News of the mass grave of Indigenous children at a Kamloops residential school has yet again revealed the genocide on which the Canadian state is built. Governments have been quick to try to frame the issue as an accident of history that ended when residential school closed, but there’s still a university named after one of the architects of residential schools, Egerton Ryerson.
As Indigenous historian Howard Adams explained in his 1975 book Prison of Grass: Canada from a Native Point of View, Canada’s education system remains colonial by design—starting as Christian missionaries serving European empires to promote cultural genocide, and continuing as a secular education system that upholds white supremacy and industrial capitalism. Adams was part of the Red Power movement of the 1960-70s, and successive waves of Indigenous resistance have led to some reforms in the education system; today more Indigenous people live off reserve, have entered university, and helped change some of the content. But his overall perspective remains true today. Below are passages from Prison of Grass explaining the colonial forces behind residential school, the ongoing colonial nature of public education, and how education can be decolonized in both content and form to promote human liberation.
Colonization and missionaries
The part played by the priests in the colonization of the native people was as destructive as that played by the soldier and the fur trader. Missionaries were extremely effective in undermining the strength and spirit of the native society. Conversion to Christianity was a powerful force in the destructive of native culture and religion, and the imperialists fully understood how useful missionaries could be in subjugating colonized peoples.
Colonizing merchants and traders negotiated with Anglican and Catholic officials for the recruitment of missionaries for the colonies. This does not mean that the missionaries were aware of the specific function they served in the imperialist scheme. They were much more valuable in the service if they were naively dedicated to Christianizing the ‘heathens’ and remained ignorant of their political function. Their Christianizing zeal gave them tremendous strength and courage to overpower the native religion: they had a total commitment to their mission and did not hesitate to sacrifice their lives in their pursuit of converts. Once missionaries succeeded in getting native people to internalize Christian beliefs, they had also partially destroyed the nation’s traditional way of life and its vitality. The missionaries believed that God had commanded the clergy to save the souls of the heathen savages, so that conversion resulting in cultural genocide was regarded as a Christian service. By doing this, they served God. They also served as a powerful influence in spreading European culture and ideas of white supremacy. They maintained that Europeans had the right to rule over Indians because natives had only barbaric institutions; therefore, Indians should serve their natural masters and place themselves under the protection of the white man.
By the mid 17th century the Catholic and Anglican churches were seriously promoting colonization, with missionaries as their active agents. The Church of England envisioned a vast empire of millions of Anglican ‘savages’ who would be hostile to Spain; meanwhile, the Catholic Church was rapidly expanding its empire in New France. Many shareholders in the early colonizing companies were clergymen. In this way, religion and commerce went hand in hand…
In the early stages, Indians fought against Christianity because they understood that it was shattering the solidarity of their tribes, councils, and culture. However, missionaries did not give up easily: when verbal persuasion was ineffective, they did not hesitate to gain converts by more violent methods…
Missionaries came to the Canadian Northwest in the 19th century in the vanguard of industrialism. These missionaries penetrated native civilization to soften up Indians and Métis for the railroad builders and land companies. In 1842 the Oblate priests reached the Northwest and, in spite of initial rejection, they set up missions among the Cree people at Ile A la Crosse, Frog Lake, and Lac la Biche. The Cree suspected that these inquisitive priests were trying to foster friction between themselves and their friends since they worked so closely with the Hudson’s Bay Company, which gave the priests free transportation, canoes, interpreters, provisions, and houses inside the forts…
These missionaries constantly urged the federal government to establish a police force for the maintenance of imperial justice in the Northwest. It has been honestly stated that “when the police came, [the priests’] hands were ever present to help them” in suppressing the native people. During the struggle of 1885, the Reverend John McDougall and other missionaries took an active part in undercover work against the Indians and Métis, and their work as spies is well known among native people. In Third World liberation struggles, churches usually play an active role in fighting against the colonized people. These same churches and clergy have served colonialism and white supremacy in Canada for many centuries…
Schooling the Redman
The white-supremacist school with its repressive attitudes towards children is the source of the so-called native ‘school problem.’ The Métis and Indians with their supposed stupidity and laziness, their so-called lack of industry and ambition, and their apathy to a ‘progressive’ school system are not the problem. The school systematically and meticulously conditions natives to a state of inferiorization and colonization. It does this in a number of ways; most important, however, is that it teaches the language, literature, and history of the colonizer and thus forces the students to deny their language, culture, and essential being. The school and its teachers operate within typical racial stereotypes and coerce students into feeling ashamed and unworthy.
