Here's Where It Gets Interesting - Beyond the Mainland

Episode Date: June 30, 2023

Today, we are going to explore the Native boarding school systems in Canada, and in our 49th and 50th states, Alaska and Hawaii. The US wasn’t the only nation setting up mandatory residential schools for Indigenous populations, and in the beginning, many of these programs mirrored those of the US with a focus to “civilize” Indigenous children. We’re not referring to merely hundreds of students who were taken from their families, but hundreds of thousands spanning decades. With many students unable to return home and schools operating “in loco parentis,” it would be years before the truth of these atrocities would come to light.  Note: We would like to issue a content warning for this episode. Some parts of this episode may not be suitable for younger audiences. Hosted by: Sharon McMahon Executive Producer: Heather Jackson Audio Producer: Jenny Snyder Written and researched by: Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reid, and KariMarisa Anton Thank you to our guest K. Tsiannina Lomawaima and some of the music in this episode was composed by indigenous composer R. Carlos Nakai. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

As a Fizz member, you can look forward to free data, big savings on plans, and having your unused data roll over to the following month, every month. At Fizz, you always get more for your money. Terms and conditions for our different programs and policies apply. Details at Fizz.ca. Visa and OpenTable are dishing up something new. Get access to primetime dining reservations by adding your Visa Infinite Privilege Card to your OpenTable account. From there, you'll unlock first-come, first-served spots at select top restaurants when booking through OpenTable. Learn more at OpenTable.ca forward slash Visa Dining. Hello friends and welcome to episode 6 of our series, Taken, Native Boarding Schools in America.

Today's episode discusses some first-person survivor accounts, which may not be appropriate for all audiences. Gilles Petitquet, who attended the Pointe-Belue School in Quebec after it opened in 1960, yes, 1960, remembered that to the staff there, students were little more than walking numbers. He said, I remember that the first number that I had at the residential school was 95. I had that number 95 for a year. The second number was number four. I had it for a longer period of time. The third number was 56. I also kept it for a long time. We walked with the numbers on us. When you think of anyone as a number, when you withhold their name, you strip them of their humanity. Today, we're going to explore the native boarding school systems in Canada

and in our 49th and 50th states, Alaska and Hawaii. I'm Sharon McMahon, and here's where it gets interesting. where it gets interesting. The United States was not the only nation setting up mandatory residential schools for Indigenous people. The Canadian residential school system was based on the American boarding school system, and their practices, at least to start, mirrored ours. You can even hear the similarities in how they spoke about native communities and education. Sir John MacDonald, the first prime minister of Canada, told the House of Commons in 1883, 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 on myself as the head of the department that 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. The Mohawk Indian Residential School in Brantford, Ontario, was the first school to open in 1831. It was a religious-based school run by the Anglican Church. At one point in 1903, a fire tore through the campus, and instead of shutting it down, it was completely rebuilt. And there's evidence that suggests it was the school's students who were responsible for the construction of the new buildings. Officially, the school was closed down in 1970. And if that

date seems late to you, consider this. The Canadian residential school system, which is called residential rather than boarding, ran from 1831 until 1998. The math on that means that students were still attending these schools 25 years ago. Over 150,000 students lived in nearly 140 Canadian schools that were funded by the Canadian government. And as a side note, these government-funded schools in Canada may have been called residential schools and not boarding schools, but there's no difference to the meaning. These were still schools where students were forced to live full-time, taken away from their families. And like the American schools, their focus was to civilize Indigenous children. By 1920,

attendance was mandatory per the Canadian government's orders, and if parents refused to comply, they were arrested. Both the American and Canadian schools operated as en loco parentis, which is Latin for in place of parents. What this meant was that the school could make decisions for the students in place of their parents, even if the parents were not informed or did not agree. The school was the legal guardian of the child. The student got sick or was injured. It was the school who made the decisions about their care, not the parents. So in loco parentis, placed the responsibility of student welfare on the schools, but it also gave them carte blanche to put their own doctrine before the welfare of the students,

