Indian Residential Schools — The Untold Story of A Lifeboat for the Least of Society
By Michelle Stirling ©2023
Joanna Baron writes a compelling case in The Hub Canada to reject the criminalization of residential school denialism. She prefers that the court of public opinion and open, civil debate remain the forum for addressing those who challenge the ‘genocide’ narrative about Indian Residential Schools. Baron describes it: “Canada’s policy of residential schools was unmistakably evil and cruel, stripping children from their families, meaning-making traditions, and communities.”
This statement shows why open debate must continue on this topic. Like many Canadians, Ms. Baron is repeating what has been said in the press; the historical evidence shows a much different picture. There is a significant untold story.
Residential schools were often the only safe harbour for victims of dysfunctional families and the only home available to Indigenous orphans.
Contrary to common belief, children were not dragged from the arms of their parents by the RCMP or government agents, priests or nuns. Prior to 1920, no child was mandated to go to Indian Residential Schools; this legislation brought residential schools into line with public school education regulations but was rarely enforced. It only applied to Status Indians, not all Indigenous children. Families had to choose to enroll their child, sign an admission form, and the child had to pass a medical exam. The child had to be age 7 or older to be admitted.
Joanna Baron is correct that challenging the public narrative on Indian Residential Schools must not be criminalized, precisely because when we look at the Kimberly Murray report “Sacred Responsibility” we find errors, significant errors of fact. Kimberly Murray is the one who wants to silence dissenting voices like mine.
Let us review a key case study in the Murray report “Sacred Responsibility: Searching for the Missing Children and Unmarked Burials” to show you what I mean.
In the case of Marieyvonne Alaka Ukaliannuk, we are told in “Sacred Responsibility…” that she was ‘taken’ from her family at age 4. First of all, as an Inuit child, Marieyvonne was not subject to the Indian Act residential school attendance law. She was not required to attend. Secondly, the minimum age for enrollment was 7 years old, unless a child was orphaned, destitute, or from a family in distress. The public record shows that her mother last saw Marieyvonne when her father was holding her, as her mother was departing south for tuberculosis treatment in about 1963. Meaning, the 4-year-old Marieyvonne was likely given up for care as her father could not care for her or other children, without a maternal figure. TB treatments were typically months or years in length. This important information is not stated in the Marieyvonne story in Kimberly Murray’s report.
“The last time I saw her was when I was going on the plane for TB,” said Marieyvonne’s mother, Therese Ukaliannuk, in Inuktitut.[1]
Close up the end note of an Indian Residential School enrollment form outlining minimum age or conditions for enrollment.
The Kimberly Murray report states that Marieyvonne went to a residential school, when she actually went to a hostel with an associated day school. Reportedly she suffered a head injury there and was taken to a hospital further south for specialized care. The Kimberly Murray report says that Marieyvonne got Tuberculosis at the hospital, which is unlikely as TB is not contagious in short-term contact. Far more likely that Marieyvonne had latent TB, contracted from her infected mother, which manifested itself later. Small children are unable to mount an immune defence against TB. The report goes on to say the child later got meningitis and was transferred to facilities where this could be treated. TB meningitis was common in small children. Marieyvonne became a quadriplegic due to this infection, according to Kimberly Murray’s report. She was taken in by the charitable facility, Cecil Butters Memorial Hospital (Butters Centre) in Austin, Quebec, where she subsequently died at age 8 in 1967.
One should recall that prior to contemporary social services and universal health care (law enacted in 1966), families often gave up guardianship of children with long-term care needs to government or charitable homes, as they did not have the physical or financial means to care for them. In some cases, as best described in the PBS documentary “The Forgotten Plague,” a TB diagnosis was the ‘social kiss of death’ for an entire family — and even is today in northern communities where the stigma of a TB diagnosis leads people to avoid medical care, thus putting others at great risk. It would have been unlikely that the Ukaliannuk family could have cared for Marieyvonne as a paraplegic child in 1966 in Igloolik.
We are led to believe in the Kimberly Murray report that all of these actions related to Marieyvonne’s care were taken in some malicious or indifferent manner to the family, when it is more likely that once the child left the home, she was given up to the state because the family could not care for her. If anything, the state provided increasing levels of care for the child; sadly, this care took her farther and father from home. What was the alternative in the late 1960s?
