#Indian Residential Schools

[multiplicity-positivity]

Shoutout to Indigenous systems on this day for Truth and Reconciliation!

Today, September 30th, is the Canadian National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. This is a day of remembrance for victims and survivors of Indian residential schools in Canada, though it could likely apply to those who live on Turtle Island in general.

If your system or someone you know is or knows a survivor of an Indian residential school, or has a loved one who did not survive their time in a residential school, our hearts go out to you. We are wishing for you and family a future full of strength, peace, and resilience. Inter-generational trauma can have significant impacts, and the pain imposed on your loved ones and ancestors should not be forgotten as time passes. We hope that their lives can be honored and remembered throughout history, and we want to do our part to help preserve their legacy.

For allies of Indigenous peoples, if you are able to, please wear an orange shirt today to honor those whose lives were forever changed due to the negative impact residential schools has left on indigenous communities. Remember that, even today, Indigenous peoples face hardships, disparities, and inequalities in our society. The closure of residential schools does not mean rest, healing, and proper compensation for the victims of such institutions. Let’s vow as a community to make our spaces safe and accepting of Indigenous systems, and do our part to educate ourselves on their histories so that we may be better allies in the future.

Friends, please show some support to the Indigenous people in your lives today, and do not take their presence for granted. Take a moment to learn more about the history of Indian residential schools in Canada and the United States, and the grim legacy they have left which many Indigenous communities are still dealing with today. If you are able to, please reach out to the Indigenous systems and non-systems in your lives to provide support in whatever ways they have requested.

We will include links to sites and organizations where you can learn more about the Canadian National Day for Truth and Reconciliation and the history of Indian residential schools in both Canada and the USA, along with links where you can directly support survivors of Indian residential schools. Remember, if you cannot support these organizations or individuals financially, you can show your support by educating yourselves and providing a space in your own communities where Indigenous voices can be acknowledged and uplifted.

Indigenous systems, we love you, we are in your corner, and we want to support and uplift you however we can. Please do not hesitate to get in touch if there is anything we can do to help make our spaces more welcoming for you. You have an important and treasured place in the plural community, and we are honored to be able to share this space with you. We hope that you can do your best to treat yourselves and your system with compassion and gentleness today, and take care!

‼️ Non-indigenous systems are welcome and encouraged to reblog, but DO NOT derail or try to center your voice over actual indigenous systems and those who are actually affected by inter-generational trauma due to Indian residential schools!‼️

[theboombutton]

Do you have any linguistics book recommendations for laymen please pleaseeeee I'm desperate

If you want an introduction to linguistics, I highly recommend picking up the textbook for your local university's LING 101 class, rather than a book specifically directed at laypeople.

On top of the usual problems with popular science books - the commonness of quackery in the genre, the reliance on intuition, the forced and flaccid tone of profundity that especially ramps up at the end of every chapter - popular linguistics books in particular are rife with political implications. Linguistics is both a cultural and a psychological topic, which makes it easy for anyone with an agenda (or even no agenda, just underlying bigotry) to write a book and get their ideological fingers up into readers' brains in ways that are sometimes subtle.

Consider the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, the idea that the language(s) a person speaks changes the kinds of thoughts they're likely to have. That sounds reasonable, right? If someone asked you to think of a plant, you'd probably pick a plant you had a word for. And by the same principle, maybe people who speak a language without a future tense have a harder time conceptualizing the future! This is the kind of intuitive-but-profound-seeming observation/speculation that pop science books love.

It was also a big part of the rationalization/justification for the Indian residential school system and the suppression of Native languages.

(Also technically English doesn't have a future tense, but no one ever mentions that in the context of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis because the entire point of the thing is to exoticize non-European languages for fun and profit.)

These sorts of just-so stories found in pop linguistics books have profound political implications about mental or cultural diffences (read: usually inferiority) of those who speak languages foreign to the the audience, and more often than you'd think they bypass the bigotry bullshit detectors of otherwise well-intentioned readers - because of the informative tone of the work, the intuitive sense it makes for a language to change the way people think, and above all, "It can't be racist, it's about their language, not their race!"

A textbook can make these errors too, of course - the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis does come up in many introductory textbooks. The difference is that 1. a textbook is far more likely to mention that a given idea is "controversial" or "disputed," since unlike pop science they don't need to keep up the tone of mind-blowing profundity to make sales; and 2. since these sorts of bullshit cognitive linguistics theories are fully in the realm of "wouldn't it be interesting if", there's just not enough to say about any one of them to take up more than a page or two in a book that actually needs to contain information.

