271. Canada’s Dark Secret: Stolen Children, Unmarked Graves, & Survival Stories (Ep 5)

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0:28Hello and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnand. And me, William Durrumpel. Now, in our previous episode with the wonderful Maya Jasanoff, we were discussing how the American Revolution birthed Canada. But today, in the final episode of our Canadian mini-series, we're going to jump forward 10 years to discuss, I have to say, a very controversial, very sensitive topic in Canadian history, that of the Indian Residential School. And we're going to look at the history through one particular school, Kamloops Indian Residential School. And I'm delighted that we are joined by Celia Haig-Brown, co-author of, well, this wonderful book, Resistance and Renewal, Surviving the Indian Residential School.

1:11And you've just told me, look, there's an even better updated version. Celia, tell us about the brand new spanking one that I haven't got yet that I'm going to get straight away. What is the book we should all be reaching for now? So you could reach for either one, but really the one that you've just shown me, Resistance and Renewal, is embedded in this new version called Chakalmukweal, Kamloops Indian Residential School, Resistance and a Reckoning. So, I mean, that sort of gives you a sense of the kind of energy and motivation in writing this book. We sort of said, you know, this is a sensitive topic to discuss.

1:46And I should tell you, Celia, that we have a discord community here at Empire where people discuss things amongst themselves. And there is a huge amount of sensitivity and also disagreement about whether, you know, first of all, from the point of were these schools truly evil or a product of their time and doing the best that they could in their time and a time that was imperfect? effect to these were out and out sort of genocidal acts of wiping out of people and their culture. And then we also have people discussing the nuance of this. What do you call these indigenous people? What is the right terminology?

2:18So let's start with the second bit first, because I feel that's an easier one to address. In Canada, there are all of these phrases that indigenous people, First Nation, Indians, what is the right nomenclature to have this conversation in? Well, this nomenclature is evolving rapidly, let me say. I would say that Indian, of course, we kind of know where all that came from, the lost explorers thinking they knew where they were. That word, however, persists in Canada in the form of federal legislation called the Indian Act. So it's a bit inescapable because people, we sometimes have it referred to as our apartheid policy, people have specific laws that pertain to them if they are registered as Indians, and they have cards that show they're registered as Indians.

3:04So that word, as I say, persists. It's also used in common parlance when people are talking to each other. Quite often Indigenous people talking to each other might use that word. It's not appropriate for a white person like me to be using it, though, in common parlance under most circumstances. So, after Indian came native, and native was a word that was quite acceptable for quite some time, simply meaning born in this place. And then the next piece that kind of kicked in, I'd say, is First Nations, Métis, and Inuit. And that comes out of the 1982 constitution, where Canada distinguished itself as separate from Britain.

3:40And First Nations, Métis, and Inuit is really seen as pretty much government terms. First Nations being, again, the registered nations with the federal government. Métis being a particular group of people, most originating out of the Red River area around the Louis Riel times, and people could trace their ancestry there. It's sometimes used by people to indicate people who have mixed heritage. So they have one Indigenous parent, one light parent, or one parent from somewhere other than Indigenous. And then finally have Indigenous. At this point in time, Indigenous seems to be quite acceptable for a broad sweep.

4:16The same is true, I think, in Australia, where there's been a similar progression through various terms, Aboriginal, for example, and Indigenous now seems to be the term of choice. Absolutely, yes, I would agree. And there was a time when Australia, we seem to refer to Australians as Aborigines, and we certainly don't do that anymore. And then finally, I would say, for most Indigenous nations, the preference is that you refer to that nation by the name they have chosen for themselves, which makes sense. So, for example, Kamloops that we're looking at. Kamloops is a city in British Columbia based on the Sakwapim machine word Te Kamloops.

4:55And now the First Nation who is adjacent to the city of Kamloops is Te Kamloops Te Sakwapim. Right. You know, at the risk of mispronouncing, I'm going to leave it to you to pronounce something that is quite… I've never seen you hesitate before. No, I'm game to throw myself at a French word. I've been known to do a Gaelic word. But this one, if I offend anybody, I'm already apologizing from the beginning. So look, tell us about the people of Kamloops and where they are from and their history. Because this is important to know why this school was as, some will say, destructive as it was to so many people.

5:31Well, Indigenous people, like most people, live in places that make sense, let me say that. So Kamloops is actually an anglicization of a Suquapim word, which means the meeting of the rivers. So this is a place where what are now called the North and South Thompson come together into the Thompson River, and it was a very important winter gathering place for Indigenous people. It's also a very important salmon river. And salmon, as you may know, are integral to much life in the interior, whether it's we human beings or many of the other creatures who wander around. No wonder the Scots felt so at home in Canada.

