In 1942 during the darkest days of the Second World War, the House of Commons took the heroically optimistic step of convening a special committee to “study and report upon the general problems of reconstruction and re-establishment which may arise at the termination of the present war.”
In 1948 a report of another federal committee went even further and recommended that “wherever and whenever possible Indian children should be educated in association with other children.” That is, they should attend provincially run public schools alongside the rest of Canada’s school-age population. Ottawa then essentially froze enrolment at its residential schools in anticipation of shutting them down shortly.
And yet Canada’s last residential school didn’t close its doors until 1996, nearly half a century later. Why did these schools—now widely accused of perpetrating a genocide on Canada’s indigenous population—stay open so long after Ottawa wanted to shut them down? Because Ottawa wasn’t prepared to abandon vulnerable native children.
As painful as it is to admit today, the vast majority of indigenous children attending residential schools during the post-war period were there for reasons other than an education. In particular, the devastating, inter-generational effects of alcoholism on reserves had turned federal residential schools into a de facto native child welfare system. And had the government shut those schools down in the 1940s, as it very much wanted to, these children would have had no other place to go.
Considering this, accusations of genocide are not just wrong, but outrageously so.
While a few dormitory-style residential schools existed throughout Canada’s colonial era, the system took form after Confederation as the new country’s government fulfilled its treaty promises to provide an education to all indigenous people. Residential schools, along with on-reserve day schools, were meant to provide indigenous children with basic language and other skills required to function in Canadian society and were largely inspired by the populist reform movement sweeping across North America at the time.
Publicly provided, compulsory schooling was widely seen as the solution to poverty and disharmony throughout society. In 1871, for example, the province of Ontario required that all children aged 7 to 12 attend school at least four months a year. Attendance at native residential schools was entirely voluntary until 1920, however, and rarely enforced thereafter. About half of all students who attended between the 1880s and 1950s dropped out after Grade 1, and few students made it as far as Grade 5. Clearly these schools were not prison camps, as is often argued.
A much greater complication for native education was the disastrous effect of alcohol abuse on indigenous communities, and in particular Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder (FASD). FASD was only formally identified as a medical condition in the 1970s, but its impact likely goes back centuries. It is caused when a pregnant woman consumes alcohol, damaging the developing fetus. Children with FASD typically have serious difficulties in school both academically and behaviourally. Tragically, these problems follow them into adult life and are reflected in high rates of family violence (including spousal and sexual abuse), suicide, and addiction, and often repeat down through subsequent generations.
During the post-war period, Ottawa actively sought to close its residential school systems for both financial and pedagogical reasons, as described above. But as Trent University historian John S. Milloy has observed, this planned shutdown was foiled by “the emergence of a new role for the schools, that of social welfare institutions.” Children identified as suffering from “serious neglect” at home were prioritized for admission to residential schools because federal officials decided they required a safe refuge. “Both parents excessive drinkers,” states one typical report. “The father is a veteran and has some difficulty controlling his appetite for liquor,” reads another. Milloy’s research identifies “thousands” of examples of similar situations in federal files.
A census taken by Indian Affairs in 1953 found that 43 percent of the 10,112 indigenous children in residential schools nationwide were listed as neglected or living in homes that were unfit because of parental problems. Another study eight years later in B.C. put the figure at 50 percent and observed that a similar percentage would likely apply to the rest of the country as well.
By 1975, children from “broken or immoral homes” constituted nearly the entire student population at three Saskatchewan residential schools: Gordon’s Residential School (83 percent), Muscowequan Residential School (64 percent) and Cowessess Residential School (80 percent).
This near-complete takeover of residential schools by high-needs children, many of them likely suffering from undiagnosed FASD, would have made the experience for all students extremely difficult, especially the minority who were attending only because there was no day school near their home reserve. This likely explains the negative experiences of so many residential school students.
As the problems associated with forcing residential schools to serve as child welfare institutions multiplied, Ottawa sought a way out of its conundrum. The solution was to transfer responsibility to the provinces. In 1964 the Federal-Provincial Conference on Indian Affairs settled “the terms under which Indian children may be accepted in provincial schools.” Native child welfare was also transferred to the provinces in a similar manner around the same time. This has since been further devolved to indigenous-run agencies, with recent federal legislation now fully “indigenizing” native child welfare.
Regardless of the many problems associated with residential schools, they existed to fill a necessary and irreplaceable role. In the beginning, it was to provide indigenous children with the language skills and other Western knowledge essential for their successful participation in Canadian society. As time went on, however, these schools evolved to serve a very different purpose. They became a de facto child welfare system for vulnerable children from dysfunctional homes brought on by centuries of alcohol abuse within indigenous communities.
By the 1940s, federal bureaucrats knew there were better options for educating native students and sought to shut down Canada’s residential school system. But they were unable to do so because they weren’t prepared to abandon the vulnerable native children these schools served. Without acknowledging this difficult truth, it is impossible to understand the full story of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools.