So yeah tl;dr just pick up a LING 101 textbook. There'll probably be less bigotry, and you'll actually learn about linguistics instead of the author's pseudoprofound wank.

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Adria R. Walker at The Guardian:

On Friday, Joe Biden formally apologized for the United States government’s role in running at least 523 Indian boarding schools. His remarks were given at the Gila Crossing community school outside of Phoenix, Arizona, and marked his first visit to Indian country as president.

“After 150 years, the United States government eventually stopped the program,” Biden said. “But the federal government has never, never formally apologized for what happened – until today. I formally apologize, as president of the United States of America, for what we did. I formally apologize. That’s long overdue.” “Federal Indian boarding school policy, the pain it has caused, will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history,” he said. “For too long, this all happened with virtually no public attention.” Indian boarding schools were run with the express goal to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man”, a phrase coined by the army officer Richard Henry Pratt, who founded Carlisle Indian boarding school, the first federally run Indian boarding school. From 1819 to 1969, in what Biden called “one of the most horrific chapters in American history”, the US government directly managed or funded Indian boarding schools in nearly 40 states. The schools, at which formal education was limited, forcibly and systematically stripped Indigenous children of their culture by removing them from their families and communities, forbidding them from speaking their languages and, typically violently, punishing them if they resisted.

A US Department of the Interior report released earlier this year found that at least nearly 1,000 Indigenous children died in the schools. Sexual violence was commonplace. Dr Denise K Lajimodiere, an enrolled citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa and one of the founders of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, wrote that the “boarding school era represented a deliberate policy of ethnocide and cultural genocide and human rights abuses”. “Some of our elders who are boarding school survivors have been waiting all of their lives for this moment,” said Stephen Roe Lewis, the Gila River Indian community governor. “If only for a moment on Friday, this will rise to the top, and the most powerful person in the world, our president, is shining a light on this dark history that’s been hidden.” No president has ever apologized for the abuses that tens of thousands of Indigenous children faced in the schools.

On Friday, President Joe Biden gave a formal apology for the US Government’s role in creating boarding schools for Native Americans by calling it “a blot on American history.” The boarding schools served to forcibly assimilate Native Americans and abuse if they resisted assimilation.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"INDIAN ART IS BEING REVIVED," Niagara Falls Review. October 18, 1933. Page 2. ---- Children model from life, forests supply materials for dyes, paints, ---- NATIVE SCHOOL ---- VICTORIA, Oct., 1 - (CP) - Indian arts are being revived in native schools of the Okanagan Valley. Children take time out from study of the three R's to scour the forests for flowers and roots which are used to instruct them in the almost lost arts of their ancestors.

Mosses, flowers, roots and bart are made into dyes and paints. Old recipes for the making of medicines from herbs and roots are tested while the children strive to Improve and perfect their creations.

Spinning, weaving, dying, pottery, clay modelling, carving and design are attempted by the children in the class-room. To the accompaniment of the click, clack of the spinning loom children sing Indian songs and listen to records of musical selection.

Ponies, dogs, cats and calves serve as life models for the drawing class. The mascot, a pet deer, is often coaxed to pose. Clays used for modelling are found on the reserve. After they have been worked they are placed in pinewood fire, then set to cool and polished. The school works out of doors.

Herbs that are collected include greaseweed which is prepared for the treatment of rheumatism. For respiratory aliments, a decoction of sunflower seeds were found beneficial. Butterfly weed, as an emetic, was voted perfect while the pitch of the fir balsam was used as a salve in the treatment of wounds.

One method used in the treatment of snake bite was the application of the powdered rattle of the rattle- snake, rubbed into the wound. Colors of the Okanagan tribe-red, black and yellow are employed in the painting class. Paint is obtained from red and yellow ochre, mixed with fish oil, and black from charred pinewood embers.

Ochre is secured from Tullameen, near Princeton. Tullameen being the Indian word for paint. In the olden days it was exported in large quantities to different parts of the American continent. The Blackfeet used it when on the war path.

[factoidfactory]

Indigenous History Month Fact #1

Canada did not close its Indian Residential Schools until 1997.

[sir-arlieosaurus-lung-struggler]

Anyone gonna acknowledge the fact that a majority of MMIW and residential school educational videos on youtube are scrubbed from my school's wifi?

[raffaellamilandri]

What lies behind Pope Francis' apology to Native Americans

by Raffaella Milandri© Recall that between 2021 and 2022, a global media storm hit the Catholic Church regarding the Native people of North America: the discovery of unmarked graves, the terrible Indian residential schools, and finally the apology by Pope Francis. Let us analyse, in brief, the issue. The Indian residential schools The ‘management’ of the conquest of North America and its…

[bookcoversaroundtheworld]

Fatty Legs: A True Story - Canada

The moving memoir of an Inuit girl who emerges from a residential school with her spirit intact.