and often even at the expense of the students. In part, the residential school system is predicated on the idea that indigenous parents were unfit. They and their native cultures were considered inferior to the white Christian one. And so in order to save the children, they must be taken from their families and re-educated so subsequent generations would be less inferior. If the ultimate goal was the eradication of the Indian within, as General Pratt said, one way to ensure that they met the goal was to sterilize students, which schools could do because they operated in loco parentis. Records are still being gathered about the role of sterilization in Canadian residential schools, but some sources suggest that tubal

ligation was used as a measure to control willful or disobedient teens. They were then covered up or explained away as other minor procedures, and the physicians who performed the surgeries were paid top dollar for their services and their secrecy. Another shared element between the Canadian and American school systems was the inability of students to go home because of the distance and cost of travel. Children were sent to schools far away from their families, and many of them stayed for years, a decade or more, basically until they were considered done with their school career and vocational training. Then the school arranged for them to work a job in new locations, not back home to the reserve system, as it's called in Canada, which further isolated them from their families,

tribes, and cultures. In this regard, the schools on both sides of the border were wildly successful with their goal to break apart families and cut tribal ties, at immersing indigenous children into the predominant white Christian culture, at using them for manual labor, and due to their complete legal control over the students, at abusing their power over them. A residential school survivor remembered, I was abused by the supervisor. I believe I was six or seven years old at the time. I didn't know what was going on. His reward to me was a chocolate bar. Unfortunately, I talked about it after. I talked to one of the boys and it got back to him.

He gathered everybody up and he called me up. He didn't explain to anybody why he was punishing me. He laid me over a desk and he had a fishing rod and started to whip me. Every time I screamed, he told me to shut up. That sealed my lips, for it seemed like an eternity. Abuses like this and more continued in the schools for decades. In 1920, Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, reaffirmed Canada's stance towards its Indigenous population when he said that, our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic. Students and families used what little power they had to fight these abuses. Over the years,

37 different schools were set on fire, most by students who attempted to burn them to the ground. Two of these attempts were deadly, and children and staff died. Hundreds of students died at residential schools in Canada. Around 1990, an effort was started to find some of their remains at one of Canada's largest residential schools, Kamloops School, with ground-penetrating radar equipment. They found the remains of 200 children, one that appeared to be no older than three. Along with the recovery effort in the 1990s, Canada issued a general public inquiry into the relationship between the Indigenous people of Canada and the government. The Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was established, and in 1996, they published a 4,000-page report that called for sweeping changes to be made. It was similar

to the Merriam Report created in the United States in the 1930s. But where the Merriam Report had to rely solely on site visits for data, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples was also able to hold public hearings. Those hearings helped to create media attention as first and second generation survivors of Canadian residential schools came forward to tell their stories and demand action from the government. One woman who spoke about her experience, Elsie Paul, shared the tale of the generational schooling of her First Nations family. Raised by her grandparents, they named her Elsie after their own daughter, Elsie's aunt, who had died of an illness she caught at the residential school when she was just 10 years old. She said, by the time they let my grandparents know that she was very, very sick, they finally got a hold

of my grandparents and they went by boat, open boat from our community. And my grandfather went up and picked her up. Nothing was ever said about what she was sick from or what kind of illness she had, but she had lost so much weight and she was really, really ill she couldn't even walk. My grandfather had to carry her to the boat. Elsie's aunt died a few days later and the family, of course, was heartbroken. When Elsie grew to be school-aged, her grandparents refused to send her like they had their own daughters. Instead, they kept her hidden away on the days the roundups happened in their community. But when she was 10, Elsie was spotted and taken to the same residential school funded by the Canadian government and run by the Catholic nuns that her mother and aunt

attended. She shared details about her time there in the 1940s, saying, I remember being woken up by the nuns clapping their hands. That was our alarm. Without hesitation, without thinking, you dropped on your knees beside your bed and prayed. You get up, you go to the washroom, you get cleaned up, you get your care child, the child you're looking after, and you get her ready as well. Then we go into our classrooms. When you enter the classroom, you pray again. When you leave the classroom to go out for recess, you pray again. So every time we entered a room or left a room, we had to pray. That was the whole day. It was just ongoing, constant. You didn't mingle. You didn't talk until you were spoken to.

