“Practical training”
Another thing about those residential “schools” –
Residential school students did not receive the same education as the general population in the public school system, and the schools were sorely underfunded. Teachings focused primarily on practical skills. Girls were primed for domestic service and taught to do laundry, sew, cook, and clean. Boys were taught carpentry, tinsmithing, and farming. Many students attended class part-time and worked for the school the rest of the time: girls did the housekeeping; boys, general maintenance and agriculture. This work, which was involuntary and unpaid, was presented as practical training for the students, but many of the residential schools could not run without it. With so little time spent in class, most students had only reached grade five by the time they were 18. At this point, students were sent away. Many were discouraged from pursuing further education.
So in fact they weren’t even schools, they were prisons with forced labor. It’s all so very Goldenbridge.
Abuse at the schools was widespread: emotional and psychological abuse was constant, physical abuse was metred out as punishment, and sexual abuse was also common. Survivors recall being beaten and strapped; some students were shackled to their beds; some had needles shoved in their tongues for speaking their native languages. These abuses, along with overcrowding, poor sanitation, and severely inadequate food and health care, resulted in a shockingly high death toll. In 1907, government medical inspector P.H. Bryce reported that 24 percent of previously healthy Indigenous children across Canada were dying in residential schools. This figure does not include children who died at home, where they were frequently sent when critically ill. Bryce reported that anywhere from 47 percent (on the Peigan Reserve in Alberta) to 75 percent (from File Hills Boarding School in Saskatchewan) of students discharged from residential schools died shortly after returning home.
75 percent!!!
One might also consider the treatment of aboriginal people in Australia.
And the US and South America. California is dotted with missions, which are very aesthetically pleasing places, but what they were there for is not quite so pretty.
New Zealand, too, though to a less catastrophic effect than in Australia,
Goldenbridge – Well, I could barely get through that. Fintan O’Toole, in his excellent ‘We Don’t Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland’ addresses the matter of the laundries and orphanages, as well as the fact that what was going on in them was well known by the Church. They were also useful when getting rid of the babies whom priests had, as it were inadvertently, fathered. I don’t suppose many of those babies survived.
I don’t know whether you have come across the anthropologist and film-maker Hugh Brody’s book, ‘The Other Side of Eden: Hunter-Gatherers, Farmers and the Shaping of the World’ – it begins in the High Arctic in Canada, and discusses the ‘residential schools’ and also the treatment of the Inuit in law-courts, among other matters. There is also a more recent book, ‘Landscapes of Silence’, which goes into greater detail. They are highly intelligent and harrowing books. I have not, I regret to say, seen any of Brody’s films, but if you Google ‘Hugh Brody: films’, you can readily find them. Some of them are also about the tribes of the northern American continent, and their struggles.
It’s worth quoting Bryce’s report on that, since the last line of this quote adds significant context:
“Thus, of a total of 31 discharged from the File Hills school, 9 died at the school, of 6 others there is no record of condition on discharge, but all are reported to be dead, 7 others died from within a few months to three years after discharge and 9 are reported as in good health, 7 being farmers or their wives at the File Hills Colony, 1 a student, and 1 at Cote’s reserve. It is most interesting to note that but 7 have been discharged during the past 5 years and that of these 5 are File Hills Colony farmers, and 2 are dead. In every instance where the cause of the 21 deaths was known, it is given as consumption or tuberculosis.”
In those days they had little understanding of the disease or how it spread or how to prevent it. And they had no way of treating it. This did lead to appallingly high death rates.
In Europe, in the 1800s, “tuberculosis … caused nearly 25% of all deaths” (wiki). The death rate for Indigenous Canadians was much higher than for Europeans, because they had no resistance to it. Europeans had lived with the disease for multiple centuries and evolved some resistance, whereas Indigenous Canadians had not. (Ditto other diseases that the Europeans brought, including smallpox and flu.) E.g:
“It has been argued that people of European origin have a high level of resistance to infection by M. tuberculosis, because of selection for host resistance over 300 years, whereas Aboriginal American populations may be more susceptible, since exposure to M. tuberculosis was rare prior to 1880 (reviewed in Stead 1997).” (link).
And while the death rate to tuberculosis in Residential Schools was indeed appallingly high, for such reasons it was also just as high in the Indigenous population generally.
That paper just quoted goes on to find genetic differences making Aboriginal Canadians more susceptible:
“In conclusion, in the epidemiological context of a tuberculosis outbreak in a community of Aboriginal Canadians, most of whom had not been BCG vaccinated, there is significant evidence to support a role for NRAMP1 or a gene (or genes) closely linked to NRAMP1 in susceptibility to active tuberculosis disease”.