[raincitygirl76]

I was well aware that the residential school system is one of the most shameful things Canada did to its indigenous population (who were here FIRST, incidentally). I had not realized the USA had a similar system.

I’d also add that just because the residential schools are now closed does not mean their effects are gone. They caused multigenerational trauma with kids being forcibly kidnapped from their parents at the age of 7, and taken to residential schools where they were imprisoned, forbidden to speak their own languages, subject to brutal physical punishment for minor infractions, often sexually abused, and if they died, whether of malnutrition, or beatings, or in epidemics, often buried in mass graves. The record-keeping by the priests and nuns who ran these “schools” was abysmal. Often indigenous parents were not even told their children had died. They simply didn’t return home when they finally aged out of the system.

Also, the “schools” were only designed to educate indigenous children to a Grade 6 level. You’d think if you’re going to kidnap children from their families, you could at least give them access to an education that would allow them to compete with white Canadians on a semi-level playing field as adults. But they weren’t given the opportunity of a decent education. It was never about educating indigenous children. It was about cultural genocide and creating a permanent underclass.

Also, indigenous people in Canada didn’t get the vote until 1960. And the “starlight tours” haven’t really stopped. And they were never a practice solely confined to Saskatoon.

Hey remember when they found over 200 bodies of native children buried behind a residential school and the world cared for... what, a week?

They've counted about 6,000-7,000 now, for those of you who do still care

[immaculatasknight]

Playing fast and loose with history in Canada

[godbirdart]

Listen okay I'm no Swiftie but I know these tickets in the charity auction could actually raise some meaningful funds that'd go towards crucial support and resources for residential school survivors and their families.

IRSSS does wonderful work, extending their help not only to Indigenous communities impacted by residential schools, but also to families of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls as well as Indigenous youth who may be struggling with the criminal justice system.

Regardless if you're a Swift fan or not though, if you're in the Vancouver area consider checking out the upcoming IRSSS Anniversary Gala on November 21, 2024:

https://www.irsss.ca/gala

[justinspoliticalcorner]

AP, via The Guardian:

At least 973 Native American children died in the US government’s abusive boarding school system, according to the results of an investigation released Tuesday by officials who called on the government to apologize for the schools. The investigation commissioned by the US interior secretary, Deb Haaland, found marked and unmarked graves at 65 of the more than 400 US boarding schools that were established to forcibly assimilate Native American children into white society. The findings don’t specify how each child died, but the causes of death included sickness and abuse during a 150-year period that ended in 1969, officials said. Additional children may have died after becoming sick at school and being sent home, officials said. The findings follow a series of listening sessions held throughout the US over the past two years in which dozens of former students recounted the harsh and often degrading treatment they endured while separated from their families.

“The federal government took deliberate and strategic action through boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities, and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundational to Native people,” Haaland, a member of the Laguna Pueblo tribe in New Mexico and the country’s first Native American cabinet secretary, said in a Tuesday call with reporters.

“Make no mistake,” she added, “this was a concerted attempt to eradicate the, quote, ‘Indian problem,’ to either assimilate or destroy native peoples all together.” In an initial report released in 2022, officials estimated that more than 500 children died at the schools. The federal government passed laws and policies in 1819 to support the schools, the last of which were still operating in the 1960s. The schools gave Native American kids English names, put them through military drills and forced them to perform manual labor, such as farming, brick-making and working on the railroad, officials said. Former students shared tearful recollections of their experience during listening sessions in Oklahoma, South Dakota, Michigan, Arizona, Alaska and other states. They talked about being punished for speaking their native language, getting locked in basements, and having their hair cut to stamp out their identities. They were sometimes subjected to solitary confinement, beatings and withholding of food. Many left the schools with only basic vocational skills that gave them few job prospects.

At least 973 Native American children died in forced assimilation boarding schools for indigenous peoples, per an inquiry by Interior Department Secretary Deb Haaland.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"...in 1884, the DIA [Department of Indian Affairs] announced that it would be opening new boarding and industrial schools in British Columbia. In the early 1880s, only seven federally funded mission schools were operating in the province, including boarding schools at Metlakatla, Port Simpson, Yale, Chilliwack, and Mission, with a total enrolment of 544 students, 322 boys and 222 girls. In the opinion of local DIA officials, Metlakatla was the most desirable spot for an industrial school because it already had the necessary infrastructure. It was also the epicentre of growing Indigenous resistance on the Northwest Coast.