6:11So did my father, who came here to fly fish, but never mind. So this was a natural gathering place. And when the Hudson Bay Company was moving around, they set up a fort here in this area. So that was sort of the beginning of occupation of the land, of settlement. Cedar, am I right in thinking that this was originally, as far as the Europeans were concerned, a place for trading beaver and gathering pelts and so on? This is part of the fur trade? Yes, absolutely. And people coming west. Sometimes British Columbia is referred to as the west beyond the west by Gene Barman, one of my favorite historians from UBC.

6:48Because of the Rocky Mountains, it's quite separate, but explorers did eventually make their way around, mostly through the north, a little more north than the way we go now. And of course, rivers were the most important way of following trade. And is there a sense that you get also in the USA that the indigenous peoples are being herded slowly westwards and that more and more peoples are being put into the west where they're then having to fight for their space? Is that not the case in Canada? No. And as I say, the West beyond the West, this is British Columbia, it's a very different terrain than so much of what comes before.

7:24So within British Columbia, there are 26 separate First Nations, and a number of them have very little in common in terms of language, culture, etc. So, there is a sweep from the north of Athabascans that come right down through the middle of the province, and the Tsukotin are Athabascan language group. This is a linguistic group. And that goes right down to the Navajo. So interestingly, I have a sister-in-law who's Tsilkotin, and she attended the World Contours of Indigenous Peoples and Education, met some Navajos, and they could almost converse in the language with each other. There were probably a few words that were different.

8:03That being said, the Tsilkwapen machine, entirely different from Tsilkotin, no shared. So rivers and mountains really kept people separate from one another. So there would be some back and forth and some trading and some this and that and some moving back and forth through territory. But overall, there was quite a lot of distinction amongst the groups here. Cidia, in some of the earlier episodes in this series, when we were talking to Maya Jasnoff, for example, there was some sensation that the French in New France had a marginally more liberal attitude to the First Nations. Is that the case still in Canada by the early 19th century, or are the kind of racial attitudes which are prevalent everywhere else in the world also making themselves felt in the West of Canada?

8:52I have done some work in northern Quebec. I've done some filmmaking there with an Escapi nation. And I would say racism prevails across the country. Okay. So, I mean, you know, the French may have thought they were being more collegiate, but actually it's the same old, same old. The issue with the French, and I hate to speak for Quebec, but the issue with Quebec is it's doing its very hard work to maintain its own nationalism and to keep its identity pushing back against this Anglo juggernaut all around it. And in doing that, the focus is really on French, Francophone, Québécois particularly. And when indigeneity comes in to challenge those understandings, those wishes, those goals, there's not always sympathy for that.

9:36Okay, let's go right back to the 19th century and those early contacts. I mean, the story that we often get from the American side, which we've covered in detail in our American series, is that those first contacts inevitably brought waves of disease with them. you know, sort of smallpox infested blankets, influenza, bugs that, you know, Indigenous people just didn't have the wherewithal to fight in their bodies. Is that a similar experience in British Columbia, the people that you've been looking at? Absolutely it is, yes. Smallpox being a very big one and nations were decimated literally and probably even more than decimated by those diseases, yes.

10:16But is the story of that early approach of people from Europe, Is it on the back of the fur trade? Because we've covered beaver fur and the attraction of the fur trade. Is that what brings these Europeans to Kamloops as well? Tell us a little bit about that story. Oh yes, absolutely. The establishment of Kamloops is based around the fur trade. There was a trading fort set up here. That was the first inroad into Kamloops. And how soon after the trade is, do the missionaries come? In about 1862, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate came north. They had been in Oregon and things had not gone well for them there.

10:57And they decided to come north and try their luck with the Indians, sorry, Indians at that time they were calling them, in British Columbia. And they came and founded the St. Louis Mission here in Kamloops. And what did that mission do way back then? At that time, they were working to Christianize and civilize the indigenous people. And that was their goal. As the Jesuits had been doing for 200 years earlier. Yeah, so civilize and Christianize. And of course, we do have this federal government who was working a way to ensure that these things were happening. Right. And at a similar time, you've got John MacDonald or John A.

11:34MacDonald or John A. I mean, I know many Canadians refer to him just as if he were a next door neighbor. John A. He is perceived to be the father of the nation, Canada's first prime minister. Now, he is a figure of great complexity and he's a key figure in confederation, bringing together these disparate parts of Canada with different languages, different religions, different politics, liberals and conservatives and bringing them into this coalition to basically say, goodbye, Britain, and also America, we're not you either. And so, you know, that is one of the things he's known for. Strangely enough, two weekends ago, I was staying with friends at the Highclere estate.