The majority of Métis and Indian students drop out of school because of their lack of interest in the academic subjects. They do not see any relation between the subjects taught in school and practical living in their community. It is more than a gap between curriculum and community; it is a gap between school and native society. In white society, education represents a child’s aspirations to occupation and success, where in native society education does not represent either of these: natives do not consider it a stepping-stone to employment. Although white children see their elders as lawyers, doctors, teachers, etc, and can realistically aspire to those models, native children do not see their elders in such roles. Indian children perceive those avenues as closed to them because they see their elders in occupations that require very little formal education; the teachers in their classrooms are white, so that even this occupation does not serve as a model for them.
A new economy would have to be established in the native society directly and immediately linked to the educational system before the school would have any credibility. School and economy must develop together. Any patchwork program not based on this principle is bound to fail. The study of ancient history, English literature, or advanced mathematics is meaningless to people who live on a day-to-day survival basis in a racially colonized situation: natives claim that school helps them in learning to read and white, but very little beyond that. The present school system is an institution of industrialism, from which native people have been excluded until recently, and has been imposed on top of the hunting and communal economy still basic to many native communities.
The problem of racism is always present in the schools, particularly with regard to native language. Many Métis and Indians have been forbidden to speak their native language by their teachers or by official policy. Twenty percent of those interviewed in a 1972 survey claimed they had been punished for using their native language at school. Others had been forbidden to speak their native language because teachers claimed these students were mocking them. This sort of teacher paranoia only serves to increase the cultural differences that exist between them and teachers…
As decolonization increases, both native parents and students will develop greater determination and pride in their heritage and nation and more confidence in their own ability and increased skills in community control. This will allow Indians and Métis to move towards a greater degree of native administration and instruction in the schools.
A great deal of the academic content now on the course of students must not only be de-emphasized but eliminated. Also, time spent in the culturally foreign and repressive classroom must be reduced and more time must be allotted to recreational, cultural and community projects outside the classroom. The present school system has to be more authentically related to native people and their way of life. Primary school students need to have native instructors who will teach them Métis and Indian history and culture in their native language. The severe, authoritarian student-teacher relationship at present the norm in the classroom must be altered so that students and teachers can relate to each other as human beings free from social roles and a hierarchy of authority…
The school is an agency of social and political control. This control is achieved through the public school teacher. During the course of educating a pupil the school requires him to subordinate himself to the teacher, who the child comes to regard as an authority in education. This authority figure wields control over the pupil very effectively through the use of the grading system. As a student progresses through his years of schooling, a belief in the rightness of authority is ingrained in him. When he reaches adulthood this respect for authority is readily transferred to the political administration of the state. Thus the patterns of behavior delineated by the ruling class authorities are achieved through the use of the public school teacher.
The manipulative methods of educators include making the student fearful of any behavior that deviates from the prescribed pattern. The examination method is a concrete illustration of the inculcation of this fear. Students are conditioned to be fearful of failing and not progressive through the system. Another art involves making the student think that his worth and well-being as a person are synonymous with his successful functioning in the school system.
Insecurity and fear are the most harmful effects of schooling, and yet they form the basis of schooling. Fear of failure is the pulse of school life: the fear of failure as a person, the more concrete fear of examinations, the fear of being considered stupid, the fear of not doing the proper thing, the fear of punishment, are all part of the school’s network of fears. The student has been made afraid, so that he may be more easily be controlled in his behavior. Anxiety is a tension that a person experiences within himself, for it stems from his personal conflicts and efforts for success. The fears imposed upon the child become part of the child’s nature. This is the process of colonization at work in the classroom…
Conformity means an excess of order, more order than is necessary. Order becomes excessive when it is used only for preserving the status quo. Conformity becomes harmful when it prevents people from developing an inner essence and when it stultifies creative energy and action. The presence of excessive conformity, authoritarianism, indoctrination, and fear in the school environment negates the autonomy and the independence of a student. The final product of such schooling is a condition of thorough colonization.
For education to be truly liberating, however, it cannot take place within the present institutions and bureaucracy. Also, it will require more than placing native elites in the oppressor’s position. The structures will have to be destroyed and new ones built that embody freedom and humanness as well as political power. Today, schooling is an agency of dehumanization and oppression. Scholars have pointed out very clearly that one of society’s problems today is schooling and all the myths that surround it. Schooling leads to alienation, subordination, and conformity. Instead of providing social mobility and serving as an equalizer for its citizens, it rigidly maintains the class system. In addition, it serves to legitimize the capitalist myths, and fails to provide any path to personal or political liberation. It is the dominant social institution in society today and unfortunately has become a serious impediment to personal fulfillment and liberation. A radical theory of educational reform is meaningful only if it is attached to the social relations of production. Under the present conditions schools can do little to improve society in general. However, they can become relevant if they are involved in the forces of decolonization.
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