.” (p.243)
The judicial process led to the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement (IRSSA) which, says Miller, “seemed to pave the way for some progress towards healing the nation’s emotional wounds.” (p.243)
In addition to financial compensation the IRSSA led to apologies by the churches and by then Prime Minister Harper in the House of Commons, and to the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The Liberal Federal government of the day established an Aboriginal Healing Foundation in 1998 in response to the RCAP final report. According to Miller “the AHF would contribute massively in two areas until the government of Stephen Harper terminated its funding. First, it discharged its principal mandate, promoting healing among individuals and communities that had been blighted by exposure to residential schooling”. And it “continued the promotion of the revisionist history of residential schooling that RCAP had endorsed”. (p. 248)
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established in 2008, was, says Miller, “preoccupied with history, both the story of individual school students and the record of government and church actions, as it laid out in its reports. What this sustained campaign amounted to, though this was not directly acknowledged, was to disrupt and replace a settler history myth about Canada that for a long time had whitewashed the country’s understanding of its past.” (p.258)
Miller describes, in his concluding chapter, the efforts of the Canadian government to portray its policies with respect to indigenous people as benign and to contrast them with those of the U.S. He states: “Against such a background of effective pro-government propaganda, it was not surprising that the first major historical work that examined treaties and Indian policy in western Canada also came to positive conclusions about the government’s treatment of first nations”. This was The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellion, by George Stanley published in 1936. “…Stanley’s interpretation of early dominion policy in the West remained dominant for almost half a century. … It was not until John Tobias’s article “The Subjugation of the Plains Cree”[1] in 1983 that Stanley’s positive portrayal was uprooted in academe. A vigorous and sweeping revision of historical understanding of Canadian Indian policy was then developed by English-language historians through the rest of the 1980’s and the 1990’s that served as a foundation for the major historical framing of the final report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples in 1996.” (p.265)
In Miller’s view, that revisionist history has not been well communicated to the Canadian population at large: “Historians who revolutionized their profession’s understanding of governmental treatment of First Nations and Metis over the last thirty years have not succeeded in spreading their findings beyond the ivory tower to the public square.” (p,266)
Citing a publication[2] Miller states: “Apart from Aboriginal people and a few sympathetic academics and interest groups, ‘there is virtually no political constituency demanding that the Government of Canada or the provincial and territorial governments remain true to and fully and generously implement the treaties’” (p.267)With respect to the communication of ‘revisionist history’ it is interesting that Peter Russell’s book Canada’s Odyssey: A Country Based on Incomplete Conquests is not mentioned by Miller probably because it was published in 2017, the same year as Miller’s book. Russell notwithstanding the story of our relations with indigenous peoples needs to be much more widely disseminated
[1] http://drc.usask.ca/projects/legal_aid/file/resource28-2c4f0414.pdf
[2] Terry Fenge and Jim Aldridge, eds., Keeping Promises: The Royal Proclamation of 1763, Aboriginal Rights, and Treaties in Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015