Canada's Dreyfus Affair?

The History of Canada's Residential Schools, expanded and amended

St Eugene Mission

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Note to the reader

I published in First Things on 10 July 2021, and republished in The Catholic World Report three days later, a version of the essay that appears below. In November of last year I briefly annotated the copy I had posted at Academia.edu, to warn readers that it contains certain errors. It now appears with corrections and additions, some of which amount to retractions; for, as critical as I was of the emerging narrative, I was not critical enough. All changes from the version published on 13 July 2021 are italicized, not for emphasis but merely to distinguish them from the original text, lest someone suppose that I had said then, or that I wish them to think that I had said then, something that I am only saying now.

There can be no reconciliation without truth, and in this whole sorry business truth has been the first casualty. Churches continue to burn or be vandalized and anti-Christian sentiment to flourish, while lies and distortions are mainstreamed in Parliament and in print, as in schools and universities and at major sporting events. It is in that sense, and only that sense, that I dare to compare what has been happening with l'affaire Dreyfus. The Catholic Church and other involved institutions are very far from guiltless. But scapegoating is taking place by means of fabricated evidence, such that anti-Catholicism is being added to our still flourishing anti-Semitism, about which I have already written.

On this year's so-called National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, which saw more of the same, I determined that I must either undertake the present task or publish instead a more thorough and better informed critique of the falsehoods to which we are being programmatically exposed. Others have already done a better job of that, however, than I could ever hope to; so the present modest effort, somewhat delayed by intervening tasks, may suffice. It will suffice, in any case, to correct my own errors of July 2021.

We ought to be very grateful to all who fight the good fight for truth, particularly in this age of Pilate redivivus, which has come upon us in consequence of our own culture's rejection of the Word of Truth. To my wife, who stays abreast of developments in this particular fight and indeed contributes to them through her own research and reporting, I am especially grateful. I alone am responsible, however, for errors or omissions in what I wrote three and half years ago or in the alterations now made.

In late June and early July 2021, some dozen churches in Canada, many serving indigenous people, were torched. A dozen more, most in non-indigenous contexts, were vandalized. “Burn it all down,” tweeted the director of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, to supportive cheers even in the legal community. The chaos ensued after alleged discoveries of the remains of hundreds of indigenous youths, buried near the residential schools in which they were enrolled under a policy backed by the Indian Act of 1876, amendments to which in 1894 and 1920 made attendance at residential or industrial schools compulsory for those who lacked access to day schools. The last of the former, many of which were operated by the Catholic Church, closed its doors in 1996. Over more than a century, about 140,000 children passed through these schools. Upward of four thousand—perhaps as many as ten thousand—passed away while attending them or expired soon afterward.

How could this be? Who is responsible? Was it a great crime and are the religious organizations who operated the residential schools the real culprits, as many suppose? A careful examination shows this supposition to be flawed. The evils to which the residential school system sometimes led—evils falsely characterized as genocide—have been taken out of their own context and placed into another. In that other, the goods to which the system led are forgotten. So are the true roots of the evils. Blame is conveniently shifted from government-mandated violation of parental rights (a subject to which we will return) to the failings of the Church, but even the former is misconstrued.

A progressive policy

At the time of its establishment, the residential schools policy was seen as a progressive one. A Methodist minister, Egerton Ryerson (1803–82), was appointed chief superintendent of education for Upper Canada in 1844. He introduced school boards, standardized textbooks, and free education for all. The Department of Indian Affairs quickly sought his advice and began to employ some of his methods in order to integrate native children into the new world in which they were to live. Much of it they ignored, however. Whereas Ryerson supported a voluntary and bilingual model, government policy held that indigenous peoples should receive an education in denominational English-only boarding schools, a system that entailed uprooting children from their tribal homes and customs.

The first residential school, the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, had opened in 1831. It was still imbued with the spirit of the first bishop of New France, Saint François de Laval (d. 1708), who laboured long before the Ryerson era to supply a complete system of education for the peoples in his care, as also to protect them from the liquor trade and other threats to their welfare. (In those days, schools were brought to the natives rather than the natives to the schools.) By Confederation in 1867, there were eight such establishments, but things were beginning to change.

