Separate and Unequal

The hard questions soon followed: How were the people who rode their horses in chase of the buffalo going to be handled now that the herds were gone? How were they going to be moved out of the way of farmers and grain fields and railways? There were some futile attempts to turn aboriginals into farmers, as in a celebrated project run by the File Hills Indian agent between 1900 and 1932. But the main point, held with firm conviction in the colonial mind, was that the savages who followed false idols and roaming herds needed to be civilized and Christianized. Only then could they be rendered harmless. And so, in came the missionaries, the residential schools, the reserve system, and the treaties. It was a schizophrenic package, designed on the one hand to tame and assimilate and on the other to hide and segregate.

On an aluminum pole in front of the school at Peepeekisis, somewhat tattered by the wind, flaps a blue, white, green, and yellow flag—a sun rising over water. It is the flag of Treaty Four, signed in 1874. In exchange for most of southern Saskatchewan, the Cree of Peepeekisis and their three neighbouring tribes were given 345 square kilometres north of the meandering Qu’Appelle River, an area called File Hills. On these four reserves, in little knots of scattered houses, now live fewer than a thousand people, nearly half of whom are under the age of twenty. At the edge of the reserve lands, machinery dealerships and co-op stores in the white towns of Balcarres and Abernethy leave no doubt that this is farmland, and good farmland, prosperous with crops of hay, wheat, and canola. The reserve lands, however, are little farmed. Here and there a few cows or horses graze, a hayfield as likely as not leased to an outside farmer. For the most part, Indian territory in Saskatchewan remains as it has for centuries: prairie grass and bits of bush, land to wander across and do a bit of hunting; land to squint at when the sun is low on the horizon; land devoted not to industry but to replenishing the rhythms of the spirit. And for someone like Maurice Nokusis, land also to guard like a talisman. “We’ve got something they [non-natives] want. We have rightful title to it all. That’s what it’s all about. White society can’t grasp our bitterness.”

Two residential schools were established for the children of File Hills. A half hour’s drive to the south, a formidable stone Catholic church squats like a well-fed bishop on his throne still dominating the village of Lebret. An entranceway and a couple of outbuildings, including a healing centre, remain, but the ground upon which the Indian Industrial School once stood is now nothing but flat, hardpacked turf pocked with gopher holes and shards of concrete. In the other direction, a search for the Presbyterian (later United Church) File Hills Residential School leads along a winding dirt road, but no one seems quite sure of its exact location. Finally, an elderly man seated on his front step says, “Oh yes, just keep on until you reach the end of this road.” The end of the road turns out to be a private yard filled with fifteen dilapidated, broken-down cars. Just past the wreckage is a cairn, pink and grey stone and roughly six feet high. There is a plaque, dated 1939, that celebrates “the fiftieth anniversary of the File Hills Residential School and Christian service among the Indians.” Beyond the cairn, only the horizon and a windy emptiness.

As early as 1827, the Ojibwa who lived in the woodlands of central Ontario petitioned the government of Upper Canada for a school for their children. Subsequent to the commission established by Governor General Charles Bagot, the renowned educator Egerton Ryerson recommended setting up boarding schools not dissimilar to those in the school systems of Britain and the United States. In 1849, the first official residential school for aboriginal children was constructed at Alderville, near Peterborough. Shortly thereafter, in 1857, the parliament of the Province of Canada passed into law an “Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes.” It offered enfranchisement to Indian men who were of “good moral character,” able to read and write, and who renounced their Indian status. A decade later, in 1869, the parliament of the new Dominion of Canada passed the Gradual Enfranchisement Act.

As the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples observed, it was believed that the problems of aboriginal independence and savagery could be largely resolved by “taking children from their families at an early age and instilling the ways of the dominant society during 8 or 9 years of residential schooling far from home.” Roman Catholic, Anglican, Presbyterian, and Methodist churches saw the task of running the schools as a logical extension of their missionary work, and the government of the newly minted Dominion was only too happy to have them undertake it.

For the next century, grievances nursed by native families and former students tended to be kept private and out of the national spotlight. Indeed, the system was sometimes praised. Manitoba’s Elijah Harper, former member of Parliament and Meech Lake resistance hero, once told an interviewer that residential school was the best thing that had ever happened to him. It was, after all, the only schooling available for most native children, certainly if you came—as Harper did—from remote Red Sucker Lake. Yet in native communities a profound disjunction and unhappiness led to sporadic episodes of personal and communal depression, and sometimes to violence. Complaints about the schools began to trickle in during the early 1990s, and they soon became a flood—and a massive policy problem.

Phil Fontaine, National Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, inhabits a sunlit office just a stone’s throw from Parliament Hill in Ottawa. Entering his third term heading up the organization that represents 750,000 status Indians across Canada, he has secured his hold on the position he was first elected to in 1997, then lost to Quebec’s Matthew Coon Come in 2000, then regained in 2003. Fontaine was re-elected last summer. In 1990, as head of the provincial Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs, Fontaine was forty-six years old and toiling away in Winnipeg. One chilly October night he appeared on cbc Television’s The Journal and told interviewer Barbara Frum that thousands of aboriginal people had been abused at residential schools, and he was one of them. The dirty little secret was out.

During interviews over the next few weeks, Fontaine expanded on his confession, saying that much of the alcoholism, crime, lethargy, family violence, and a host of other social and economic problems in reserve communities could be traced back to people’s residential-school experiences. “Many of our people were students at residential schools and suffered abuses of many kinds,” he said. “Sexual abuse is just one kind. There’s physical abuse, there’s psychological abuse, denial, deprivation. Three, four generations share this . . . . We have to purge ourselves of this sad experience to enable us to have a clearer vision of the future and to go forward with some peace.”

It was a shot across the bow and a gutsy move for someone who harboured high political ambitions. At the time, victim confessions were not the surefire winners they have since become. But “that was the time of Mount Cashel,” the Newfoundland orphanage where rampant abuse of boys by the Catholic Christian Brothers led to court cases and massive settlements, he recalls now, “and I knew the situation for our people was far worse than even that.”

Fontaine asked for and received a meeting with the Roman Catholic archbishop of St. Boniface, but beyond that few plans were made and no certain strategy adopted. Nonetheless, his public disclosure started the ball rolling in ways Fontaine could never have predicted, much less orchestrated. By the mid-1990s, the first criminal charges were laid and a conviction was secured against Arthur Plint, an elderly former dormitory supervisor at a United Church-run school in British Columbia. Plint went to jail, and two dozen of his victims launched a lawsuit against the church and the federal government. “A few bad apples,” religious leaders protested. “Isolated incidents.” Still, one by one, newly emboldened native people stepped forward. “A similar thing happened to me,” became the common refrain. Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government attempted to restrict the blame, stressing that churches had operated and staffed the schools. The churches were stuck. They had nowhere near the resources necessary to handle the lawsuits that were sure to come.