INSTRUCTIONS
The final assignment for this course is a term paper. This must be an argument-driven paper that answers an historical question by making, and supporting, an historical argument. In a word: this means that you must explain the historical circumstances that caused the event you’re examining.
Your paper should springboard off of course material, articulate a historical question, and develop an original historical argument. The difference between this paper and the others in the class is that the other assignment is about engaging course materials, this one must include at least two pieces of original research (academic articles or books) that further develop a theme from class.
The research paper must be 3-4 double-spaced, typed pages long (approximately 900-1,200 words) and written in standard academic prose – which means full sentences and structured with an introduction and conclusion.
You must submit your two sources for me to approve 24 hours before our week 12 class, explaining how you will use them - professor’s instruction
My topic: The article written by Tamara Starblanket- Suffer the little children. (file provided below)
Suffer the Little Children: Genocide, Indigenous Nations and the Canadian State 89The Horror | Chapter Two | THE HORROR Canada’s Forced Tranfer of Indigenous Children “I entered school when I was six. At 47, it took me some time forty years before I could talk about my experience in Residential School, and that was just the first step. And I have a number of steps to take before I can consider myself a whole person. —Residential School Survivor The residential school system was a program designed and implemented by the state and church (from 1883 to 1996)1 that utilized a destructive and vicious legal framework that invoked “doctrines of racial superiority”2 —a civilizing project— to forcibly remove Indigenous Peoples’ children from our Nations and ultimately from our lands and territories. Still, to this day, our children continue to be forcibly removed from our homes and families into the provincial child welfare systems with no end in sight.3 The devastation and effects of racist colonial violence enacted upon our Nations continue to be reflected through the poverty, incarceration rates, suicides, and addictions that we suffer from, among other devastations and the most important being our relationship to our lands and territories. | SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN90 The Goal of Complete Assimilation Canadian law and policy have been expressly geared toward bringing about the complete disappearance of Indigenous Nations, as such.4 By 1842, the Bagot Commission had declared that since “the Indians” were in an “uncivilized state,” they should be compelled to assimilate into the colonial society by such means as imposing Canada’s system of private property ownership and the forced transfer of children to residential facilities in which they could be compelled to view the world in eurocentric terms.5 As Duncan Campbell Scott later put it, “our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department.”6 The state goal was absorption into the “body politic.”7 In other words; the objective was to destroy our Original Nations. As John Milloy in A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879 to 1986 correctly contends, “the schools have been, arguably, the most damaging of the many elements of Canada’s colonization of this land’s original peoples and, as their consequences still affects the lives of [Indigenous Peoples] today, they remain so.”8 In 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (hereinafter RCAP Report) concluded that Canada’s various assimilation policies, together with the various laws authorizing their implementation, were “designed to move communities, and eventually all [Indian] Peoples, from their helpless ’savage’ state to one of self-reliant ‘civilization’ and thus to make in Canada but one community—a non-[Indian], Christian one,” and that, especially during Scott’s tenure, “education was ‘by far the most important of the many subdivisions of the most complicated Indian problem.’”9 John A. MacDonald assigned Nicholas Flood Davin the task of touring U.S.-designed boarding schools for Indigenous Peoples’ children.10 The Davin Report of 1879 was based on the following findings by U.S. government officials. Milloy writes, “Senior American officials who Davin visited, Carl Schurtz, the 91The Horror Secretary of the Interior, and E. A. Hayt, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, evinced the greatest confidence in the efficacy of the industrial school, which was, Davin was informed, “the principal feature of the policy known as that of ‘aggressive civilization,’ their policy of assimilation.”11 Davin then determined that day schools were a dismal failure “‘because the influence of the wigwam was stronger than the influence of the school’.”12 Davin’s report highlighted that children should be forcibly removed away from their families and be “‘kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions’—the residential school—where they would receive the ‘care of a mother’ and an education that would fit them for a life in a modernizing Canada.”13 It was recommended that children be removed from the “savage” influence of their parents and peoples and isolated in state-controlled residential school facilities. Based on Davin’s recommendations, John A. MacDonald stated to the House of Commons in 1883: …the first object is to make them better men, and, if possible, good Christian men by applying proper moral restraints, and appealing to the instinct for worship which is to be found in all nations, whether civilized or uncivilized….When the school is on the Reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that the Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men; so that, after keeping them a number | SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN92 of years away from parental influence until their education is finished, they will be able to go back to their band with the habits of mind, the education, the industry which they have learned at these schools….