Lisa Cooke

Lisa Cooke in her TRU office.

Last week I spoke with Lisa Cooke, a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor at TRU in the department of Sociology and Anthropology. We spoke about many things including the history of the Indian Act, residential schools and her views on educations and self-government.

Here are a few excerpts from our conversation:

“The residential school system emerges out of the Indian Act which is a document that came into law in 1876 but what it was designed to do was consolidate all of the existing Indian laws, the laws that dealt with Indian peoples, so primarily it was responsible for identifying who was an Indian and who wasn’t and then figuring out from a colonial government’s point of view how to deal with the Indians and the term at the time was “deal with the Indian problem” and the approach was, the philosophy underscoring dealing with the Indian problem was how to get rid of Indians so the Indian Act’s goal was to get rid of Indians and make itself obsolete. So it started by registering Indians and determining who could be an Indian and who couldn’t and then it determined what kind of acts of Indianness or expressions of native culture would be permissible, mostly none. All in an attempt to assimilate into what they called the Canadian body politic so the Indian Act’s goal was to get rid of Indians. That it is still in existence and still in law today suggest that it has not been successful in its goal. Now the residential school system came for the missionary church school system and its main premise was to kill the Indian to save the child was the philosophy there so in attempts to turn all Indians, at the time in law you couldn’t be an Indian and a citizen of Canada, so to turn all Indians into good Canadian citizens the government felt that the best thing to do would be go for the kids. And so residential school were mandatory from the late 1800s up until 1920 when it became illegal not to send your children so this was an aggressive policy and assimilation was the goal. Many residential school survivors talk about how what they learned in residential school was not how to be white but how to be ashamed of being native and so we talk about ethnocide as the attempt to deliberately extinguish a culture. Residential schools can be thought of as a Canadian attempt, an aggressive violent attempt, at ethnocide”

“I am surprised in a classroom when my non-native have never heard of residential schools even because they have got some political traction in the last few years and we live in a place with a very prominent residential school, you can see it from just about anywhere.” 

“We’re not taught about residential school and we’re really not taught about why they came into being and the devastating effect that they had because what residential schools did, by taking away children from community, it had devastating effect of communities and this is happening this is happening in concert with a whole lot of other forces of dislocation and disruption that lead to a series of social and cultural breakdowns inside communities which really was the goal, was the goal of the Canadian government was to do that, the result being that the Canadian government determined that those communities weren’t suitable for children based on their terms of suitability and so the residential school system then became a catchment basin for children who couldn’t be cared for or the government determined wouldn’t be cared for in their home communities and the residential school system was in place for long enough in Canada that it was enough generations damage done that residential school system was just the catchment basin for the problems that it was itself creating which just continued the cycles that it was well established.”

“Creating spaces in our education system from the very beginning is critical where different versions of the story can be told and heard with equal legitimacy is key. I don’t think it’s acceptable that any young person grows up in Kamloops and doesn’t know that that’s a residential school and also doesn’t know the impacts of that residential school, the legacies that were left, the number of children, at the turn of the century it was reported that a full 50 per cent of children didn’t survive residential school, so we really need to understand the very dark ghosts that haunt the shadows in this still marginalized story even though it has gained some mainstream political traction in the last few years, I don’ think it has gained the recognition of the magnitude of not just the residential schools but the whole colonial process in Canada, so I’d say if we’re going to start to dismantle some of these bureaucracy that, though well intentioned by the people on the front lines, I think still flow out of some very hostile colonial bureaucratic structures and processes. If we’re going to start to dismantle those that I think education is critical, and not just of native of native but about native-non-native relations in this place we now know as Canada.”

“While the colonial government saw children as a key to the assimilation project, local communities see children as the next generation so the movements towards community and collected healing, reconfiguring new possibilities, new visions for communities, the education of children is critical and central to that and communities seem to be recognizing the importance of that. But I would say that education again while having some jurisdiction over education for bands for native children is key... those students who are going to be the ones in a positions of power need also to be educated about the complexities of the issues”

 “We colonize with practices. We colonize with violence and disease and policies but we also colonize with education and knowledge and who has the power produce what is legitimate knowledge...taught as official legitimate history so to take some control over what constitutes as educationable knowledge is a push back against that. Our First Nations people have been colonized by many means, textbooks and school systems being one of them, both residential school and what their non-native contemporaries are learning alongside them in the non-native schools that colonial relationships through knowledge so to challenge that is an act, an attempt of decolonization.” 

“I think its enormously significant in terms of cultural pride, in terms of self empowerment... this is about carving out spaces for alternative ways of knowing and living and believing and learning that would allow communities in its most ideal form to create spaces for the legitimization of the their forms of knowing.”

 “One of the things that does come up in self-government agreements when they are reached and signed and implemented is that is the result is the bureaucratization of local politics, local government in a way that allows for the self-governing government to deal effectively with whether is territorial, federal, provincial governmental levels so to be treated as an autonomous government, as a self governing politically autonomous unit to be treated as such, a certain structure is required of it otherwise it’s not taken seriously a politically autonomous unit, that in itself forces on the implementing community a certain bureaucratic structure that might very well not be reflective of its own forms of traditional government.”

“There’s always hope and I think back to the importance of education and the education of everybody, that the story of colonization in Canada is the story of Canada, everybody’s Canada and we are all implicated and we all need to know about it... all of those things are absolutely possible. Culture is always changing.”