Native Canadian education experience in early Canadian history: The industrial school and its legacy in the residential school - Considering oppression and resistance.

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. [...]

[...] The goals of Native curriculum, native control of schools, introduction of native language, culture and so on in the educational curriculum in Canada is an outgrowth of these critiques, and of the reflection on the historical legacy of damage of the residential and industrial school model (of separation and streaming of native children), thus offering them little way of hope for being individual, autonomous and culturally proud children. The outcome, or damage, of the industrial/residential model of schooling, the origins of which lie in early Canadian policies towards Native peoples, has a long legacy and history up to the present. [...]