Though the conflict at Metlakatla in 1882, tensions persisted in the community and surrounding area. Indigenous Peoples were frustrated at the failure of government to prevent further settler encroachment on their lands. In response, Ts’msyan and Nisga’a citizens created new political organizations to fight back and assert their sovereignty. In fact, DIA officials who wanted to open new schools on the Northwest Coast often heard complaints from parents, including, “what we want from the Government is our land, and not schools.” Moreover, news of the 1885 war between Canada and the Métis and allied Cree, Assiniboine, and Saulteaux communities made its way over the Rocky Mountains. W.H. Lomas, the Cowichan Indian agent, confirmed the growing danger:

Rumours of the Metlakatla land troubles and of the North-West rebellion have been talked over at all their little feasts, and not often with credit to the white man.

Lomas warned that the provincial government’s disregard for Indigenous Peoples was tantamount to playing with fire and that action should be taken immediately to dissuade further dissent and prevent a general uprising. The “smouldering volcano” of Indigenous-settler relations once again threatened to erupt. Settler fears about Indigenous resistance, as Ned Blackhawk argues, directly inform colonial policy. In this context, and with Duncan out of the picture and Bishop Ridley in charge, the Metlakatla school was retroftted to become the province ’s first official industrial school.

John R. Scott, who had taught in Australian schools for Indigenous children, was chosen as its first principal. When he reported for duty in 1888, he found its condition unsatisfactory. There was no furniture to accommodate the pupils. After securing proper lodgings, Scott toured neighbouring communities to convince Indigenous parents to send their children to the school. He travelled to Fort Simpson and Kincolith and also visited a number of fishing camps along the Nass River. Of his journey, he wrote:

At these places I called at nearly all the huts and houses, and wherever I saw any children I explained to their parents the objects of the school and the provision made by the Government for educating Indian boys.

Some parents were interested, but Scott’s efforts were mostly met with indifference. Unfazed, he took in four boys, and two more pupils followed shortly thereafter. On May 13, 1889, he officially opened the Metlakatla school with just six students. By the end of the year, fifteen boys, four Nisga’a, eight Ts’msyan, and three Haida, were attending. Ottawa soon deemed the Metlakatla experiment a success and began preparations for new schools in the province. As in the colonial period, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Catholic missionaries competed over newly available federal funds. Given the widely known difficulties with mission day schools, Powell proposed that boarding and industrial schools be established in strategic locations throughout the province as “the more desirable and advantageous course.” Considerable debate ensued among the churches and the DIA about the number and most suitable locations for such schools, with Powell and Indian agents relentlessly lobbying the DIA. In the end, three schools were established in 1890: Kamloops in the interior, Kuper Island, of the east coast of Vancouver Island, and Cranbrook in the southeastern mainland. Allocated per-capita grants of $130 per annum per pupil based on annual attendance, all three were run by Catholic missionaries and staffed by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. All three were also situated in areas with significant Indigenous opposition to colonization.

In the late 1870s, Kamloops was identified as a hotbed of discontent over the provincial government’s land policy. In the summer of 1877, when two reserve commissioners arrived to investigate Secwépemc complaints, they quickly received of an alarmed telegram to the Indian Branch in Ottawa: “Indian situation very grave from Kamloops to American border – general dissatisfaction – outbreak possible.” Kuper Island and the parts of Vancouver Island that were located in the Cowichan Indian Agency also had a reputation for resistance. Most notably, Indigenous Nations were angry over the state’s attack on the potlatch, a ceremony and important economic gathering that Ottawa outlawed via an 1884 amendment to the Indian Act. In the late 1880s, the Kootenay region was also seen as troublesome. In 1887, provincial reserve commissioner Peter O’Reilly, Trutch’s brother-in-law, laid out reserves in the Cranbrook area in an unsatisfactory way, and Ktunaxa citizens, particularly Chief Isadore, were dissatisfied.

