Residential schools - 30 years later. . .
by Gilbert Oskaboose

Does the silence from Indian Country mean that it will be left to the social scientists and writers of the future to determine the impact of those infamous residential schools on our nations? Are we playing dead again? Can we at least make the connection between that dark chapter in our history and the dysfunctionalism in our communities today?

Think about it. Think about generations of children removed from their homes, their extended families, communities - with all that means - and plunked down into an alien, hostile environment. Consider yourself or your children placed in that situation. What would you do? What would they do?

Punished for speaking their own language, stripped of customs and traditional ways, often cold and hungry, frightened, lonely, turning on themselves and each other. . .

Conventional wisdom says that the will to survive is one of the strongest human feelings and that is exactly what those generations tried to do - survive. The strong survived with their fists. They became the schoolyard bullies who took the lion's share at mealtimes, took the best clothing, stole what they couldn't have. The weak survived by becoming the silent majority - unseen, unheard - or by becoming what the stronger ones called "kiss-asses," sucking up to the Christian priests and brothers, becoming altar boys, never doing anything to "rock the boat," never objecting, never complaining, always being "good boys," always doing exactly what they were told.

The silent majority is still here today, a lot older and none the wiser, still waiting for someone to do something for - or to them. The ones who survived through violence brought it home to their communities. Many became abusers. Many turned their violence back onto themselves - and died young, drunk, violently . . .

Both groups - and the "rugged individuals" in between - survived, or did they? . Some of them escaped into the army, some ran away, others were sent home as "unteachable." A very few were educated and made it into the "Canadian mainstream," as a tiny handful of doctors, nurses, teachers . . . Eventually the schools closed and they all went home, but to what?

One boy got home and was greeted - in Ojibway - by one of the "elders."

"Sorry, sir, he responded politely, I can't speak Indian."

"What! , The elder roared, what the hell kind of a little brown Whiteman are you, you can't speak Eendian?" The boy took that kind of bullshit until he was big enough that he could tell those elders - most of whom had spent their own lives drunk - to go to hell.

Recently those old-timers have sobered up, and with the new "born-again Indianism" infesting Indian Country, have become "wise and sacred elders," dispensing good, bad and irrelevant advice to younger generations who didn't know them back in the old days.

How intolerant they've become, how judgemental, and how soon they forget that it was their generation who stood by, blissfully intoxicated, hat in hat, while their children were taken away by priests and Indian agents. "Taked good care my kids, eh Fadder!"

What kind of parents do you think those generations of residential school "kids" made, when the time came for them to raise their own families, bearing in mind that the girls were raised by childless nuns and the boys by white men wearing "black dresses?" What do you think they knew about discipline when theirs had come in the form of a hard strap cut from a conveyor belt? What would they know about love when they were raised on abuse - sexual, physical, emotional, spiritual, cultural . . . How could they pass on dignity, pride and self-esteem, to paraphrase Sioux author Vine Deloia Jr., when they had been brainwashed, through alien textbooks, into believing their own ancestors were little more than a "lice-infested, canoe-toting, whiskey-drinking, horse-stealing, bead-coveting, root-gathering band of brigands, wandering around the deep woods, annoying decent god-fearing whites busy carving a new civilization out of a savage wilderness?"

The "residential school syndrome" didn't begin and end a long time ago. The bulk of the schools opened in the 1800's and remained open till the mid-nineteen Fifties and Sixties. The legacy of those institutions and what they did to the First Nations will be here for a long time to come. There are children not even born yet who will feel the effects of those schools - in the dysfunctionalism and in the attitudes of survivors and survivors' children who will raise them. That kind of brutal societal disruption and change can't be turned off like a light bulb.

It's not good enough to dismiss this as ancient history or as "water under the bridge," as one aging Blackrobe tried to do recently. We are human beings, not water flowing serenely under a bridge. It's what we were and what we've become.

How can we know where we're going if we don't have the vaguest understanding of where we've been?