It seems that every few days another story breaks about the legacy of Canada’s residential schools. As The Wild Hunt reported earlier this week, members of the Ktunaxa Nation released a statement on the discovery of 182 graves found near the site of St. Eugene’s Mission School in Cranbrook, British Columbia; this follows similar statements by the Cowessess First Nation and Tk’emlúps te Secwe̓pemc First Nation in June, who found large numbers of unmarked graves at other residential schools throughout Canada.
These residential schools were part of a collaboration between the Canadian state and the Catholic Church over the course of more than a century. Between the 1870s and the late 1990s, more than 139 residential schools operated in the country, reaching their height in the 1930s when roughly 80 schools operated concurrently. (Some operated without federal support and so were not considered part of the 139 regularly documented.)
The Indian Residential School hockey team of Maliotenam, Quebec, circa 1950 [Wikimedia Commons, CC 2.0]
First Nations children were required to attend school under the Indian Act, and for many children, there was no option besides a boarding school. Administrators deliberately placed the residential schools far from the children’s families and home reserves, making it difficult for parents or other relatives to visit their children – a situation made worse by the “pass system” in effect that meant Indigenous people had no freedom of movement unless approved by an agent of the state.
In practice, this meant that, for over a century, Indigenous Canadian children were forcibly removed from their families, their cultures, their languages, and their home religions. They were forced to adopt the languages of the white Canadians who had colonized them, along with their culture and their Christianity. The Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission famously described the effects of the residential school system in their 2008 report as tantamount to cultural genocide.
The public is coming to understand, too, just how many of these children died in these schools – more than 4,100 are known so far, a staggering percentage of the approximately 150,000 Indigenous children who attended the schools throughout their history. The evidence suggests most died of disease or malnutrition caused by the poor living conditions in the schools.
Vancouver Art Gallery community memorial to the 215 buried children discovered at Kamloops Residential School. The main memorial consists of 215 pairs of children’s shoes, along with various accessories including teddy bears, books, images, and flowers, June 6 2021 [Frozemint, Wikimedia Commons, CC 4.0]
It is important to state the reality of this situation plainly: for more than a century, the Canadian government and the Catholic Church ran schools that forcibly removed children from their families with the express intention of divorcing those children from ever being part of their original culture again. In the process, they sometimes killed as many as one in 20 of those children and buried them, nameless, in shallow graves.
In TWH’s coverage, Chief Jason Louie of the Lower Kootenay Band of the Ktunaxa Nation said this: “We were robbed of future elders.”
I sat with these words for a long time, thinking through their implications. Church and state robbed the nation of its elders, the parents of their children, the children of their lives. And all of this in the service of white racial supremacy and Christian religious supremacy.
Even Justin Trudeau – whose own record of Indigenous policy is checkered at best – describes the discovery of the bodies of these children as “a shameful reminder of the systemic racism, discrimination, and injustice that Indigenous peoples have faced.” So would anyone with a human heart.
Right?
Students at the Blue Quills Residential School, Alberta, Canada, c. 1940 [public domain]
On Thursday, The American Conservative published an opinion piece by Declan Leary, an associate editor at the publication, with the headline “The Meaning of the Native Graves.” It bore the subtitle, “They’re Good, Actually,” written in the tone one might use to describe how brussels sprouts are, believe it or not, quite tasty if cooked properly.
Leary’s thesis is straightforward: the fault belongs with the state, not the church. “Had the Canadian government,” he writes, “which in word endorsed the Christian mission of the residential schools, upheld that word in deed by providing the funding which Church authorities repeatedly said was necessary for adequate operation, living conditions could have been improved and a great many premature deaths avoided.” But the dead children themselves are not a true cause for concern: he states that mortality was generally high then, especially among the Indigenous, and when people die, we bury them. “There is nothing inherently scandalous about this,” he says.
The mission of the residential schools, however – especially in making good Christians out of these Indigenous children – more than compensates for the dead in his eyes:
Whatever good was present at the Ossossané ossuary—where those who had not yet encountered the fullness of Truth honored their dead as best they knew how—is increased a thousandfold in the cemeteries of the residential schools, where baptized Christians were given Christian burials. Whatever natural good was present in the piety and community of the pagan past is an infinitesimal fraction of the grace rendered unto those pagans’ descendants who have been received into the Church of Christ. Whatever sacrifices were exacted in pursuit of that grace—the suffocation of a noble pagan culture; an increase in disease and bodily death due to government negligence; even the sundering of natural families—is worth it.
It must be, else two millennia of Christian civilization, in which oceans have been bridged, wars waged, continents conquered, and the lives of a million Jean de Brébeufs given in service to the Lord’s final commandment—Going therefore, teach ye all nations; baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have commanded you: and behold I am with you all days, even to the consummation of the world.—all has been for nought.
I sat with these paragraphs for a long time, just as I sat with Chief Louie’s words about his peoples’ missing elders. As one might expect, I was furious: Leary’s argument would apply just as readily to my own childhood, or to my covenmates’ children, not to mention Indigenous children throughout colonized lands today. And beneath my fury, I was horrified – because, under the rules of Leary’s religion, he is quite correct in this argument. When nothing else matters, really, besides salvation in the eyes of the Christian god, then all manner of behavior – the breaking of families, the destruction of history and culture, the death of children – is justified, so long as it saves a few more souls for Christ.
The message, implicitly, is that for Leary and those who agree with his reading of history, Canada could re-institute the residential schools policy tomorrow, and so long as it got the appropriate share of government funding, it would be a moral action.
It must be as he says, because if it is not, one would have to reckon with the idea that a long accounting of war, death, and human suffering in the name of Christian evangelism might not be justified at all – that perhaps Christian missionaries are not the heroes of history after all, that perhaps those “noble pagan cultures” would have been better off left to themselves. That all this blood and suffering was, in fact, for nought.
It has been hard enough for the Canadian state to accept the evils done by its policies toward the First Nations over the centuries; how much harder it must be to accept that these evils were not done for the greater glory of the divine but simply in the service of empire and white supremacy? But that acceptance is the first, necessary step toward making any kind of restitution toward the Indigenous people who suffered under the treatment of colonizers.
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