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The
recent discovery of unmarked mass graves of 1,300
Indigenous children
buried in five former residential schools has forced Canada to come
to grips with a legacy of cultural and physical genocide against
Native people.
In
the 19th and 20th centuries, 150,000 children were separated from
their families, language and culture and placed in 150
government-funded residential schools. There, children were subjected
to torture, trauma and death to “kill
the Indian in the child.”
Thousands of children died — 4,100 according to Canada’s
Truth and Reconciliation Commission on the residential schools,
although the actual number may have been as high as 15,000.
And we can only imagine the trauma these children experienced,
including those who were forced to bury their classmates and build
their coffins.
The
disturbing news from Canada was a reminder that the United States
maintained its own system of 367 Indian boarding schools from 1860
until 1978.
The two countries’ systems were intertwined,
with the United States providing a model that Canada would adopt and
emulate.
Responding
to events in Canada, U.S. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland — the
first Native American to hold a Cabinet position and a granddaughter
of people forced into these boarding schools — announced an
investigation of residential schools. She noted that most Americans
would be alarmed to learn that “the United States also has a
history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to
eradicate our culture and erase us as a people.” But, she
emphasized, “it is a history that we must learn from if our
country is to heal from this tragic era.”
She
is right. Just as America is being forced to address its legacy of
enslavement, segregation and systemic racism, the nation must
confront the genocide of Indigenous people — who are rendered
all but invisible
in society — and the role of settler colonialism in building
the country. Native American genocide, like slavery, constitutes
America’s original sin.
From
the earliest colonial days, violently clearing the land of Indigenous
people — like slavery — was critical to the formation of
the country. And, as with slavery, Christianity played an
instrumental role in
advancing violence against Indigenous communities.
Three papal edicts — known
together as the Doctrine of Discovery — provided a religious
justification for colonial conquest and exploitation of non-Christian
people and paved the way for the West African slave trade, slavery
and Indigenous genocide.
These
beliefs permeated the Declaration of Independence, which referred to
the original inhabitants of this land as “merciless Indian
savages.” And with U.S. expansion came Native American
dispossession, death, forced relocation and containment in
reservations. In fact, it was public policy. In 1819, Congress
enacted the Civilization
Fund Act,
which authorized the president “in every case where he shall
judge improvement in the habits and condition of such Indians
practicable” to “employ capable persons of good moral
character” to introduce tribes to the “arts of
civilization.” In 1824, the Bureau of Indian Affairs was
established to administer the fund, which paid Christian missionaries
to “civilize” the Indians.
The
creation of residential schools were part of the broader settler
colonial project to exterminate Native American culture and separate
them from the land through war and violence. The first government-run
boarding school for Native American children was the Carlisle
School,
which opened in Pennsylvania in 1879 for the purpose of “civilizing”
by forcibly assimilating the children into White society. Founded by
a Civil War veteran, Gen.
William Henry Platt,
who was in charge of Native American prisoners
of
war,
its mission was clear. “A great general has said that the only
good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction
has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres,”
Platt said. “In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only
in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead.
Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
Of
the 10,000 children who attended the Carlisle School until it closed
in 1918, more
than 180 died
amid
abuse, malnourishment and disease related to substandard living
conditions. After 100 years, the bodies of 10 of these children were
returned to their families in June 2021.
Nevertheless,
Carlisle came to serve as a model for other residential schools.
Employing Platt’s assimilationist
and genocidal philosophy
of eliminating Native American culture, these schools adhered to
policies forcing children to speak, dress and behave according to
White
American values,
focusing on individualism and materialism, private rather than
communal property and the monogamous nuclear family structure. Boys
received industrial training, while girls learned home life skills in
regimented environments, suffering under living conditions the Native
American Rights Fund described as “somewhere between dungeons
and death camps” in a 2019 report.
Between
one-third
and 40
percent
of the Indian boarding schools in the United States were operated by
Christian denominations. Churches believed that “civilizing”
and converting
Indigenous people to Christianity was their only hope of salvation
from a “dying” culture. Missionaries regarded Indigenous
spirituality as witchcraft and Christianity
as the only acceptable moral law for a civilized society.
But,
in fact, the boarding school system is now recognized as a form of
genocide
designed to forcibly remove children from their homes and separate
them from their families, culture, clothing and language. Their hair
was cut in a humiliating manner. Sadistic missionaries punished them
for speaking
their native tongue
by washing out their mouths with soap, lye and chlorine. They were
neglected, denied food, beaten and raped, sometimes
leading to death
—
all
for the sake of destroying Indigenous culture.
And
their influence spread across the northern border. Nicholas
Flood Davin,
the architect of the Canadian residential school program, visited
Indigenous boarding schools in the United States in 1879 and was
impressed with what he saw, particularly with the Carlisle School and
its solution to the “Indian problem” through an
“aggressive
civilization”
policy that deconstructed Indigenous children.
“The
experience of the United States is the same as our own as far as the
adult Indian is concerned. Little can be done with him,” Davin
wrote in his 1879 report
to the Canadian government. “He can be taught to do a little at
farming, and at [live]stock-raising, and to dress in a more civilized
manner, but that is all. The child, again, who goes to a day school
learns little, and what little he learns is soon forgotten, while his
tastes are fashioned at home, and his inherited aversion [avoidance]
to toil [work] is in no way combated [stopped].” In Canada,
residential schooling was made compulsory for all First Nations
children in 1920.
Most
of the schools ceased operations by the mid-1970s, with the last one
closing in the late 1990s. With the Indian
Residential Schools Settlement Agreement
in 2007, Canada paid reparations to the survivors of residential
schools and issued an apology.
Lawyers
in Canada have requested the International Criminal Court investigate
the Canadian government and the Vatican for alleged crimes
against humanity.
While the Canadian government identified 5,300
abusers,
none have been charged under a federal law addressing war crimes and
crimes against humanity. A few priests have faced sexual assault
charges but not homicide. Out of more than 38,000 reports
of abuse
at the residential schools, there were fewer than 50
convictions.
The
mass graves in Canada are a wake-up call for the United States to
seize the opportunity and get on the right side of human rights. As a
country with a long, unresolved and traumatic history of genocide and
mass graves, of family separation and the erasure of children,
America must heal itself by accounting for its past.
This
commentary was originally published by
The
Washington Post
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