A detachment of the newly formed North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) under the command of Sam Steele was sent out from nearby Lethbridge, Alberta, as a show of force to deter further conflict. As tensions eased and the police were redeployed, the barracks that had been built for them were updated “for industrial school purposes in the interests of the Indian children.” The fact that Indigenous children were to be institutionalized in an old NWMP barracks established to check the power of their parents confirms that the structures of settler colonialism in British Columbia developed in the shadow of colonial conflict over the land, as Blackhawk shows was the case in the American West. Indeed, the principal of the Kootenay Indian Industrial School, Nicolas Coccola, acknowledged that when the school opened in 1890, the Ktunaxa were “on the eve of breaking out into war with the whites.” State schooling thus emerged in what Blackhawk calls the “maelstrom of colonialism.” The new school system was tiered, and the funding available to schools depended on their rank and utility to the DIA. At the bottom of the hierarchy were the Indian Day Schools. Given their high rates of irregular attendance and inability to separate children from their parents and communities, they were seen as inefficient but still necessary stop-gaps. Thus, most day schools received only a few hundred dollars of federal funding, barely enough to cover a teacher’s annual salary. Paying the remaining costs was left to the churches. Nevertheless, by 1890, ten were in operation, mostly on the coast, at Alert Bay, Bella Bella, Clayoquot, Cowichan, Hazelton, Kincolith, Lakalsap, Masset, Nanaimo, and Port Essington. By 1900, their number had jumped to twenty-eight in all parts of the province. Securing regular attendance remained an issue, however. In 1884, Harry Guillod, the Indian agent for the West Coast Agency, informed the DIA of a disturbing incident:

Rev. Father Nicolaye has had trouble with the Indians. He, as a punishment, shut up two pupils for non-attendance at school, and some sixty of the tribe made forcible entry into his house, and three of them held him while others released the boys … It is very uphill work trying to get the children to attend school, as the parents are indifferent, and are away with them at other stations for months during the year.

Far from being agnostic about schooling, Indigenous parents organized against the teacher and advocated for education on their terms. Gwichyà Gwich’in historian Crystal Gail Fraser notes that Indigenous parents often “understood the implications” of Indian education “while demonstrating their awareness that their complicity within the system did not equate to unqualified approval.” Parents and guardians actively negotiated their circumstances and “proved remarkably successful in their capacity to transform, to greater and lesser degrees, emerging state structures and policies around schooling.” Still, such activity convinced the DIA that boarding and industrial schools were necessary to separate children from their parents and communities to facilitate re-education and assimilation.

Indian Boarding Schools, originally designed for younger children and located on or near Indian reserves, were a step above day schools in the DIA ranking. According to state officials, they had the advantage of being able to house children and establish some distance from parents for much of the year to disrupt Indigenous lifeways. Indeed, Métis historian Allyson D. Stevenson argues that “disruption and dispossession figure prominently in the colonization of Indigenous kinship.” Their per-capita grant was usually in the range of sixty to eighty dollars, and some also received free or cheap land grants to open new facilities. In 1890, boarding schools were operating at Coqualeetza, Port Simpson, Mission, and Yale. The All Hallows Boarding School at Yale originally accepted Indigenous and white pupils, the latter mostly the daughters of Anglican families in the Diocese of New Westminster who were unhappy with the non-denominational public school system being implemented across the province. As Jean Barman writes, All Hallows was unique in that it was both a boarding school for Indigenous girls, complete with DIA funding, and a private Anglican school for white pupils who paid fees. By 1900, there were seven boarding schools, with new institutions being established or recognized by the DIA at Alberni, Alert Bay, and North Vancouver. Most incarcerated Indigenous children from many different Nations from across the province.

The highest rank in the new system was reserved for the Indian Industrial Schools. The first schools were mostly paid for by the federal government, but an Order-in-Council of 1892 shifted substantial costs back to the churches. Missionaries were now expected to operate the institutions on per-capita grants that were below the then-current level of expenditure, usually $130. The government assumed that teaching would be done on a volunteer basis or would be covered by churches. The inadequate funding simply exacerbated existing problems. Nevertheless, by 1900 new industrial schools at Alert Bay, Coqualeetza (which was upgraded to an industrial school), and Williams Lake joined Metlakatla, Kuper Island, Kamloops, and Kootenay. Within twenty years, the number of Indigenous children attending federally funded schools of all kinds – day, boarding, and industrial – had doubled, reaching a total of 1,568 by 1900."

- Sean Carleton, Lessons in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Schooling in British Columbia. Vancouver: University of British Columbia, 2022. p. 121-126.

[factoidfactory]

Indigenous History Month Fact #3

When Indian Residential Schools were built in Canada, the building plans would already come with a cemetery built beside the school, as it was assumed that students would die.

Hundreds of unmarked graves are still being found to this day.

[nofatclips]

In the Beginning Was Water and Sky, a short film by Ryan Ward

[walltowalltitties]

Hello. Here's two cool places to donate to:

The Indian Residential School Survivors' Society

and

Standing Together.

They are, respectively, a non-profit organization based out of Vancouver BC dedicated to helping residential school survivors, missing/murdered indigenous women, and indigenous youth in the criminal justice system (IRSSS), and a movement dedicated to cohabitation and coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, free of occupation and oppression and free of those who don't have the people's best interests in mind (ST).

(Both of them accept one-time and recurring donations, whichever you prefer.)