Assembly of First Nations, Inuit representatives, and religious organizations like the United Church of Canada and Roman Catholic entities all agreed to a final redress of the abuses of the Canadian residential school system. As part of that settlement, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was created. In 2008, Prime Minister Harper released a public statement of apology. He announced the implementation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to inform all Canadians about what happened in the residential schools by witnessing and documenting the truth of survivors, families, communities, and anyone personally affected by the schools. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, or TRC, took on the ambitious project of recording the history of residential schools in Canada. To do so, they traveled across Canada for six years,

interviewing people, throwing national events to publicize their work, educate the public, and shine a light on survivor stories. The Canadian government paid $72 million and shared over 5 million documents that the TRC used to compile their history. This work took place between 2007 and 2015 when the TRC held its final event and submitted its six-volume report, which contained 94 calls to action or ways to support reconciliation between Canada and its Indigenous population. In part of this report entitled, What We Have Learned, Principles of Truth and Reconciliation, signed by three commissioners, is the following powerful statement. Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group, and biological genocide is the destruction of the group's reproductive capacity. Genocide is the destruction of the group's reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement is restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted.

Spiritual practices are forbidden and objects of spiritual value are confiscated and destroyed. And most significantly to the issue at hand. Families are disrupted to prevent the transmission of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next. In its dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things. On September 30, 2021, Canada held its first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, which is now a National Day of Remembrance in honor of residential school survivors and their histories. The National Center for Truth and Reconciliation hasn't ended their work. It continues to research the impact that residential schools and policies had on the First Nations of Canada. They continue to gather survivor statements to complete the historic record and ensure accountability for the cruelties committed against Canada's Indigenous people.

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With 3,200 dairy farming families across Ontario sharing our love for milk, there's love in every glass. Dairy Farmers of Ontario. From our families to your table, everybody milk. Visit milk.org to learn more. On March 30, 1867, Russia signed a bill of sale that handed over the territory of Alaska to the United States. of Alaska to the United States. At less than two cents per acre, the U.S. gained about 370 million acres of wilderness, almost a third the size of the European Union, including 220 million acres that are now protected federal parks and wildlife refuges. But with the sale, Alaskan natives insisted that they never gave up their claims to the land they lived on,

and that the United States had purchased the right to make a deal with them, not with the Russians. When Russian explorers first landed on the Aleutian Islands in 1741, there were more than 17,000 people there. 17,000 people there. In mainland Alaska, there were around 100,000 people from various indigenous tribes, including the Inuit, Tlingit, and Athabascan tribes, among others. Many Russian settlers were cruel to the indigenous people. Local tribes recorded multiple stories of children who were held for ransom until a perceived debt was paid or to ensure that camps were not attacked. The Russians forced indigenous people into larger settlements in order to keep better track of them. People died of disease in the close quarters because they had no natural immunity to Russian illnesses. The settlers also forced indigenous tribes to relinquish bounty from their hunting,

thwarting their ability to provide adequate food for their own communities. This brutality meant that by 1867, when the U.S. acquired Alaska, there were only about 50,000 native Alaskans remaining on the mainland, and only around 1,500 left on the Aleutian Islands. That's half the indigenous population gone from Alaska, and over 91% of the population gone from the Aleutian Islands in just over 100 years. The schools that had sprung up in Alaska under the Russian Empire had been taught by Russian Orthodox priests who died off one by one. And when Russia left the picture, no one came to replace them. So between 1867 and 1884,

only one mission school operated in Alaska. The Department of Indian Affairs wrote to Congress that the children of those who learned to read and write in the Russian schools, deprived of schools by the neglect of the U.S. government, are left to grow up in ignorance. But the Purchase of Alaska opened the floodgates for American missionaries. In the late 1800s, a group of Presbyterians opened the first school for Native Alaskan children in an effort to instruct away their uncivilized ways and immerse them in European Christian culture. It wasn't long before boarding schools sprung up across the territory. At first, many of them, though supported financially by the U.S. government, were run by religious groups. But by the 1920s, the U.S. government had set up three vocational boarding schools for Native children in Alaska.

