Part 2

Educating Our Nation

After years of abuse and isolation at residential schools, First Nations communities are taking back control over education. Many see it as the key first step toward native self-government. In this series, we’ll examine how First Nation communities are transforming what was once a source of profound alienation and despair to a creator of pride, knowledge and confidence.

Today: Part 2: Learning to move past residential schools

Followed by: and Part 3: B.C. bands take educational control for brighter future.

Previously, Part 1: Community-run schools paving the way toward First Nations’ self-government

First Nations learning to move past residential schools

By Jenifer Norwell

Every time Janet Deneault steps into the Kamloops Residential School, it takes her back to when

she was nine years old. The red brick of the outer walls and the pastel blues and yellows of the

hallways and dormitories haven’t changed in the nearly 40 years since she was a student.

It took Deneault, 53, more than three decades to come back to the school where she lived for six years as a child. Now she returns to the school regularly to give tours as part of her job as a museum educator with the Secwepemc Museum. Though her work, she teaches students and visitors about what happened at the school and the effects it had on its students.

Starting in the 1870s, First Nations children were forced to attend government-funded schools,

usually located far away from their own communities. The schools themselves came out of the creation of the Indian Act in 1876. The act determined who was and was not an Indian and set out the rules of what First Nations people were allowed to do.

The first school in Kamloops opened in 1890 and was rebuilt in its current state after a fire in

1923. In the nearly 90 years before the school closed in 1977, the goal of the school was simple–

to assimilate First Nations children into mainstream society.

In reality, what the school did was further isolate First Nations children. Students were often subjected to all kinds of abuse. They were underfed and forced to do manual labour. Even when conditions were good, students weren’t taught the necessary skills to excel outside the school’s

walls.

Sitting in her office, tucked behind the museum in the old annex building that once housed the dormitories for senior students at the residential school, Deneault remembers what her time was like at the school.

“I had no idea about how to get down on my knees and scrub a floor, but I had to learn. I had to

do it,” she says.

She’s not the only one who suffered at the school. In a windowless room of the museum, posters about residential schools line a partition. The black and white eyes of children stare out at visitors as the words beside their faces explain how students were forced to work the land and were sometimes beaten or starved for their trouble.

Daniel Saul’s face is also on the walls of the museum. The grad photo of the manager of the Secwepemc Museum hangs next to his classmates. A small smile turns up the corners of his teenage mouth, but his experience at the school wasn’t positive. He attended the Kamloops Residential School for 10 years starting in Grade 3. During his time there, Saul lost his language and his close connection to his community, the Simpcw First Nation, north of Barriere.

“Even though we were surrounded by hundreds of kids, we were all very lonely because you’re lonesome for your family and we were very poor and they didn’t have a vehicle or anything like that to come all the time,” he says.

Looking out over the old school, Saul remembers the harsh treatment he suffered there.

“I was never beaten in my life until I got here,” he says.

Stories like Saul’s resonate with Lisa Cooke, a cultural anthropologist and assistant professor

at Thompson Rivers University in the department of Sociology and Anthropology. She’s spent much of her academic life studying First Nations people.

“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,”

says Cooke.

“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,” she says.

“At the turn of the century, it was reported that a full 50 per cent of children didn’t survive residential school,” says Cooke.

That’s information that some Canadians still don’t know. Cooke teaches many university students who have never heard of residential schools and the effects they’ve had on First Nations people.

The disconnection and abuse has led to issues that still affect First Nations communities today.

Intergenerational impacts like addictions and abuse continue to plague communities, but there seems to be hope that things will get better. That’s in part because of the same tool that caused the problems in the first place–education.

Many bands are now running schools that offer their children education on their own terms.

Across from the Kamloops Residential School building is the Sk’elep School of Excellence. The band-run school offers a balance of provincial curriculum and cultural teachings in a building that’s inspired by Secwepemc architecture.

And the Tk'emlups Indian Band in Kamloops isn’t the only First Nations community to move to this model. Across the province, First Nations bands are taking back control of education and that’s something that makes Cooke happy.

“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,” says Cooke.

“Having some jurisdiction over education for bands for Native children is key,” she says.

Deneault shares that view on education. Even with all she’s gone through at the Kamloops

Residential School, Deneault still puts her hope into the community-run education system to improve the lives of First Nations people.

“Most all Indian reserves now have education as their number one goal and that’s what I like, because it means rather than looking back at an era of what happened in education, they’re moving forward to better educate our children,” she says. “It’s very empowering.”