State support for mission schools, Catholic and Protestant, became available in 1874. With the advent of compulsory education, the schools multiplied. By 1931 there were eighty in operation. Funding was enrolment-based and (given the parlous state of the economy) very parsimonious. Living conditions became crowded and less healthy. Children arrived already suffering from tuberculosis or other illnesses. When children died at the schools, they were seldom sent home for proper burial. The government wouldn't, and the churches couldn't, pay for that; nor could the families. So instead it was shallow graves and wooden crosses in fields outside the schools. And though the education was generally good and gratefully received by some, record-keeping (or the successful preservation of records) was remarkably bad. The little wooden crosses and cemetery fences, of course, are often long gone. Hence the uncertainty as to numbers and names and even locations of those buried.

Recently, however, ground-scanning devices have been deployed to supply locations and numbers. On 28 May 2021, we were told that there were 215 unmarked graves at the site of the residential school in Kamloops, B.C.; on June 25, that in Saskatchewan there were 751 where the Marieval Residential School had been; on June 30, that 182 had been “discovered” at St. Eugene's Mission near Cranbrook, where I grew up.

Unfounded allegations

These allegations have lingered in the public mind, which is content to regard them as facts. But two and a half years later, no bodies have been found. In that Kamloops orchard where it all began, only quite predictable ground disturbances have been found, which the First Nation in question now refers to, not as graves, but as anomalies. Bodies there are, of course, in burial sites attached to the schools, but no suspicious bodies, so far as we know. The whole business therefore appears as anomalous; indeed, as quite fantastical, if not maliciously fraudulent.

So we must ask a second time, and just as seriously: How could this be? Who is responsible? Why were these “anomalies” used to fuel, not truth and reconciliation, but urban legends with political, cultural, and financial repercussions of great consequence? Why has the truth not been told and apologies made? C. P. Champion and Tom Flanagan's edited volume, Grave Error, exhumes the truth from the grave in which it has been buried by a concerted misinformation campaign. The pioneering work of retired justice Brian Giesbrecht, as of Rodney Clifton and others, also deserves mention. Mountains of background research have been piled up by the pseudonymous Nina Green for anyone to explore who cares to learn the relevant facts.

These facts challenge even claims that are technically true but circumstantially misleading. Take the word “compulsory,” for example, used above to qualify attendance at the schools. It should not be supposed that coercion was the norm. Moreover, it is not the case that most native children attended residential schools. Quite the opposite. Even in the heyday of these schools, attendance figures hovered around 33%. Yet the burnings and the slanderings and the firings of “denialists” continue unabated in an industry—lucrative and advantageous for some, devastating for others—of “knowings” and “reconciliations” falsely so-called.

Justin Trudeau and Murray Sinclair and Kimberly Murray are not alone in bearing ex officio responsibility for what has been happening, though their own sins of omission or commission loom large. Even the Bishop of Rome has joined in the blurring of truth and the smudging of history, displaying an uncharacteristic papal credulity. Canada's own bishops and clergy, though often diligent in efforts at reconciliation, have been missing in action when it comes to public discussion of the salient matters. Bishop Fred Henry (requiescat in pace) was among the honourable exceptions; as is Fr Cristino Bouvette, a priest of indigenous origin whose grandmother was educated in one of the residential schools. To Bouvette's eminently sensible interview with the Catholic Minute (posted 21 October 2024) all should stop and listen. But let us turn to the story I was about to tell.

An irresponsible campaign

On 26 June 2021, if memory serves, our family arrived for Mass in our picturesque Quebec parish. There, at the end of the drive, stood a lone protester, holding up a sign reading 751. A small pair of shoes, the symbol of genocide, lay at his feet. I enquired of this young man what he knew of all this and what he hoped for as a response from ordinary Catholics. He had not been misled by the scurrilous suggestion, planted early in the irresponsible press, that these were mass graves, as if there had been mass murder. But even he did not appear to have much grasp of the requisite details; nor indeed did I, being as yet unaware that the Kamloops claim was unfounded.

