Dramatization of Aboriginal Residential/Boarding Schools

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This is a dramatization (from the 1989 film "Where the Spirit Lives") of the system of Indian (in the sense of First Nations) Residential Schools praticed in Canada. Analogus policy was implemented in the United States through Indian Boarding schools.

This particular dramatization is set in the 1937. I think it's suitable as a thread starter simply because awareness of this element of history is almost non-existent in the US and limited in certain parts of Canada.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZkJhWTfuPw[/youtube]

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXO68LCB8kU&NR=1[/youtube]

the Living Spirit topic

I remember watching this important drama many years ago on CBC. Just recently the Federal government apologized for the apalling treatment these |first nations children suffered at the hands of sadistic teachers staffing these schools operated by religious orders.

The You Tube video was of poor quality, but fortunately the dialogue was hardly necessary.

Religion.
non-separation of religion and state.
lack of checks and balances.
"faith" be it in an institution or a god.
contracting out.
certainty that "our way" is better than "your way"
racism.

Residential schools barely touch the surface, but they are a good focus. I just don't like that it takes one's attention away from the fact that more non-natives were molested by priests than natives. The fact that residential schools no longer exist, give an artificial closure to the larger issue. The BS government apology gives even more fake closure to a still very current problem.

If any major company were to have the systemic abuse within it that the Catholic Church does, and was to take part in the practice of defending their accused employees in court, or worse yet, suing the victims, (using tax payer money remember, given that church's are tax-exempt) Continuing to hide information and documentation, transferring the offenders from corporate office to corporate office, to ensure that they don't get caught.

What do you think would happen?

Sorry, this strikes a very strong chord with me.... Personal experience.
Please do not think I'm taking away from the Residential School issue here, In no way is that my intent. I just want to point out that it is only a single cog on a large wheel. And a wheel that is still turning full tilt, having only lost a single cog.

I think the list above that i ran through... it comes down to the fact that humanity hasn't yet learned that there can be no "one right way" for anything.
Until we do.... We are doomed to a continuous bombardment of Residential School Tragedies.
And we are no where near understanding that. The truly educated are coming closer, but the rest, I'm afraid, are actually losing ground, because the power-elite finds that mentality so much more useful in maintaining control and order.

First Nation Australians were treated to the same treatment.
Full blooded aboriginal peoples were not considered as human beings until the late mid 1960's and mixed race children were made wards of the state and placed in similar 'boarding' schools where they were trained to be useful to the all white population [domestics, workers...].
The thinking behind this policy seems to have been driven by a belief that the 'black' could be trained out of them as the 'superior' white genes came to the fore.
My family has personal experience of this in my grandfathers generation.

peace j

This is a problem without a proper answer.

Here in Australia Aborigines like to talk about their "culture" and language.

But let's face it. Their "culture" is that of early stone age hunter-gatherers and their language is only spoken by 200 people in the whole world.

So should their children be raised in their "culture" or should they go to school and learn how to be citizens of the 21st century?

If you say "send them to school" then you are "destroying their heritage".

If you say "let them be raised tribally" then they will never get the proper education which would allow them to join mainstream Australia and the modern world.

Ever think about letting them decide for themselves?
Nope, guess not. Cause you talk about what they "should" do as if you (or anyone other then them, the individual, not the people as a whole) have a place to define what "should" be "done with them"

Self determination can only happen in an environment where choices are available.
Those choices must include where to go to school and what to believe.

Unfortunately, our current systems do not encourage this.

Wombat is making the point, I think, by writing culture as ""culture"" that there is no single australian Aboriginal culture as such and never has been- no common language, no single set of values, and almost no inter-tribal contact aside from very infrequent warfare resulting from very rare accidental encounters in a vast country with a tiny population of stone-age nomadic hunters with no settled homesites and no permanant buildings. ""Culture"', in the Aboriginal sense, is a 1970's left-wing construct.
And even the most casual look at the aussie media will reveal no shortage of taxpayer-funded "'Aboriginal"' bodies funded with the object of allowing positive life decisions to emerge...no amount of funding can overcome multi-generational welfare funded sloth, however, sadly.

Every culture in the world is heterogenous and evolving. ""Culture"" isn't a leftwing construct so much as a human construct, a theoretical fiction neccessary for making sense of the world. There were many inter-tribal alliances in pre-contact Australia.

