This paper will explore Native education in British North America, focusing on the structural disadvantages which Native children faced in a society whose goal was assimilation of Native people to white, Christian values, at the expense of their own cultures and languages. This was a paternalistic system at best, and highly racist and discriminatory at worst. The experience of Native children during the colonial period did not improve following Confederation: in fact it worsened, in the establishment first of Industrial Schools and then the Residential School, which became the dominant education institution. (Barman Hebert and McCaskill, 1986) Both institutions are notable for their philosophy of segregation of Native children from other Canadians as well as, especially in the Residential school, their own families and communities. Struggles by Native leaders in the later parts of the 20th century finally are moving to alter Canada's previous misguided educational goals and methodologies for transforming the Native peoples of the country into more ‘civilized' people. (McKegney, 2007; Stonechild, 2006)In a broad overview of the nature of education of children in pre-contact times David LeJong (1993) writes,
“….every human society has its own means of preparing children for adult participation in that society.
[...] (Gresko: 95) Gresko in fact contends that despite the feelings of authors such as Agnes Grant to the contrary, that the industrial and residential schools were not completely destructive. Instead, the pan-Native rights movement may have well had its origins in the struggles over prohibitions against the summer spiritual sun dances that Native peoples continued to perform and celebrate despite laws outlawing them throughout North America. (Gresko: 101-102) “Educational experience, in Canada as well as in the United States, increased the Indian's mobility and contacts with other groups, and resulted in “greater knowledge and concern about each other's character and interests, and a common sense of identity.” (Gresko: 102) Many of the subsequent leaders of the Native Rights movement of recent decades attended residential schools; as such, some argue in defense of the schools, that they did help raise the educational levels of Native people. [...]
[...] The original goal of the Industrial School in the West, following the 1885 Riel Rebellion, was to create an institution where Native children could be assimilated into the lower rungs of Canadian society; to provide a compliant, passive low paid work force for needed menial labor, both agricultural and industrial. (Titley: 55) The schools would be gendered: instruction in the morning and work training (or actual work) in the afternoon, with tasks divided along gender role lines. (Titley: 55) Their goal was also to reduce possibilities of resistance to white-Canadian hegemony. [...]
[...] At the point in Canadian social history when the government decided there should be compulsory primary education for all children, and that this educational system should be based on ethical, moral, and religious values and rote instruction, to create well disciplined children who would make good adult workers and complaisant citizens, the Industrial School model was not yet established. In the 1840s The Schools Act legalized corporal punishment as an aid in the learning process. (Contenta, 1993: 20) As Contenta writes, North American schooling up until the reform period introduced by Ryerson, was monitorial in nature, with rote instruction by a single teacher for hundreds of children who assigned teaching duties to children as well. [...]
[...] Education is historically and in the contemporary setting as much a battleground as any other area of institutional culture; the experience of native people in Canadian education attests to this. Works Cited Axelrod, Paul (1997) The Promise of Schooling: Education in Canada, 1800- 1914, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Barman, J., Hebert, and McCaskill, D.(1986) Indian Education in Canada. Vol. The Legacy. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press Campbell, Maria (1973) Half-Breed, Halifax: Formac Publishing Co., Ltd. Chartrand, Longan, T., and Daniels, J. [...]
[...] (Gresko: 89-90) The failure of these reserve day schools, a result of inability to teach European farming methods, led the Canadian government to propose the industrial boarding school and residential school; two models in use in the U.S. Stonechild maintains that the 19th century ideas of social Darwinism, advanced by Spencer, that different races had different genetic abilities, is part of the creation of the policies that propelled racism in European cultures in the North American educational context. (Stonechild: The new educational institutional goals were remove Indian youths from the tribal way of life and train them in the arts and industries of civilization.” (Gresko: 90) The goal was to create moral, self- supporting Christian citizens capable of amalgamating with the white community or of elevating the pagan and dependent reserve community.” (Gresko: 91) The stages important to completing this process included “baptism, communion, confirmation, and marriage .paralleling the apprenticeship in civilization of the secular sphere of the children's education.” (Gresko: 92) These are the stated goals of Father Hugonnard, a Roman Catholic educator given the role of running an industrial school in the Qu'Appelle Reserve area, as part of a land reserve treaty settlement in the 1870s. [...]
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