Operating on the assumption that it was made reasonably and in good faith, I nevertheless asked some questions: How did these children die? Who was responsible for their deaths and why are their graves unmarked? What attempts have been made at redress? What are churches and governments doing or not doing? To such questions he had no ready answers. He hoped that Pope Francis and the Canadian bishops would apologize rather than merely express regret; and that the putatively wealthy Catholic Church would sacrifice some of its properties in order to help indigenous peoples get things they are still lacking, such as potable water. Certain of his hopes were subsequently realized, though not much has changed for natives who suffer from the policies and practices of incompetent or corrupt leaders in government, including First Nations government, or from entrenched patterns of dependence, addiction, and despair that money cannot solve.

We began discussing these things, which are complex enough that we never arrived at the topic of those rotten apples in the staffing barrels of the residential schools—clerical, religious, and lay people who traumatized the children in their care emotionally, physically, or sexually, as if the trauma of being taken from their homes and homelands were not trauma enough. In the public mind, naturally, these things tend to run together: child seizure, child neglect, child abuse, child deaths. They need to be separated out if each is to be given the attention it deserves.

Unfortunately, the present campaign seems more interested in manipulating public sentiment than in achieving public clarity. Information on local gravesites has been dropped piecemeal into the collective psyche, as if these finds represented new and shocking knowledge rather than confirmation of things already established. Little effort has been made to explain that what Professor Scott Hamilton called for six years ago, during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, is being undertaken. Indeed, the ignorant are being left to think that we are only now discovering that a great many children died during the course of their residential school education. Something long known is presented as new and shocking in order that it may be deployed in support of a political fiction.

For the sake of that fiction, lines are being blurred, categories confused. Residential schools are not intrinsically evil, nor were Canada's. Rape and murder, or negligent homicide, are intrinsically evil, as is systematic cruelty; but hardships and cruelty cannot rightly be run together, nor did the TRC call for a search for bodies of murdered children. Yet today that is what we encounter, implicitly or explicitly. The term adopted by the commission to describe the context and effects of residential school education, “cultural genocide,” has begun to appear without its adjective. Even the careful statement on 24 June 2021 by then National Chief Perry Bellegarde, which wisely avoided the noun itself, was released under the header, “Horrific discoveries of unmarked graves demands urgent action.” That header left more than a hint of wanton and, indeed, deliberate destruction of young lives.

By contrast, Chief Sophie Pierre (who preceded me at our local high school after attending the St. Eugene's school and who knows the strengths and weaknesses of each) spoke the plain truth: “There’s no discovery, we knew it was there, it’s a graveyard. The fact there are graves inside a graveyard shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone.”

Perhaps the timing of such “news” items was accidental, or perhaps the intention was to capitalize on Bill C-15, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Act that received royal assent on 21 June 2021, driving home the point that the country must now act in more concerted fashion to effect changes. If so, the end does not justify the means. The fires this campaign has provoked, and the hatred for Christians (especially Catholics) it has fanned, cannot be deemed so much unfortunate collateral damage. Sentiment is a dangerous thing. Truth and reconciliation both suffer when it is weaponized.

Take, for example, the demand for a papal apology, which had already been made. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement was signed in 2006. The process of formal apologies for which it called had already begun in 1991. This was culminated, observes Raymond de Souza, by Prime Minister Harper in 2008 and by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, when he received a native delegation and “expressed his sorrow and anguish for the ‘deplorable’ conduct of those Catholics who caused immense pain and suffering to those in residential schools.” According to Fr de Souza, “that this was a suitable counterpart to the federal government apology was understood by everyone—Indigenous media, Catholic media, secular media.”

In 2015, however, the TRC completed its six-volume Final Report on the residential schools, based primarily on a patient hearing of many heartbreaking stories. (Such, note bene, was its mandate. It was not tasked with a full analysis of the historical record or even with an unbiased sampling of indigenous responses to residential school experience; nor was it given unfettered access to federal archives, as it should have been.) Among its ninety-four recommendations was a demand that the new pope, Francis, be summoned to Canada more or less immediately to make an apology in situ “for the Roman Catholic Church’s role in the spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children in Catholic-run residential schools.” While this may tell against Fr de Souza's reading of the situation, it is being reiterated today as if nothing at all happened in 2009. Even C-15, as I have shown elsewhere, trades in myth as much as in history. The pontiff's eventual visit, though not without benefit, was a mistake insofar as it failed to clarify this.

