The weekly wrap-up post at The Line considers the recent revelation of possibly hundreds of unmarked graves of First Nations children at the site of a former Catholic-run residential school in BC. Despite being Canadian, my interest in Canadian history centres mostly on economic, naval, and military aspects, but I was certainly aware that the residential school system was a black mark on Canada’s historical dealings with First Nations and that the general outline of events — if not the gruesome details — had been known for many years. The first time I found out about it was in middle school, through what we’d now call a “Young Adult” novel about a young First Nations boy escaping from the residential school he’d been sent to and his attempts to travel hundreds of miles to get home. I read it in the early 70s and it may have been published up to a decade before then (I no longer remember the author’s name or the title of the book, unfortunately).

If I, as a schoolchild, knew something of this fifty years ago, why have people younger than me been shocked and appalled to be hearing about this widespread tragedy for the first time now?

Kamloops Indian Residential School, 1930.
Photo from Archives Deschâtelets-NDC, Richelieu via Wikimedia Commons.

We like to start our dispatches with something pithy or casual, but it’s been a heavy week. The discovery of what appears to be a burial site containing the bodies of more than 200 children at the site of a former residential school in B.C. has shaken Canadians. Of course it has. There are two outrages here — the outrageous reality of the generations of combined abuses inflicted on Indigenous Canadians, of which the residential school system was but a part. Also, the outrage that most Canadians are only learning about this now.

Your Line editors are not experts on Indigenous affairs or history, but we dare say we’re better read than most on Canadian history in a general sense. We do not say this in any way with snark or derision, but to our fellow Canadians — this should not be surprising to you. The Catholics who ran most of these schools under the sanction of the state had a long history of trying to save souls at the expense of the bodies in which they inhabited. Religious institutions were slow to recognize and stop the spread of disease in their own institutions. Most disturbingly, their ideology glorified, even sanctified, physical suffering. It still does.

Mass graves have been uncovered in Ireland, at the site of Catholic-run homes once devoted to the care of unwed mothers and children. “Saint” Mother Teresa’s hospitals in India were altars to the needless suffering of impoverished people who could not afford to die in peace and dignity. Her hospitals were dirty, poorly run facilities where children were reportedly tied to beds, and terminal patients were given little more than aspirin.

One of the great lessons of history that we consistently fail to accept is that many of our most evil actions are rooted not in self-evidently evil impulses, but rather in our desire to “save” others. Hubris and paternalism, these are the sins we cannot seem to shake. Residential schools, Catholic or otherwise, were the disastrous result of marrying a poisonous and righteous ideology with the authority and resources of a centralized state.

The Truth and Reconciliation report laid out much of this in detail in its final report in 2015, which also spelled out that graves like the ones we’re now mourning in Kamloops are likely to be far more prevalent and common than we now understand. Everyone here deserves the truth.

Update: I’m delighted to see that David Warren continues to improve from his recent health issues and he has rather a different view on Canada’s residential school system and its place in the lives of the First Nations children who attended the schools:

Ryerson was also a figure in the development of Canada’s “residential schools”, which took Indians from (mostly) dysfunctional homes and gave them an education with priests, nuns, and respectable Protestants. Not all denizens of an orphanage are happy, and by attaching the word “colonialism”, and giving simplified accounts, full of libels, “progressive” Canadian politicians have made this period of Canadian history into a scandal. Those who know better have been silenced.

Some years ago I tried to defend the “residential schools”, more or less alone in the Canadian “meejah”. I received many, many letters from former students of them, who said their memories were happy. They had been inspired by teachers of real Christian faith and conviction, and had been equipped with the rudiments of sound learning. “They saved my life,” was a frequent comment.

I could understand the residential schools because I am familiar with Canadian education before it was taken over by barbaric hordes; and also because I am myself partly a product of “British colonial” private schools in Asia, decades ago. They were brutal towards their boys, sometimes. I was myself beaten, and their teachers were sometimes tyrannical.

As a young man I thought this was the way of the world. Now that I am old, I look back on the teaching I received with great pride. It was vastly better than what I would receive in a Canadian high school; and that was much better than what we get today.