Not found in the Kimberly Murray report is that one of Marieyvonne’s brothers, Bobbi, stated that his mother and father were alcoholics, blaming their grief and this addiction on his sister disappearing. He claimed that his family’s life was impacted by Indian Residential Schools (even though there is no record of either parent attending one).[2] Since Marieyvonne was enrolled at such a young age, 3 years below the minimum age, one may also ask if the home environment was unsafe for her then if alcohol was an issue in the family.
Her brother Bobbi carried her middle name ‘Alaka’ as his and he recounted in his interview the tragic lives of his family members, claiming that his sister had ‘disappeared’ from a residential school and was found murdered — which is not supported by the documented evidence, nor by the Kimberly Murray report.
As he recovered from cancer at the Ottawa Hospital, Bobbi took the opportunity to tell his personal story.
From an Ottawa cancer hospital statement in French [translated]: “Just before leaving hospital in May, he [Bobbi] wanted to tell his story, marked by homelessness, his parents’ alcoholism, the suicides of two of his brothers and the disappearance of his five-year-old sister from a residential school, who was later found murdered”
“…. My entire family was affected by residential schools, but people don’t know it,” says Ukaliannuk. “My father and mother became alcoholics because they didn’t know how to deal with the situation. They blamed each other for what happened to my older sister because she was simply missing… My mother learned of my sister’s grave only 50 years later. She is in Quebec.”
As shown above, Bobbi was living a family myth. There is no evidence that Marieyvonne was murdered. Thousands of families lost children in those early days to disease. Those losses did not impact the entire family as Bobbi insinuates about the impact on his own family of his sister’s care in far away hospitals.
In a few short hours of researching, independent researcher Nina Green found the above facts about Marieyvonne Ukaliannuk and her family, which dispute the narrative in the Kimberly Murray report. So, what does this say about the quality of research of this $70 million ‘Sacred Responsibility’ report? What does it say about Kimberly Murray’s urgent insistence to have existing public records become subject to Indigenous data sovereignty? What does it say about the proposed plan of Kimberly Murray to criminalize researchers and writers who question the ‘genocide’ narrative, and who show evidence that the ‘genocide’ narrative is not true?
As historian Robert Carney pointed out in his review of the 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal People’s report, many times children were enrolled by their parents in Indian Residential Schools so that their parents were free to go hunting or trapping, which was their gainful employment. Carney was the father of Mark Carney, former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor who was born in Fort Smith NWT where his father was a Catholic School administrator.
Robert Carney outlined in his work, in some cases residential school was cheaper for the family and more secure for the children, and certainly a refuge for orphans. He wrote of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (1996) “It would have been fair to acknowledge that many traditional [Indian Residential] boarding schools, in some cases well into the twentieth century, took in sick, dying, abandoned, orphaned, physically and mentally handicapped children, from newborns to late adolescents, as well as adults who asked for refuge and other forms of assistance.”
One need only read this sad story in Eric Bays’ book, “Indian Residential Schools: Another Picture.” Bays explains that at the Hudson’s Bay trading post at Albany, a father showed up saying there was no food in the family tent and that his wife was ill. The father then died. The Hudson’s Bay sent out men with food, only to find the family in a tent, the mother deceased with five children around her. A two-month-old baby was given up to a relative, the 16-year-old joined other relatives on a hunt, and the remaining three children, a boy and two girls, came to the residential school. During a flu epidemic, the youngest of the three died at the school.
This vignette is a repeating story through the history of Indian Residential Schools. Orphaned children. Families in distress. This also is an example of why many Indigenous people ‘know’ there are missing children from their communities — and why they feel certain the loss is directly associated with Indian Residential Schools.
In this one instance, we see that seven people vanished from the tribal community within days. The mother and father died. All but two children vanished; one too young to remember anything — the older 16-year-old likely traumatized at being suddenly orphaned. Were these parents given a proper burial in that community? Did anyone tend their graves? Are there markers to remember them by name? If not, it would be as if an entire family simply disappeared.
Would the orphaned 2-month-old have been told about their biological mother and siblings? What would the 16-year-old have remembered about his family, as he grew up? Just that his younger siblings vanished into an Indian Residential School and never came back. Typically, all Indian Residential School students with parents would have been brought home for summer holidays by the government. But with no surviving parents, the younger children could not have been sent home, so they remained at their new ‘home’ — the Indian Residential School. To the community, they became ‘missing children’ who never returned from Indian Residential Schools.