Class played an interesting role in Native Alaskan education. Some children were sent to the mainland to be educated at some of the larger, more premier boarding schools, to be educated at some of the larger, more premier boarding schools, like Sophie Titoff, who at age 12 was sent to the Carlisle Indian Boarding School via steamship and railroad. It was a month-long journey that she took alone at age 12. Carlisle put Sophie through the outings program, and in her fifth placement in 1905, she contracted tuberculosis and was returned by her host to the school where she died and was buried. Her remains weren't repatriated back to her Aleut descendants until 2021. 21. Sophie's story began and ended at the very start of the 20th century, but things changed very little over the years. I want to share the story of two boys who attended the Rangel Institute in Alaska in the 1950s. This is what student Jim had to say. My mother took us to the airport,

and our mom in Fairbanks left my younger brother and me there in the hands of the Bureau of Indian Affairs officials. The first thing that they did was they tied us together with other children with ropes at the Fairbanks airport. There were dozens of other children that were already tied there. I remember this so well, even though it happened 67 years ago. I can still recall some of the younger children as young as five were there. I remember this so well, even though it happened 67 years ago. I can still recall some of the younger children as young as five were there. I was eight, my brother was six, and we were thrust into just an alien situation where there was a lot of barking of orders. We were given yellow name tags to affix to our clothing that had our names or destination written on it,

it took almost half a day to get to Wrangell. The first thing they had us do was strip completely naked on this receiving room concrete floor. A lot of children did not understand the commands, and oftentimes in frustration, a lot of matrons ran over to these little guys and just kind of ripped their clothing off. We were all told to get in a line to get haircuts. These were done in a way that was kind of like being sheared. Ever see these videos of sheep being sheared? Well, that's what happened to us. We were given clothing. The government issued clothing with our numbers. Our number was on our clothing and on our bedding. Children who had difficult names were often referred to only by their number.

Fred's story reveals some of the other kinds of violence that occurred in these schools. He recalled, if we do the smallest thing, we would get punished, like our coat would be on the floor, or we were late getting up. On Saturday morning, the big kids would line up for spanking with their pants around their knees in the barber shop. They'd get, I think, 12 swats. I don't remember now, but it was lots. The big kids wouldn't cry, but as little ones, we get the same amount of spankings and we are all lined up beside them. The big ones could get spanking before the smaller ones, but we'd be crying before when we saw the big guys getting their spankings and we had to watch them. When it was our turn, the only good thing about that is the big boys could take our place if they wanted to. and a lot of them did. They took their second spanking. My brothers

would take two spankings for me. The levels of trauma here are breathtaking, and they barely scratched the surface of what daily life was like for children who were stolen from their homes and thrust into schools that broke and abused them in the name of civilizing them. The Indian Citizenship Act was signed into effect on June 2, 1924, and it granted citizenship to Native Americans born in the United States in Alaska, but that citizenship did not automatically come with the right to vote, which was left up to the states. The Alaska Territorial Legislature passed the Alaska Voters Literacy Act in 1925, and it required citizens in the Alaska Territory to speak and read English in order to vote.

It meant that the schools were the gatekeepers. Native Alaskans couldn't fully participate in their citizenship without first participating in the government-controlled education. Here is what Dr. Lomawema had to say. This is where it's crucial to understand the status of Native people prior to 1924. So Congress unilaterally granted, as if it was a boon, birthright citizenship to Native people in 1924. So Congress unilaterally granted, as if it was a boon, birthright citizenship to Native people in 1924. Before that, it was a very haphazard route to citizenship. And the majority of Native people were considered, legally speaking, wards of a federal guardian. Wards have no rights.