12:15And it was pointed out to me over the valley where we were staying, that it was actually the place where the British North American Act and the documents and a lot of the negotiations that led to the Confederation of Canada took place. And there was actually a display which sort of commemorates John A. as this guy who pulled the different federal parts of Canada into a single whole. But today, he is a much more controversial figure and one who's remembered really for his very negative views of the indigenous peoples and his attempts to, in inverted commas, Christianize, civilize, and bring them into line with the immigrant white population.

12:52Yeah, I think he was definitely a product of his times. I think he was a product of his foundational upbringing. And I think it's very interesting. He was writing, working on the British North America Act while he was sitting in Britain. It might've been much more appropriate to be tied to the land that he was writing about. And I think indigenous people would think that that would be very important to have the land informing what you're doing at every turn. Yes, he's controversial. He is the founding father, if we want to put it that way. But I do think that at that time, general understandings of Indigenous people from Europeans were that they were inferior and perhaps even less than human.

13:33Hence the name of the book we were flashing, Chiquel Muhuil, which actually translates to, we become human again. And that is a pushback against current times, but it's a pushback against the whole history of the colonization of North America, we could say, but in this case, Canada. I think it's a little complicated to collapse the US and Canada. We I know it's partly me feeling distinct, despite the fact that I have an American mother. But really, the histories are quite separate because we didn't have a war of independence. We had the British North America Act. Could you explain what that is, Celia, for those who don't understand it?

14:11Well, that is our founding document. And that was what guided the formation of Canada and remained in place as the document that represented who we were as a nation. And correct me if I'm wrong, but before this, you had separate federal colonies. Yeah, you had Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia. And then this is the document that pulls all of these together into some kind of united entity, which is distinct, distinct from Britain, distinct from America. It is a country, a country with these different parts that all have the same aim or pulling in the same direction. And that's sort of, we're talking 1867 here.

14:50The other piece of legislation that you mentioned a little earlier, when you said actually the terminology of Indian is problematic now, because it was used in legislation called the Indian Act, and that is dated 1876. So I think it's a good idea to explain what that actually was and what that actually said. So there were pieces of legislation pertaining to people called Indians at the time. And what you're referring to is the moment when those pieces of legislation were consolidated into the Indian Act. And I will say again, that Indian Act still exists today. It has various revisions along the way.

15:30One of the most important being Bill C-31, which addressed a sexist dimension of the Indian Act, that was Section 121B, which said that if an Indian man married a white woman or a woman who was not classified as Indian, that woman would become a registered Indian. However, if an Indian woman were to marry a non-Indigenous or non-Indian person, she would lose her status. She would no longer be an Indian. Now, that was addressed through a lot of work over many, many years, and finally that revision to the Indian Act was done. But the Indian Act exists now. It's constantly being looked at and revised.

16:12In the 1950s, it had major revision. That's one of the places when education was a serious concern, particularly around the residential schools. And although they didn't end at that time, that was part of the legislation that began the changes to the schools. So, you just mentioned the residential schools, and this is obviously something we'll be focusing in on now for the rest of this episode, because this is an extremely controversial matter. But first of all, it has a very long history, doesn't it? I think you mentioned 1605 is the date of the very first one. Could you take us through this story?

16:46I'm taking this information from J.R. Miller's book, Shingwak's Vision, where he does a really thorough examination of the history of residential schools across Canada. And he points to 1605 or 08 or something, when the Recollects were in New France. And they began by taking a few Indigenous boys to France to be trained and Christianized and civilized. At some point, they were a Franciscan order. At some point, the Jesuits arrived. That didn't work very well, whatever they were trying to do. The Jesuits did the same thing, took some kids to France, but then they set up what they called a seminary, which was basically a boarding school.

17:24And they also tried to do the best way possible to get the children to become good Christians. One of the problems they were having is that as long as the kids were with their parents, the parents didn't have a very hard time amalgamating Native spirituality and Christianity. So it was always not the appropriate way that the Jesuits wanted it to happen. So they made a big effort to have a little school and bring, I think, boys there to teach. And that also ended in failure. So they just gave up and stopped doing it. In my estimation, that failed experiment was completely ignored once the big push for residential schools got going.

18:06And the big push comes partly from John MacDonald, who says, you know what, the residential schools is going to be part of this great united new land that we are making where everybody thinks the same, has the same... culture, language even. He starts talking about how this is almost a God-given purpose to create these schools to amalgamate and change these people who are needing this kind of paternalistic guidance. So, I mean, talk about the actual sort of legislative part of this and how do these schools suddenly get funding and suddenly start changing? Now it's not just a Jesuit trying his luck with a number of parents, it becomes law to do this.

18:48Can you talk us through that? Yeah, I want to start a little bit before Confederation. In 1847 with the province of Canada, there was a report done by Edgerton Ryerson, and he was the one who suggested establishing schools to, quote, raise Indians to the level of whites. Now, he didn't say residential schools per se, but they quickly turned into residential schools. So then in 1867 was Confederation, and various provinces joined Canada along the way, so it wasn't always the 10 provinces and the territories when it got started. At that point, then there was a bigger push towards residential schools.

