American Indian Culture and Research Journal

The Residential School experience was, beyond question, intolerable. . . . [All] too often, “wards of the Department” were overworked, underfed, badly clothed, housed in unsanitary quarters, beaten with whips, rods and fists, chained and shackled, bound hand and foot, locked in closets, basements and bathrooms, and had their heads shaved or hair closely cropped. —John Milloy, A National Crime We cannot understand the full horror of Indian Residential Schools until we understand that their very existence, in however benign a form, constituted an abomination. —Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, The Circle Game Still, today, I do not regret going into the Residential School. —Rita Joe, Song of Rita Joe Canada’s official residential school policy, functioning between 1879 and 1986, acted as a weapon in a calculated attack on indigenous cultures, seeking—through such now infamous procedures as familial separation, forced speaking of non-Native languages, and propagandist derogation of precontact modes of existence and Native spiritual systems—to compel its inmates into assimilation. The results of this onslaught are now widely documented. Native children were divorced from their traditional Native cultures yet at the same time were refused entry into prosperous white Canada through inferior educational practices and racism, institutionalized to occupy a liminal space characterized by disillusion, identity crisis, and despair. The legacy of the residential school system ripples throughout Native Canada, its fingerprints on the domestic violence, poverty, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide rates that continue to cripple many Native communities. Okanagan author Jeannette Armstrong identifies residential schooling as “the single most devastating factor in the breakdown of our society. It is at the core of the damage, beyond all other mechanisms cleverly fashioned to subjugate, assimilate, and annihilate.”