They did not have standing in a court of law. So you couldn't, for example, sue over maltreatment of your children. You had no standing for that. It wasn't until January 3rd, 1959, that President Eisenhower signed into law the statehood of Alaska. It was state number 49. It was state number 49, and it took six more years before the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated literacy test barriers that gave all Native Alaskans access to their voting rights. Boarding schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Affairs were beginning to close across the newly minted state, but they didn't all vanish. The Rangel Institute, for example, where Jim and Fred attended as boys in the 1950s, stayed open until 1975. Hawaii was annexed by the United States in 1898, but well before that, Native Hawaiian children like

the indigenous people on the U.S. mainland were subject to boarding school curriculum that sought to civilize them. The seven boarding schools on the islands were supported by the U.S. Civilizations Fund, and around 1820, the first round of missionaries were deployed by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions with the following objective. You are to aim at nothing short of covering those islands with fruitful fields and pleasant dwellings and schools and churches and of raising up a whole people to an elevated state of Christian civilization. Hawaii's Queen Regent, Ka'ahumanu, not knowing what was in store for her people as Europeans landed on her shores, encouraged families to send their children to the new schools, and they did, in droves. In 1821, about 200 students attended mission schools.

Three years later, that number had increased to 2,000. And less than a decade later, in 1830, over 41,000 students were enrolled. But even though the majority of Native Hawaiian children attended these mission schools, they had very little interest in converting to Christianity. At the mission school in the city of Hilo, Reverend Lyman, who served as principal, wrote a letter to his superiors on the mainland that said, We've been obliged during the whole year to mourn the absence of the converting and sanctifying influences of the Spirit. We're in the midst of a depraved and degraded people, a people who without a more

abundant outpouring of the spirit than has been here witnessed, will live and die heathens. But the tides changed in 1836 when the Hilo Boarding School was founded and served as a school-to-missionary pipeline for the Lahainaluna Seminary, a teaching school on Maui that trained young men to be preachers and missionaries. Essentially, Hilo boarding schools sent Native Hawaiian boys directly to a seminary so they could then return to schools and convert children as their instructors. The Hilo Charter of 1848 required teaching Native Hawaiian boys Christianity through giving them, quote, useful knowledge coupled with manual labor to promote good citizenship. So we're again seeing the coupling of education and manual labor, which was necessary to keep the schools up and running

with low costs. Hawaii's territorial period, which lasted from 1900 to 1959, was a time of cultural evolution for the island chain. The U.S. was preparing to transform it from its own sovereign nation into the 50th state, and this pressure on Native Hawaiians played out in hundreds of little ways, especially in the schools. Not only did they want the students to be Christian, they also wanted them to act like Americans. At Hilo Boarding School, administrators set up a pupil government where students monitored and judged each other's behaviors, doling out punishment to one another for various infractions. Eventually, the school's curriculum shifted, and by 1910, it was more of a mini

military base than a school. Students wore cadet uniforms, carried rifles, and participated in strict schedules that had them up and practicing drills before dawn each day. King Kamehameha III signed a Bill of Rights in the 1840s that shifted responsibility of education from missionaries who ran the boarding schools and on to the kingdom. Within a decade, over 200 public schools opened in Hawaii. He also established the Chief's Children's School, later renamed the Royal School for the purpose of training future Hawaiian leaders. It was his way to try and retain a sense of cultural heritage and tradition, even as Hawaii's sovereignty was waning. But things changed again by 1850. This too has parallels with what happened in Alaska

and on the mainland. Widespread disease was carried to the islands by merchants, and the Native population didn't have immunity. Native people were dying from contagious diseases like smallpox, tuberculosis, and typhoid. By 1890, the population of Native Hawaiians had dropped from over a million to under 40,000. And despite the fact that new public schools opened in the 1840s, the United States' political and economic pressure was reaching a boiling point. After the Hawaiian kingdom was overthrown in 1893, teaching and learning the native Hawaiian language was banned for nearly four generations. One woman recalled,