A perfect storm

Back to our thumbnail sketch of earlier history: In the era of the residential schools, medicine was relatively primitive while pandemics were common. Smallpox was deadly. The Spanish flu took people in the prime of life at a ten percent fatality rate. Tuberculosis was slower, but for natives still more lethal. According to The Globe and Mail, documents in the National Archives reveal that children were dying from it “at alarming rates.” The Department of Indian Affairs sent its chief medical officer, Peter Bryce, to investigate. His visits to fifteen schools in western Canada found that “at least 24 per cent of students had died from tuberculosis over a 14-year period.” He informed the department in 1907 that the schools were failing to separate the healthy from the sick.

Two years later Bryce submitted a second report, recommending that the government take responsibility for administering the schools. For his troubles his position was abolished; only in 1969 would his advice be followed. After retirement in 1922 he authored The Story of a National Crime. The pleas of other doctors were likewise ignored. “Evidently somebody has mistaken our residential school for a TB sanatorium,” complained Dr MacInnis in a letter from Nova Scotia to Indian Affairs. This he thought “very unfair to the children who are clean and well.”

Today, in our artificially induced “pandemic” era, we seem to be getting all this backward, treating the healthy as if they were sick rather than the sick as if they were healthy, leading to new national and international crimes, some of which are finally being acknowledged while others are still being ignored. In Canada, alas, the great majority are ignored. But my point is that the old national crime was indeed national; that is, political and economic, not primarily religious. Life expectancy in those days was generally much lower and child mortality much higher. Bryce, however, made clear to Indian Affairs that the mortality rate was far greater for natives than for the general population and that immediate action must be taken to address the problem. In 1914, as The Globe points out, “the most influential senior Indian Affairs official of the period,” Duncan Campbell Scott, allowed that “it is quite within the mark to say that fifty per cent of the children who passed through these schools did not live to benefit from the education which they had received therein.” Yet no effective action was taken until after the Second World War, by which time medical measures had much improved.

Scott's assessment cannot be generalized to the entire history of the schools, or confined to the schools for that matter. It captured the pitiful prospects of the native population as such, in which those who remained at home sometimes died in similar numbers. The schools, however, found themselves at the heart of what Hamilton aptly describes as a perfect storm: “a very, very poorly developed public health infrastructure”; an epidemiologically vulnerable population; children drawn from disparate communities, bringing sickness with them, then being crammed into buildings with poor heating and ventilation while offered an inadequate diet. Of course, says Hamilton, under such conditions diseases “are going to explode like wildfire.”

The question that must be pressed is why this storm, which waxed and waned, was allowed to last for the better part of a century, at the expense of so many young lives. And why neither the state nor the church mustered the courage to turn and face it, or to extract themselves from it, as the state is trying to do now by falsely or disproportionately blaming the churches.

Responsibility and repentance

Let us be clear: For the physical or mental abuse of those in their care, all who have power to prevent it are responsible, together with (if differently from) those perpetrating it. For policies that seduce or compel communities to send their children to schools where disease rages or where their culture is wrongfully suppressed, all who produce or perpetuate them are responsible. No party is responsible for everything, nor can blame be distributed equally. To distribute it justly is something of which only God is ultimately capable, but man, within his own limits, has an obligation to try. It is part of learning to live justly.

Those who pretend that we have a new instrument for doing so are far too optimistic, however, or at least much too hasty. What we have learned from the ground scans is almost nothing, and new only in certain modest particulars. Where gravesites are successfully mapped we are in a better position, not to blame the living, but to honour the dead. And so we must, bearing in mind that, while most were victims of disease, that does not in itself make them victims in the moral sense. Many were in the right place at the wrong time and, whether students or staff, were there quite voluntarily. That schooling was compulsory, and official policy sometimes enforced, does not prove otherwise; nor can stories of suffering be said with confidence to outweigh stories of benefit, since the latter have not been sought and the former are sometimes compromised by exploitation of the reparations system.

