Residential Schools

"Confronting the truths of Canada’s Indian residential school system has been likened to waking a sleeping giant. In The Sleeping Giant Awakens, David B. MacDonald uses genocide as an analytical tool to better understand Canada’s past and present relationships between settlers and Indigenous peoples.

"With the growing strength of minority voices in recent decades has come much impassioned discussion of residential schools, the institutions where attendance by Native children was compulsory as recently as the 1960s. Former students have come forward in increasing numbers to describe the psychological and physical abuse they suffered in these schools, and many view the system as an experiment in cultural genocide. In this first comprehensive history of these institutions, J.R. Miller explores the motives of all three agents in the story.

"For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the “circle of civilization,” the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse.

"Earth, Water, Air and Fire: Studies in Canadian Ethnohistory is a collection of 17 articles that resulted from a conference sponsored by Nin.D.Waab.Jig. and Wilfred Laurier University in 1994. The conference addressed the status of ethnohistory in Canada as it related to Aboriginal People and was designed as multidisciplinary and holistic. Two of the contributors reflect the Aboriginal Perspective and the essays by Dean Jacobs of Walpole Island and renowned historian Olive P. Dickason are important contributions. The remaining topics are wide-ranging and a few are noteworthy.

"Out of the Depths: The Experiences of Mi'kmaw Children at the Indian Residential School at Shubenacadie, Nova Scotia is the personal memoir of Isabelle Knockwood. As a child of five, she was sent to a Catholic residential school in 1936. Her memories of this education system have haunted her throughout her life and as a mature adult she enrolled in a university program where the basis of this book began. In addition to her first-person account, the author interviewed 27 former Mi'kmaw students and conducted archival research.

"The twelve essays that make up Reflections on Native-Newcomer Relations illustrate the development in thought by one of Canada's leading scholars in the field of Native history - J.R. Miller. The collection, comprising pieces that were written over a period spanning nearly two decades, deals with the evolution of historical writing on First Nations and Métis, methodological issues in the writing of Native-newcomer history, policy matters including residential schools, and linkages between the study of Native-newcomer relations and academic governance and curricular matters.

"This inspiration and very emotionally moving program looks at the "other side" of the Residential Schools experience. As many First Nations "survivors" share their stories we come face to face with the fear, confusion and sometimes hurtful experience that were the Residential Schools. Seen from a First Nations perspective we come to realize just what effect these schools have really had on First Nations people then and now and we start to realize some of the healing that has begun as a result of finally facing the truth about these schools.

"In From the Iron House: Imprisonment in First Nations Writing, Deena Rymhs identifies continuities between the residential school and the prison, offering ways of reading 'the carceral'—that is, the different ways that incarceration is constituted and articulated in contemporary Aboriginal literature.

"Fifteen-year-old Buckley (Buckley Petawabano) attends residential school, where he longs for his home and dreams of fishing and hunting. Yet when he returns to the reserve for the summer he feels like a stranger, unable to speak his Cree language or live off the land like his father and brothers. Johnny (Johnny Yesno), an Indigenous caretaker at the school, takes Buckley under his wing, introducing him to Indigenous history, culture, and knowledge.

"The adoption of Aboriginal children into non-Aboriginal families has a long and contentious history in Canada. Life stories told by First Nations people reveal that the adoption experience has been far from positive for these communities and has, in fact, been an integral aspect of colonization. In an effort to decolonize adoption practices, the Yellowhead Tribal Services Agency (YTSA) in Alberta has integrated customary First Peoples’ adoption practices with provincial adoption laws and regulations.