They suggest that this is part of the reason that tuberculosis rates today are 10 times higher in Aboriginal Canadians than in the general Canadian population (they quote 70/100,000 and 7/100,000 respectively).
Brody also in his books & films provides personal accounts from people who were actually at those residential ‘schools’ (as ’students’ of course). They are harrowing (to use that word once again). Statistics are certainly extremely useful, but not if they harden or blind us to what was – or is – actually happening to particular individuals. Was it Stalin who said something along the lines of “If you kill one person, it’s murder, whereas if you kill millions, it’s a mere statistic”?
Probably not. And if he did say it, it wasn’t an original thought.
Stalin didn’t seem to have any problems with killing one or a million.
Reflecting on the relationship between residential schools and TB in Canada September 2022:
I know there are those who continue to claim that the Residential School System was a well-intentioned “product of its time” (though perhaps a bit of an odd way to talk about a system that still existed in many places as recently as the 1990s). Possibly that might alleviate the pangs of conscience for those involved, but of course does not make the slightest bit of difference to the fate of those who suffered under the system, nor to those continuing to suffer from the ongoing intergenerational trauma.
And even those assertions of good intention are surely called into question when examining the historical records. Defensive responses might relegate physical and sexual abuse to “a few bad apples” (again, no help to those on the receiving end), but there are systemic issues such as the fact that in many cases the residents were not given proper nutrition, with insufficient and substandard food being provided, and even worse, in some cases there were nutritional experiments being done on the children
And it isn’t just residential schools; most of the church schools have records of horrific abuse. If you listen to people who went to Catholic schools, it was awful. I guess if they treat white kids so badly, it isn’t hard to believe they treated non-white kids even worse.
And I have read about some of the current religious schools, principally the ones in New Orleans, but I suppose this applies more broadly than that study. They are routinely abusing the kids in the name of discipline, and the stories are still horrific.
Churches need to get out of: (1) Schools; (2) Health care; (3) Social services such as adoptions; (4) Psychological counseling; and (5) politics. Not to mention anything else they involve themselves in that isn’t holding church services and serving wine and stale bread. All those things are better handled by governments, parents, and other institutions, and those other institutions are held accountable in a way the church isn’t. They have to follow regulations, hire qualified people, and report their income.
They probably shouldn’t be handing out the wine and stale bread either, unless they’ve instituted strict hygiene guidelines.
I suppose churches (and mosques and temples etc) could be involved in projects like creating housing for people who don’t have any? Food banks? Getting people to medical appointments? That kind of thing? Just nuts and bolts practical help that doesn’t connect with any kind of proselytizing? If, and it’s a big if, all parties could be sure there was no religious nudging. Kind of a Red Cross type of thing. The Red Cross was in effect secular right?
Google tells me it was never religious; the cross is via the Swiss flag.
Thank you, What A Maroon. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if it came from the pen of a good satirist, for it certainly puts its finger on the fact that the sheer enormity of mass maltreatment or mass deaths is oddly difficult to grasp, and reducing such matters solely to statistics, and arguments over statistics — reducing those matters to a manageable abstraction — can allow us to evade realities if we are not careful; and gives licence to those who pretend that after all things weren’t, or aren’t, really so bad in this ‘best of all possible worlds’ (to follow Ophelia’s lead and quote Leibniz) to pursue their claims. Those who suffered, or suffer, are reduced to an anonymous and amorphous mass — a sort of mass grave or black hole in the memory.
Ophelia @12:
I think Habitat for Humanity might be an example of that; I don’t hear anything about them proselytizing, but they do seem to have at least some religious underpinning.
But with all the soup kitchens, etc, that get busted for insisting on prayer, or including bibles in food baskets, I’m not sure most religions can manage to avoid pushing their religion. Voting, too. They’re not supposed to have anything religious up in a voting area, but I’ve never voted in a church that didn’t. Usually it was things like kids posters that only a surly curmudgeon could object to, right? (I don’t know – can women be curmudgeons? Because I can certainly object to that…it’s sneaking it in, that’s what it is.)
If they want to do things like Habitat or so forth, I’m all down with that, but will they do it without bringing Jesus with them? I’m not sure. I know most of the Christians I’ve known can’t, even the liberal ones. Maybe the Unitarians, but then, they’re not really Christians, right?
#Seanna @ 8:
It’s good to see that not everybody thought in the same way back in the 1920s (or the 17th, 18th & 19th centuries, for that matter); I am fed up with that excuse for people’s behaviour being trotted out.