My decade of working on historical documentaries under the guidance of the late Dr. Hugh Dempsey, leads me to be a strong supporter of Indian Residential Schools — a historical realist, you might say. Dr. Dempsey was married to Pauline Gladstone, a successful Indian Residential School graduate, and his father-in-law was Senator James Gladstone, another successful graduate of Indian Residential Schools. Far from being an ‘apologist’ or ‘denier,’ I am one who recognizes that Indigenous people were facing a massive techno-cultural transition, and the Indian Residential Schools were intended to give the young people the tools to find a place in this new world. In today’s parlance, to ‘learn to code.’
In the story in The Hub Canada, Joanna Baron mistakenly repeats the lie that there was an “announcement of the detection of 215 human remains” found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. In fact, no remains have ever been found there to date. This is important information!
Those facts about student attendance could be verified because the schools, Indian Agents and government kept extremely accurate records about the students for both accounting purposes, related to government funding for family or school, and death reporting.
In effect, by allowing statements for compensation without cross-examination of any kind, this was a lack of due process that violates the constitutional principles of Section 11, as civil and criminal accusations have been made in public and in private sessions of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, without recourse for the accused to properly defend themselves. This has morphed into an entire nation — Canada — being subject to a public hanging for genocide when the evidence does not support these hearsay claims.
Canada is in the process of paying at least $60 billion in reparations to Indigenous people. It started with about $5 billion to those who attended Indian Residential Schools, then expanded to include claims for other forms of alleged abuse, such as foster care for children and unreliable drinking water on reserve. None of these claims has ever been subject to cross-examination or substantiating evidence beyond ipse dixit allegations of the aggrieved. This financial bonanza is due to the “Litigation Guidelines” of 2019, implemented by then Minister of Justice and Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould, days before she left office. These are, in effect, ‘reparations by stealth’ according to Dr. Thomas Flanagan.
As for Truth and Reconciliation, the process was also marred by bias. Witness the misleading and biased claims in the “School Days” statement on the kiosk that greeted incoming guests to TRC events.
As I described above, Indian Residential Schools served as orphanages and the equivalent of today’s “$10 a day daycare” back in the years when parents were still working as hunters and trappers. Contrary to the statement on the TRC kiosk, communities were never ‘devoid of children’ because only 1/3 of all eligible Status Indian children ever attended Indian Residential Schools — or 1/6th of all Indigenous children (which includes First Nations, Inuit and Metis). Parents had to sign their children up for enrollment; there was often a waiting list; and parents could and did withdraw their children as they saw fit.
It is true that of the 113 years of operation of Indian Residential Schools, some 400 children tragically died at school, typically due to TB or Influenza. A medical death certificate was issued. If a child died due to accident or injury, an inquest was held into the death. The religious facilities, as has been their custom throughout centuries, provided last rites, a proper funeral and burial, either at the local community church graveyard (sometimes on site of the school) or the child’s body was returned for burial at the home reserve.
Based on the foregoing, Canadians should be questioning the quality of research and the broad assumptions drawn by Kimberly Murray in her report. Much of the research is faulty and the facts are easily found in public documents.
Perhaps that is why Kimberly Murray is insistent in her report that Indigenous data sovereignty be a priority; that all records concerning Indigenous people be transferred and secured into Indigenous-only management.
Because the evidence in the historic record shows there was no cultural, nor was there a physical genocide at Indian Residential Schools.
In light of this, Canadians should be asking questions about the lack due process, dollar figures for compensation, the efforts to secure and conceal historical public documents, and whether the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) will be exploited for further unconstitutional claims like — ‘land back’ — based on a fictional genocide.
This article shows how a more informed perspective changes the story about Indian Residential Schools from one of being ‘unmistakably evil and cruel’ to that of having been a lifeboat for the least of society, in a time when there were no social safety nets of any kind. That many individuals did suffer is well known; less known is that many thrived and that Indian Residential Schools saved thousands of orphaned Indigenous children’s lives.
Baron is right that “The solution to ignorance or prejudice in a free society can never be censorship.”
This article shows why it is important for writers and researchers to have full access to historical records and to be free to write and present additional research.
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Michelle Stirling is a member of the Canadian Association of Journalists.
[1] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/mother-daughter-grave-search-1.3682042