19:29It was in 1876 that Nicholas Davin was sent to the U.S. to study their industrial schools. And this is really the solid beginning of residential schools. Industrial schools in the U.S. had been set up with President Grant suggesting they were a major component of aggressive civilization. Aggressive civilization, in this case, being directed at the native peoples. Absolutely. And the idea was to create a blue-collar workforce? Is that sort of inherent in the idea? They didn't say that right away, no. But when any examination of the schools is done now, they say there were three things that went on.

20:10The first thing was to Christianize. The first lessons were religion. The second lessons were skills, menial skills. And then a very distant third were some academic skills, reading and writing. One of the reports that your man Davin produced for MacDonald to read. It's going to be hard for people to hear, but the report on industrial schools for Indians and half-breeds was the title of it, which in itself is going to make some people go, that sounds wrong. But it's the report that John A. MacDonald gets and it says, you know, little can be done with adults. Can't do anything for them. They are a lost cause.

20:45But for the children, as their tastes, and this is a quote, are fashioned at home, and his inherited aversion to toil is in no way combated. That's why adults are a washed out case. If anything is to be done with the Indian, we must catch him very young, is a line from this report. And so that then becomes, you know, some may say in that kind of paternalistic, Victorian-ish way of this is how we save you from yourselves, this almost industry of taking children from their parents, from that malign influence, and just hothousing them in religion and, again, I'm using air quotes here, civilization.

21:24Yes, I couldn't agree more. That's exactly what that was about. And this parallels similar efforts in other parts of the British Empire. So you have similar legislation and similar schools being set up in Western Australia. you get similar stuff going on in Ireland and indeed in Western Scotland dedicated at the Gales trying to stop them to speak Gaelic and Wales and Wales yeah yeah I know this has echoes at this period across the world so if you're listening to this in Wales or in Western Australia you will hear much in what is to follow that will sound very familiar we're going to take a break very shortly but just before we get to the break Victorian scores were inherently brutal I mean Just pick up a Dickens and you'll know what it was like to go to school here.

22:11Were they just as brutal as Victorian schools were brutal? Or was there something specific, dehumanizing and violent about these residential schools? I have often thought about boarding schools and how similar they might or might not be to residential schools. I actually have had a graduate student, a PhD student, who focused a section of her dissertation on arguing about the distinction. But I have always claimed when children were sent to British boarding schools, they were having their culture reinforced. Spare the rod and spoil the child. This was not shocking to them. The child should be seen and not heard, all of those kinds of things.

22:54When Indigenous kids were taken and grabbed up and put into the boarding schools that may have had some similarities. It was antithetical to all of what their life experience had been to that point. In addition, when English kids went to English schools, their language was the language. When Indigenous kids went, they couldn't speak. And if they did speak their language, they were punished. So the clash of cultures that residential schools in Canada brought is unfathomable. Let's take a break here. And then, you know, you've said a few things that I really do want to get into in more detail, you know, the scooping up of children.

23:31What did that look like and feel like? And some of the accounts that you've been gathering over the years of what it felt like to be in these schools. Join us after the break.

23:45Welcome back. And I should say that some of you might find the next part of this Empire podcast a little bit upsetting because it does involve children and it involves brutality to children. So we're going to talk about Deputy Superintendent General Duncan Campbell Scott. Now, even when I say his name, you're chuckling, and it's not a happy chuckle, is it? Because tell us why he elicits such emotion when you say his name in Canada now. Perhaps one of his statements that represents his line of thought is his idea that we will continue until there is no Indian, no Indian Act, no Indians anywhere.

24:22They will be completely absorbed into the body politic. And he also used the rather dodgy phrasing, the final solution for the Indian problem, didn't he? Well, I mean, we should say who he is first of all, because we haven't explained why he would even, what he says matters at all. He's a career civil servant. He joins as deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs from 1913 to 1932. And as such, with that position and that power, he really does hold life and death in his hands for many of these indigenous people. So he has a very poor view. The children who are scooped up, how are they scooped up and taken away from their families?

25:01And it's by law. It's not by the choice of the parents selling them off for education. It was 1920 when compulsory attendance became law. In Kamloops, there was literally a cattle truck, and in Chiquel McQuill, there's a photograph of the children in the back of the cattle truck. The truck would drive up, the attendants would get out, and the children would be ordered to get into the truck. I have in, both in Resistance and Renewal and in Chiquel McQuill, there is the story of a woman talking about the day that the truck was coming, her father being aware that the truck was coming, and him saying, I'm going now, you have to be here, you have to stay here, and you have to go to school.