To honour the dead was and is the whole point of cemeteries, a burial tradition introduced to North America by Christians and welcomed by indigenous peoples. The cemeteries in question were a final resting place not only for deceased school children but also for other poor folk from the local community. Yet we are hampered in the salutary work of honouring the dead by the smoke of burning churches, which tells us that the question of responsibility for that protracted “perfect storm” has not been answered as it ought to be answered.

No answer to the question of responsibility can retreat from official confessions of grave culpability, whether on the part of government or on the part of the religious organizations that ran the schools. The prime minister's despicable posturing notwithstanding, however, the government must bear the brunt of any further censure. For it was the state that determined the policy, which included forced assimilation by remote education, and held the purse strings that controlled its implementation. A fatally flawed scheme, conducted with a deadly combination of ambition and parsimony, was made worse by dereliction of duty by parties on both sides. Even the native side cannot avoid critical scrutiny, if truth and reconciliation are actually to prevail; but the scheme itself had devastating effects for which national repentance was and is requisite.

Repentance for what? For just that, our collective and particular failures, which we are repeating today on a grander scale through the deliberate erasure of culture. Not for Western civilization as such, which has become the target of the cynical and the self-loathing. Certainly not for Christianity or the Catholic Church, which from the days of Canada's patron saints—Jean de Brébeuf and his colleagues, who shed martyrial blood on behalf of abandoned natives in the face of tribal genocide—has done so much to temper our excesses and heal our diseases of body and soul, as it must now do again, despite its own shame and disgrace. Not for genocide either, for there was here no genocide, though there was no shortage, in the midst of much that was praiseworthy, of negligence, cruelty, disaster, and untimely death.

The charge of genocide

In conclusion, something more must be said about this charge of genocide, which stirs up an irrational hatred. Article II of the Genocide Convention defines genocide by reference to five kinds of acts “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such.” These are:

a. Killing members of the group;

b. Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

c. Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

d. Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;

e. Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

In the present context, the fifth is the one most fixed upon by those who employ this term. It must be remembered, however, that all five are qualified by the intent clause, for which evidence is wanting.

The aforementioned Globe article highlights the judgment of John Milloy, “the only outsider to have accessed the locked vault of Indian Affairs records” and author of a book that harks back to Bryce's. In that book, A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, Milloy rightly eschews the language of genocide, for no one was actually trying to make children ill or to erase the indigenous peoples. The unconscionable assault on their families and culture by the state, and the complicity of the churches (will we ever learn?) with the state, led to tragedy. But the school deaths “were primarily due to the policy of paying churches on a per-capita basis” that incentivized over-crowding and the dangerous admission or retention of sick students. It was inexcusable, but it was not genocide.

Moreover, the bare fact of compulsory remote education does not amount to what is specified in the fifth subsection, though it tends in that direction. I am strongly opposed to such education. Indeed, I am against most laws—today, ironically, such laws are again proliferating, promoted by powerful international organizations including the United Nations—that permit agents of the state to violate the sanctity of the family, doing things to the minds or bodies of children that their parents believe harmful. But I do not think Canada guilty of genocide, or the churches complicit in genocide. The failures of both, past and present, are sufficiently serious without resorting to that term.

Those who speak loosely of genocide do not discourage but encourage the kind of act that in the course of time leads to genocide; acts that do nothing for national repentance and do not honour, but rather disgrace, the dead. Honouring the dead should begin with prayer, for those still able to find a house of prayer. From there it should move to self-examination, contrition, and penance or reparation, so that there may be reconciliation between man and man and, by divine mercy, God and man.

Postscript

That the premier of Quebec, M. Legault, has lately determined to put a stop to public prayer may be taken as a signal that some are nigh incapable of repentance and that coerced assimilation is alive and well in our country. That is a subject I will take up in a new essay, in which mention will be made of certain difficulties with his (presently vague) proposal, including the fact that this category cannot be narrowly tailored to target Islam. It is a very broad category that by its nature covers everything from Corpus Christi processions to smudging ceremonies. The mooted legislation may therefore do more to unite indigenous and non-indigenous peoples against his laïcité regime than he has bargained for. But we must wait to see what the gods of Quebec City actually table in support of their militantly secularist theocracy.

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© D. B. Farrow, 9 December 2024

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