A "Horrific" First Nations Education Bill Is Stirring Up Memories of Residential Schools

Class of Mi'kmaq (Micmac) girls taken in the Shubenacadie Residential School, Schubenacadie, Nova Scotia, 1929. Photo via Flickr user lac-bac.
The year is 1920. Deputy superintendent general of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott—the most revered and reviled public figure in Canada—is taking the government’s aspirations for assimilation of the red man (as the native is callously known) to new lows. Scott’s strategy is a stranglehold on language and culture through re-education. His political strike is swift, insidious, and lethal. With the application of an amendment to the Indian Act, Scott makes it mandatory for aboriginal children aged six to fifteen to attend residential schools. Parents wishing to protect their children from this harbinger of desolation are threatened with prison terms. Participation is compulsory, resistance futile.

Thousands of children—150,000 when the gloomy statistics are eventually compiled—are stripped senselessly from their homes, forbidden from speaking native tongues or practicing tribal customs. These injustices prove a drop in the bucket of the atrocities to come over the decades that follow. The institutions—run by many a sadistic zealot from the Roman Catholic, Anglican and United Churches—are overcrowded. Many would argue they are uninhabitable. Disease runs rampant. Moral and ethical standards are grotesquely low. Mortality rates reach 30 percent in British Columbia, 50 in Alberta. At some schools, the death rate is an astronomical 60 percent. Sexual, physical and emotional abuse rules the day.

All told, the residential school system claims the lives of thousands of innocent native children. Many more souls than that are irreparably tainted. Worse, the curse proves familial, genetic even. Native men and women are forced to grapple with the ghosts of that ugly past for generations. And still, under current Canadian law, there is no recognition of First Nations language or culture in the context of education. Under the Indian Act, the lead suit, now Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Bernard Valcourt, continues to hold absolute authority over aboriginal education, including objectionable elements from the residential school era. That said, is it any wonder Bill C-33, the Conservative government’s contentious First Nations Control of First Nations Education Act, is causing an uproar among native groups?

Opponents of C-33 argue that the bill gives even more power to Valcourt and infringes on the treaty rights of aboriginals to control K-12 schooling. More importantly, the money the government is promising in hopes of ameliorating on-reserve education is reported to be a far cry from what is needed to effect change in native communities where, according to a 2011 census report, less than half of young adults graduated high school (to roughly 70% for off-reserve native men and women). Despite pressing needs, the cash would not start flowing until 2016 and the exact amount has yet to be confirmed, as the Harper government has only outlined a funding formula but no formal figure.

According to the Council of Canadians, which has expressed concern over the bill, the vast majority of First Nations from coast to coast are against C-33. In fact, the Assembly of Manitoba Chiefs representing 62 First Nations, the Chiefs of Ontario (133 First Nations), the BC Assembly of First Nations (203), the Assembly of the First Nations Quebec and Labrador (43) and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations (74) are all confirmed to be against the bill, which was put on hold in early May. Other First Nations organizations, like the Confederacy of Nations, who are said to be taking over the file and have been called a band of “rogue chiefs” by Valcourt, will be involved in negotiating a new deal – a plan that will be put into motion at a special chiefs assembly slated for May 27 in Ottawa.

The problem with that ideal is that, regardless of what happens at the meeting—where the Assembly of First Nations will also discuss new leadership following former national chief Shawn Atleo’s resignation over C-33—the bill is still likely to pass, in one form or another, by the start of summer. The Conservative government has said that if the AFN supports the bill, C-33 will go ahead as planned. “We have been clear that we introduced the legislation with the support of the Assembly of First Nations,” says Erica Meekes, press secretary for Minister Valcourt, “and we have been equally clear that the legislation will not proceed without their continuing support.”

For his part, Valcourt has already said that C-33 meets all of the five conditions outlined by the AFN and its chiefs at a meeting in December of last year. Those include: government engagement with First Nations; shared oversight; recognition of languages and culture; a statutory funding guarantee; and assurance that aboriginal communities can continue to exercise control over their education. Under Atleo’s leadership, the AFN completed an analysis of the bill that concluded C-33 was a “constructive and necessary step” to reforming aboriginal education. The stance has since shifted. AFN CEO Peter Dinsdale says: “the chiefs-in-asssembly are the ultimate authority for all decision-making so any outcomes of the special chiefs assembly… regarding Bill C-33 will represent the position and mandate of the Assembly of First Nations.”

Grand Chief Gordon Peters of the Association of Iroquois and Allied Indians, who holds the education portfolio for the Chiefs of Ontario, points out that even though Atleo vocally backed the bill and produced a rosy analysis, he nor the AFN has authority to formally support legislation on behalf of the 634 First Nation communities represented by the organization. The formal decision on C-33 will come from the chiefs of the assembly, he says. “There’s been a lot of confusion over this entire process, about who can do what and why things happened the way they did, why there was no information on any of these negotiations that took place, all of those things,” he says. “To move forward, we have to make a decision so we can put all of it to rest.”

Of the meeting itself, Chief Peters is realistic. He says that it’s important the assembly gets organized again in the wake of Atleo’s resignation and the fallout from C-33, but in terms of actual solutions, he is skeptical. The end goal, he believes, is to see that this file gets handled respectfully, regardless of the end result. “I think that’s the best we can get out of it. I don’t think anyone’s there to believe that something can be salvaged. All the things this bill intended to be able to do are not there. And that’s pretty sad. This bill is just horrific.”

Assuredly, Minister Valcourt is no Duncan Campbell Scott. The overt racism of old has been weaned out and replaced with tolerance for First Nations people. But, it seems evident that over the last hundred years, the government has made little progress in bridging the gap between the will of its legislators and the wants of native people on the education file. C-33 has, to the chagrin of both involved parties, dug up old resentments from the residential school era and beyond. Despite an apology from Stephen Harper in 2008, it has yet to be properly dealt with. The issue of educating native children to government standards is still a touchy subject. Old wounds bleed when the scars get picked at.