This panel brought together critical and historical perspectives on Indigenous Peoples’ experiences with the Canadian settler state’s varied ‘schooling’ projects, including contexts related to Indian Day Schooling, Indian Residential Schooling, and provincial schooling. These structures and contexts of schooling – each internally varied across time and space – have been inadequately and too rarely examined in relation to one another, or as constituent parts of a larger, multi-institutional complex of state schooling organized in service of Canada’s colonial social-political order. What benefit may be gained in our analyses of settler colonialism by attending to the histories and social relations of these varied projects together, or by approaching them as organizationally distinct but complexly connected and overlapping, rather than as discrete and altogether separate forms (an approach taken in panelist Sean Carleton’s recent work Lessons in Legitimacy)? They are already each structured by a shared constellation of underlying colonial social relations, which is to say they are each already situated within the state’s relatively durable and diffuse project of dispossession and usurpation. This panel engaged this question through research on contexts wherein Indigenous Peoples have experienced and responded to specific structures and relations that co-constitute (with other ‘educational’ structures) the aggregate context of colonial state schooling in Canada: Indian Day School experiences in Kahnawà:ke; Indigenous teaching in Indian Day Schools in British Columbia; how Indigenous parents in the Arctic responded, historically, to their children who were institutionalized at Indian Residential Schools; and Indigenous experiences with contemporary state schooling in Quebec.
Panel Overview (for each presentation please provide: title, presenter name(s), and abstract)
Chair: Dr. Omeasoo Wahpasiw (Carleton University)
Education for Assimilation: Indian Day School Stories from Kahnawà:ke - Wahéhshon Whitebean (鶹AV)
Issue: State-sponsored attempts to assimilate Indigenous peoples in so-called Canada included the creation of Indian Day Schools, with twice as many children in attendance than Indian Residential Schools, yet we still know very little about the experiences and impacts.
Background: Loss of language, culture, and identity at Indian Day School are traumatic experiences that affected multiple generations of Indigenous families. This research examines experiences of Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawks) that attended Indian Day Schools in Kahnawà:ke. These stories are revisited through a reflexive exploration that includes unpacking community roles as a Kanien’kehá:ka community member of Kahnawà:ke, Indigenous researcher, and claimant in the Federal Indian Day Schools settlement.
Learning Objectives: To provide a snapshot on the history of Indian Day Schooling in Kahnawà:ke and create awareness of the impacts on health & well-being. To promote cultural, land-based and trauma-informed approaches to healing that support Indigenous peoples to move beyond colonial legacies of trauma.
Results: An Indigenous community-centered approach to research provides opportunities that empower communities to overcome collective traumatic experiences without revictimizing participants. Indian Day School stories provide an opportunity to examine the broader context of community life, and acted as springboards into on-reserve community schooling, and public schooling off-reserve.
Conclusion: Centralizing Kanien’kehá:ka life stories about navigating historic, contemporary, and multigenerational colonial traumas demonstrates identity reclamation, language revitalization, and land-based education as pathways to healing.
The colonialism of contemporary state schooling in Canada - Christopher Reid (鶹AV)
Provincial jurisdiction state schooling has been inadequately examined in scholarly analyses of the colonialism of present-day education in Canada. I argue that we must better understand the organization and function of contemporary provincial schooling’s social and political relations within the Canadian settler state’s ongoing consolidation and reproduction. Historians have documented the importance of schooling to state formation in early Canada. Schooling however remains central to such processes in the present. With colonial usurpation and dispossession as its condition of possibility, provincial state schooling is structurally and continually expropriative, incorporative, and eliminative, as well as pedagogically implicated in the educational settler state’s self-legitimation. Schooling’s generic distance from overt practices of colonial domination is however widely presumed, especially in contexts where Indigenous peoples are imagined to be absent, while its web of infrastructures, practices, and relations reproduces colonial power in specific ways (through curriculum and ideology, law and jurisdiction, physical organization in propertied and territorialized space, labour and employment, and more). What might a mode of analysis that attends to state schooling’s contemporary constitution reveal of the 'truth' about schooling in settler colonial contexts as a supposed collective, self-evident good? And how might schooling serve as an entry point to better analyze the role of the provincial state apparatus within Canadian colonialism more broadly? This paper attends to these questions and contexts through an examination of state schooling in the provincial context of Quebec.
Racism at Work: Indigenous Teachers and Pay Grievances in British Columbia’s Indian Day Schools, 1880s-1930s - Dr. Sean Carleton (University of Manitoba)
In 1935, after almost twenty years of teaching at the Alert Bay Indian Day School on Vancouver Island, George M. Luther, an Indigenous teacher, wrote to the Department of Indian Affairs (DIA) in Ottawa to tender his resignation. Owing to his ill health and poverty resulting from years of being poorly paid for his labor, Luther tried to negotiate a small pension – as teachers had recently secured in the province’s public schools – but he was unsuccessful. Instead, the DIA granted him two months of salary upon retirement, a total of $180. This meant that Luther’s annual salary, at the end of his career, was $1080. By comparison, the average public-school teacher in British Columbia’s elementary schools made close to $1,500.
Two decades of correspondence between Luther and DIA officials about pay grievances and the lack of pedagogical support reveals the racism at work in British Columbia’s Indian Day Schools. Indeed, the DIA constantly opposed the hiring of Indigenous teachers, preferring to hire “white” teachers where possible because of their presumed superiority and advanced skill set. Nevertheless, this paper will establish that, against the wishes of the DIA, Indigenous teachers comprised a significant portion of the day school workforce in British Columbia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Moreover, surviving DIA records and correspondence offers a window into the previously undocumented working conditions, racism, and grievances these teachers experienced.