[emphasis added].14 Other policy statements are instructive. RCAP cited the Minister of Indian Affairs, Frank Oliver, who in 1908 held that education would “‘elevate the Indian from his condition of savagery’ and ‘make him a self-supporting member of the state, and eventually a citizen in good stan[d]ing’.”15 Scott affirmed that education was ‘indispensable’ for Indian communities and was necessary for without it “they ‘would produce an undesirable and often dangerous element in society’.”16 The intended “vision”17 of the government looked to the young “for a complete change of condition.”18 The RCAP elucidates the intent of the Canadian state: Only in the children could hope for the future reside, for only children could undergo “the transformation from the natural condition to that of civilization.” Adults could not join the march of progress. They could not be emancipated from their “present state of ignorance, superstition and helplessness”; they were “physically mentally and morally …unfitted to bear such a complete metamorphosis.”19 A “civilizing” boarding school education system held the greatest promise for the government’s goal. Elizabeth Furniss in Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake Residential School, cites the federal government’s position: If it were possible to gather in all the Indian children and retain them for a certain period, there would be produced a generation of English- 93The Horror speaking Indians, accustomed to the ways of civilized life, which might then be the dominant body among themselves, capable of holding its own with its white neighbours; and thus would be brought about a rapidly decreasing expenditure until the same should forever cease, and the Indian problem would be solved.20 Doctrines of racial superiority to address the “Indian problem” were codified into the Canadian state’s destructive colonial legal framework, which was really about overrunning and claiming our lands and resources. The articulation of the so- called problem and its solution was legislated into various laws and the Indian Department took as its goal “[t]ribal dissolution, to be pursued mainly through the corridors of residential schools.”21 The government invoked what Lemkin termed “laws of occupation”22 to forcibly transfer Indigenous Peoples’ children.23 The purpose was to terminate the “Indian problem” or the national identity of the Original Nations. The legislation itself demonstrates the intent that went into designing the laws that force the transfer of the children. Milloy, on the legislative domination, noted: “[B]ehind every school principal, matron, teacher, and staff member who worked in the school system, and behind each participating denomination, stood the Canadian government and the Department of Indian Affairs, which was symbolic of Canada’s self-imposed ‘responsibility’ for Aboriginal people set out in Section 91:24 of the British North America Act of 1867.”24 Early state social engineering tactics are found in the 1857 Act to Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes of the Province,25 the precursor to the Indian Act. The British North American Act of 1867 (BNA Act) “legalized” the domination and dehumanization of Indigenous Peoples and Nations.26 Section 18 of the BNA Act gave the colony of Canada power and authority to effect policies and programs that have led to genocide.27 The relevance of section 18 is that it affirms that Canada is a colony | SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN94 of Great Britain. Section 91(24) gave exclusive legislative authority (control and domination) to the federal government under: “Indians, and Lands reserved for Indians.”28 This colonial legislation entrenched in law the racist view that Indigenous Peoples were incapable of governing themselves and imposed the Indian Act of 1876.29 These colonial laws then forced the removal and compulsory attendance of Indigenous Peoples’ children into the residential school system.30 Another example of a genocidal colonial framework is the White Paper of 1969 that was an attempt to assimilate Indigenous Peoples into Canada.31 It is evident the government intent to “absorb” Indigenous Peoples into the colonial “body politic” has not changed over time.32 The White Paper is viewed as attempt to get rid of the Treaties by extinguishing the Treaty and Inherent rights of Indigenous Peoples.33 Colonial termination laws and policies are intended to continue to dominate and dehumanize until land issues are extinguished, and the Peoples assimilated or “digested”34 into the fabric of the state of Canada. Recall briefly that Prosecutor Neely in his opening statement against Heinrich Himmler declared that the fact that “these innocent children were abducted for the very purpose of being indoctrinated with Nazi ideology and brought up as ‘good’ Germans [served] to aggravate not mitigate the crime.”35 The Nazi government legislated into its framework laws intended to dominate and dehumanize the oppressed nations. The purpose of removing children to indoctrinate them as “good” Germans is similar to the language utilized by the Canadian government. Aptly clarified by David Wallace Adams, the residential school system became an “education for extinction”36 plan of coordinated government action. The vision of Canadian government officials and the “language in which it was couched, revealed what would have to be the essentially violent nature of the residential school system in its onslaught on [children].”37 The residential school system served to render Indigenous Peoples’ children completely vulnerable to the forcible assimilation and indoctrination. 95The Horror Forcible Transfer and Resistance The Canadian state legislated the forcible transfer of Indigenous Peoples’ children into residential institutions38 where the children were then severely traumatized and dehumanized by the collective experience of the serious bodily and mental harm. While the policy statements have been reviewed, it is important to note again that the residential institution was designed for the purpose of destruction via forced indoctrination. The RCAP Report outlines the instructions given to officials: Those strangers, the teachers and staff, were according to Hayter Reed, a senior member of the department in the 1890s, to employ “every effort…against anything calculated to keep fresh in the memories of the children habits and associations which it is one of the main objects of industrial education to obliterate.” Marching out from the schools, the children, effectively re-socialized, imbued [or indoctrinated] with the values of European culture, would be the vanguard of a magnificent metamorphosis: the ‘savage’ was to be made ‘civilized’, made fit to take up the privileges and responsibilities of citizenship [emphasis added] .39 The analysis proceeds to examine the ways in which Indigenous children as part of the government intent to “kill the Indian in the child”40 were conditioned to “think, speak and write like white men.”41 Laws of occupation that force the removal of Indigenous children sever the child from his or her national identity, family, community, land (Mother Earth), laws, government, kinship, language, and spirituality to indoctrinate and “absorb”42 him or her into the oppressor society. The intent to destroy the national identities | SUFFER THE LITTLE CHILDREN96 of the children is supported by policy statements or “general political doctrine”43 and enacted into the colonial laws that force the transfer by state agents such as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.44 In the case of the present day child welfare system, the children are removed in similar ways through state agents such as the police and child welfare workers. Parents, families, communities and Nations