First Nations People in Canada and Residential

Schools

Images taken from Encounter World Religions

First Nations peoples in Canada have had much taken from them. With the colonization of Canada by European settlers, they lost much of their land.A truly horrifying experience for some First Nations people in Canada was when from the late 1800’s to the mid 1900’s, many First Nations children were forced to attend residential schools, Some parents were persuaded to send their children to these schools, but sometimes government officials would take children from their parents and send them to live in the schools. These school were often very far from the children’s communities, in some cases, over one thousand kilometers away.

Residential School 60% Catholic ~ 30%

Anglican/UCC

At these residential schools, many children were abused physically, spiritually, sexually and culturally. They were sometimes forbidden from speaking their language and were sometimes punished if they did. They were sometimes assigned a number instead of being addressed by their names. The number they were assigned would change every year as they went to the next grade, so they could not even identify with the number. In some cases, they were not even allowed to talk to their siblings if they were attending the same school. Also First Nations children were forced to practice the Christian faith.

First Nations children were often at the residential schools from the age of five or six until the age of seventeen or eighteen. These were the years when they would have learned parenting skills by being around their parents. Instead, many learned about abuse. This made it very difficult for some when they went on to become parents. Also, because they were away from their communities for much of the childhood and adolescence, some young people felt like they did not belong anywhere. Many First Nations children who attended the residential schools lost the Traditional way of life.

Residential School first established in

the 1600s

Many kept all this inside without telling anyone. The pain caused by all these abuses led some First Nations people to turn to alcohol or drugs to numb the pain. In the late 1980’s, some victims began to speak out, and legal action was finally taken against some of the guilty. With punishment of the guilty, and with the help for the victims, hopefully the very long journey toward healing has begun.

Residential School Mortality rate 35-60%

within first 5 yrs.

3 of the 150,000 Native Children at a Residential

School

Thomas

Moore (true name

unknown) before and after

entrance to the Regina,

Saskatchewan Residential School

1874

Thomas

Moore (true name

unknown) before and after

entrance to the Regina,

Saskatchewan Residential School

1874Systematic Deculturalization ~

Cultural Genocide ~ Ethnic Cleansing

Qu’Appelle Indian

Residential School Lebret,

SK Opened 1884Closed in

1998Father Hugonard, Principal

The government of Canada now recognizes that it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes and we apologize for having done this. Prime Minister Stephen Harper June 12, 2008

They made us many promises, but they kept only one.They promised to take our land – and they did.Chief Red Cloud

1822-1909

“White people didn’t know about the land being sacred. We didn’t know about the land being property.

We could not talk to each other because we did not understand each other.

Lame Deer, Lakota Elder 1903-1976

Reclaiming Traditional Voice and Vision