Imagine being taken away from your home, away
from your family and everything you’ve known for
your entire young life and being shipped away
to a strange place to have everything about who
you know yourself to be systematically stripped
away with ruthless and calculated efficiency.
The survivors would harbour negative feelings, to
be certain, and the social and cultural effects would
be wide-ranging and last for generations. In the
case of residential schools and Canada’s Indigenous
populations, they have. Thousands of children were
physically, emotionally and sexually abused. Many
were buried at the very schools they were brought
to, never to return to their families again.
Now imagine someone asks you to name something
positive about the experience. How dumbfounded
would you be? And how out of touch and
insensitive would they have to be to even ask such
a question?
These are some of the queries being raised after
a correspondence course question from the Alberta
Distance Learning Centre asked students to name
a positive effect of residential schools. The question
so rightly outraged one St. Paul student last week
that she shared it on social media, and started a
well-deserved national uproar.
It’s beyond offensive and goes to show how little
society as a whole actually understands the impacts
of the residential schools, the last of which only
ceased operations in 1996.
This isn’t political correctness run amok. Such a
question is comparable to asking a Jewish person
to say something nice about Hitler, or asking an
African descendent to describe how slavery was
beneficial.
How long has this been out there and how many
students now think there was anything positive
about the residential school system? Nobody seems
to know.
The only clue is that the document lists Phil Fontaine
as chief of the Assembly of First Nations. Fontaine
was chief from 1997 to 2000 and from 2003 to
2009, so at the very least the document is a decade
old, if not two.
This is beyond a serious oversight. It is something
that should not have been included in the first
place. The fact that it was should be cause for serious
reflection on the types of narratives we continue
to build around residential schools, and the harm
they did and continue to do to Indigenous peoples.
