Canada’s Catholic school scandal

Between the 1880s, when state coercion swelled a previously much smaller-scale system of similar institutions, and the last one closing in 1997, something like 150,000 children from Canada’s indigenous peoples (First Nations, Métis and Inuits) were effectively incarcerated in "residential schools". In the 1930s, this included one third of indigenous children.

Most of the schools were run by Catholic organisations; at the system’s height in 1931, 44 out of 81, though only a quarter of Canada’s population was Catholic and, unlike Ireland, it was not a Catholic state. In 1969 Canada’s federal government took control of all the schools, and the numbers in them then sharply declined.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission's 2015 report recorded 3,201 deaths of children in the schools — mostly from disease, but also malnutrition, fire, suicide and physical abuse. Records are said to be extremely patchy. The TRC’s chair, indigenous but a former judge and senator — no radical — argued that the real number must be many times higher.

Until the 1950s, death rates for children in the schools were, depending on various ways of calculating, between twice and four times as high as for children in Canada’s general population. As in Ireland, new discoveries about the burial of victims have sparked new waves of public awareness and debate.

In May 2021, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that scientific investigations at the grounds of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia had suggested the presence of over 200 unmarked graves.

Since then, other similar discoveries have been announced, with several thousand possible graves identified.

Just under a year ago, in Solidarity 657, I told the story of Ireland’s “mother and baby homes”, run mostly by the Catholic Church, in which thousands of children died and many more were abused. Canada had a similar decades-long trail of murder and abuse to which the Catholic Church was central.

In a world where religious authoritarianism remains a potent and in some areas growing force, and also where indigenous rights struggles face a growing right-wing backlash, the Canadian story is important to know.

In October 2022 Canada’s House of Commons voted unanimously for a motion from an MP of the social-democratic NDP party to recognise the state-backed “residential school” system, in which churches imprisoned and brutalised many tens of thousands of children over more than a century — up to the 1990s — as a form of genocide, trying to destroy the collective being of a people. The Commons vote came after the Pope, visiting Canada in August, used the “genocide” word too.

Yet since that vote, right-wing Catholics have been central to a wave of attempting to play down the seriousness of what was done to indigenous children. Part of the context is a broader rise of the radical right in Canada.

The “Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) set up by the Canadian government in 2008 summarised the historical context of the schools in its 2015 report:

“For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’”

Indigenous people and supporters have objected to the qualifier “cultural”.

As in Ireland, it took years of campaigning to drag more elements of the truth of what happened in Canada’s residential schools into the light. Much remains to be uncovered, but the overall picture seems clear.

The general treatment of the children was similar to Catholic carceral institutions in Ireland — brutal discipline, poor diet and malnutrition, constant verbal assaults, frequent violence, and widespread sexual abuse – but with the extra toxic infusion of virulent racism. As one indigenous writer put it, “children [were] constantly told they were savages, beasts, pagans, heathens, and worse”; and of course this shaped the viciousness of their treatment. Children were often physically assaulted, for instance, for speaking their native language or trying to practise their family’s religion.

Testimony given by survivors to the TRC includes numerous heart-breaking and sometimes extremely disturbing stories, from healthy children knowingly placed in dormitories with those suffering from serious infection diseases to hungry children stealing food from livestock. It is established fact that at one school run by the Catholic church, St Anne’s in Ontario, children were tortured in a home-made electric chair.

Unsurprisingly, inmates learnt little. They were not supposed to. Hard physical labour and Christian indoctrination were the mainstays. Canadian police enforced attendance at these schools and prevented escapes.

Until well into the 19th century, indigenous peoples in large parts of what is now Canada maintained a substantial degree of independence from European settler authorities. Although interacting with European traders, manufacturers and officials from a position of weakness, they were to a large extent able to maintain control of their own land and labour. This changed as spreading colonial settlement and capitalist development shifted the colonial governments into a more malignant policy, as summarised in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission quote above.

Part of this was seeking to destroy connections between new generations of indigenous children and their communities (and arguably to reduce the indigenous population by exacerbating the harshness of its social conditions through state coercion). The Canadian prime minister who oversaw a great expansion of the residential school system in the 1880s declared that “in order to educate the children properly we must separate them from their families. Some people may say this is hard, but if we want to civilise them we must do that.”

Canadian right-wingers, including prominent politicians, journalists and church figures, have engaged in denialism, claiming supposed hysteria about “mass graves” — in fact few people have used this terminology – and using lack of clear facts about who is buried where to try to distract from and distort the overall reality of what took place in the schools and what they represented.

They have seized on some excavations which have not found remains. Attempts at mass exhumations have not taken place, and indigenous people and organisations are divided on whether they should. But in terms of the basic picture, it is well-established from many angles that a very large number of children died in the schools, and that this was the sharp end of a much wider culture — or rather system — of abuse.

Meanwhile while Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government condemns the history and engages in a rhetoric of indigenous rights, its concrete policies are different — failing to address the continued removal of indigenous children from their families, for instance; and siding with oil companies and developers against indigenous communities. It has not even implemented a large number of the TRC’s recommendations.

The continued struggle of Canada’s indigenous people is part of a wider global struggle by indigenous peoples to assert their rights – from Australia to India, from China to the US.