The forced assimilation in Hawaiian schools, both the seven federally funded boarding schools and even the public schools, came with a high price, the stifling of Native Hawaiian culture. By 1900, the educational curriculum was entirely American. Anything remotely Native Hawaiian was forbidden. The curriculum didn't just erase Hawaiian culture, it erased Hawaii's past and whitewashed its existence. Students learned that Hawaii's history began with the arrival of the white missionaries to the islands. A native Hawaiian student once said that every time she thought of her people in her home, she had a pang of regret that these islands were ever discovered. Like the residential schools, the public schools in Hawaii at the turn of the 20th

century mixed classroom education with manual labor. The goal was to produce a future workforce for the new white landowning class that was settling on the islands. The passage of the 1900 Hawaii Organic Act gave the white superintendent and all-white school board complete control over public school education. Princess Bernice Bishop, the last living descendant of King Kamehameha I, decided to leave a legacy that she hoped would benefit Native Hawaiians. She instructed in her will that two schools were to be built, one for boys and the other for girls, on 375,000 acres of the Hawaiian monarchy's ancestral land. As the Native Hawaiian population had declined by two-thirds in her lifetime, she stipulated in her will the schools should give preference of enrollment

to Native children. The Kamehameha School for Boys opened as a military school in 1888 and was recognized by the War Department as a military school in 1910. Vietnam veteran Shad Kane said, every one of us that went to Kamehameha schools was expected to join the military. The girls' school opened seven years later. Just like the school to missionary pipeline we talked about, these institutions functioned as a school to military pipeline for a time and likely contributed to the high numbers of Native Hawaiians who served in the U.S. military. Records actually show that some Native Hawaiians served as far back as the War of 1812, and again in the Civil War before the kingdom was overthrown and the islands were annexed by the U.S.

In 2003, a report concluded that Pacific Islanders, including Native Hawaiians, were 249% more likely to join the army than any other group. more likely to join the army than any other group. Indigenous people on and off the mainland showed up to serve the United States, even when their treatment at the hands of its government and people demonstrated cruelty and contempt. And yet they served and even died on behalf of a country that wanted little more than their land. Grassroots movements in the 1960s and 70s revitalized interest in reclaiming Hawaiian heritage and culture. Native Hawaiians worked to bring back their native language and practices such as hula. The response was so immense that it led to political changes and a shift in educational practices. In 1986, the ban on teaching the

Hawaiian language was lifted, but the ban had four generations to do its damage. Today, only around 2,000 people speak Hawaiian as their native language. The public educational system in Hawaii has made steps to try to repair the loss of their culture in classrooms by establishing the Hawaiian Studies Program and the Hawaiian Language Immersion Program. These educational changes are helping to mitigate the devastating loss of language and culture when Native Hawaiians had no control over the education of their children. As we've seen through this series, taking children away from their communities, their families, their faiths, their traditions, their language, their customs, is cultural genocide. The Kamehameha schools are still operating today, although the curriculum is no longer military-based.

Instead, it focuses on the exploration and celebration of Hawaiian heritage. We'll learn more next time. I'll see you then. Thank you to our guest scholar, Kate Cianina Lomaweimot, and to composer R. Carlos Nakai, a Native American musician who provided some of the music you heard in today's episode. Thank you for listening to Here's Where It Gets Interesting. I'm your host, Sharon McMahon. Our executive producer is Heather Jackson. Our audio producer is Jenny Snyder. And this episode is

written and researched by Sharon McMahon, Heather Jackson, Amy Watkin, Mandy Reed, and Kari Anton. Thanks so much for joining us. And if you enjoyed this episode, we would love to have you leave us a rating or review or to share on social media. All of those things help podcasters out so much. We'll see you again soon.