Furthermore, try seeing your whole family abused by a horrible clerical system of ill-devised forced assimilation and avoid assimilation. Like most aspies, I'd probably go catonic after experiencing what indigeneous peoples in Australia, the US, and Canada had to go through thanks to Church-operated "educational" institutions.

It is a tragedy that the Truth and Reconcilliation Commission has become so politicized that it is in danger of having the people who were subjected to this policy die before their stories can be told. Not just the students, but the teachers as well.

Not every teacher in a Residential School was a sadist or a pedophile. Some of them were dedicated professionals, who truly believed that they were there to do good. We can lament their misguided idealism, but we cannot second guess their motives.

Not every child in a Residential School was ill-served. Many became important leaders in their communities, and in the country (not least being the current Lieutenant Governor of British Columbia).

What was the Government of Canada to do at the time? The Constitution clearly places responsibility for "Indians and land set aside for Indians" upon the feds. Given the vast geography over which First Nations communities were (and still are) found, given the nomadic way of life of some First Nations, putting a schoolteacher in every community would have been an impossible feat at the time. Leave them be? This would never have entered the political calculus at the time--and even today, First Nations education initiatives are about improving life chances for learners on reserve, not about confining them to their communities.

Residential schools were a viable mode of delivering services, and Churches were expected to be reliable agents for that delivery. Both proved tragically insufficient.

But the true scope of the tragedy is only more lately revealing itself: scores of sleeping or dead languages, and others with only a handful of fluent speakers. A generation of parents who learned no parenting skills from their parents, and have been unable to guide their own children's learning and upbringing (so eloquently described in Australia as, "The Lost Generation.") And these tragedies lie squarely at the feet of the Government. The policy of linguistic assimilation, and the policy of restraining family integration were deliberate and unnecessary policy choices whose causal link to today's communities are clear.

I likely did come off rather blunt towards Wombat in my reply. The key is that we think of children as either "property of the parents" or "property of the state" depending on our view.... I see it different, they are "property of themselves, and ONLY themselves"
The choices must be given to the children themselves.

Maybe not all sadists and pedophiles, no... But how many of those that weren't were fully aware of what was going on in the next room and did nothing about it?

But it's more than that, I don't care what they're motives were.... They believed that the way the natives lived was wrong, and it had to be remedied.
So they intended only the best for the children.
So such and such a person intended to go to work today... it didn't happen, but his motives were right.
I did go to work today, and I worked hard. Who has food on the table?

You can only educate if you don't brainwash. When you brainwash, it's not education, it's indoctrination.
You present multiple possibilities of anything that is not fact, and be clear that there is no truth, just opinion.
Or... don't cloud a child's mind with all this BS until they're old enough to understand the options.
Teach a kid to add and subtract.
Don't teach a kid to worship!
When they're old enough to differentiate between the objective and the subjective then can be taught such subjects.
That way... when they're older, they can with a clear and informed mind make reasonable choice for themselves.
An Educator must be someone who puts forward facts, free of bias. You can teach the facts about christianity without teaching christianity. the same goes for native spiritualism. You can even compare them in that framework. But the pious cannot be educators, because they cannot differentiate between the subjective and objective... why? because they were not taught it themselves, and were indoctrinated themselves.

This is not a chore just for educators.. nor is it one just for parents.. it's cooperation between the two that is required to achieve this.
Which is more at fault for residential schools? Well, the one had to push their way harder because the other one resisted, and because the other one resisted, the first had to push their way harder.
The question is who started it? Who dragged kids off to the schools?
I don't blame the government really, though indirectly they're responsible.
I blame not just the church, but the concept of religion as a whole, because it is the most dogmatic self-perpetuating set of beliefs for mutual self-destruction and brainwashing ever conceived.
Dawkins has it dead to rights ... they are Viruses of the Mind.
But thanks to the internet for what Susan Blackmore labels "horizontal memetic transmission" it's days are numbered as we enter into Aquarius, the age of free thought.

In Australia, black kids are being "'dragged off to the schools"" again, with the full cooperation of their parents, as major urban and rural boarding schools make places available to motivated kids whos parents wish to remove them from the two-weekly cycle of welfare-funded drugs and booze that is the norm in most Aboriginal townships. The process is very successful, just as it was when the movers and shakers in todays race-based ""Aboriginal Industry"" were educated in Church boarding schools many years ago.