Curiosity post 3: Obedience and Disobedience in Residential Schools

6 min readNov 11, 2020

Keeping on my theme of obedience, I will be researching the Canadian residential schools and the students inside of them. This includes the pros and cons of obeying the “teachers” and disobeying the “teachers” and just general information on this horrible Canadian history.

Pictured above is a statue of Sir John A Macdonald, the first prime minister of Canada, who is credited and highly respected for his formation of Canada. What often goes unnoticed however, is his awful treatment, and the architect of some of the major residential schools against the indigenous people of Canada. I'm here to talk about the troubles and stories of the indigenous people here in our country.

Residential schools

What are they? Residential schools are schools mandated by the Canadian government and were led by the churches to isolate indigenous children from their homes and force white culture upon them. One of the more infamous schools is St. Anne’s, located in Albany Island Ontario. There will be more on this school later. So how was obedience and disobedience handled in these torturous schools? Lets take a look.

Obedience

If you were one of the rare students who obeyed the rules put in place to rid you (the student) of your culture, language, families and assimilate you into the predominantly white euro-Canadian culture that ruled late 1800’s to late 1900’s in Canada, then congrats, no harm was done to you, other than the fact that you were stripped from your culture, language, family and everything you’ve ever known. Doing what was intended by the leaders of these schools was not beneficial to you, you lost everything from your past, you were given undermined education usually only up to grade 5, not the grade 5 that we know today, but one focused on manual labor, and agriculture. Sadly, a plethora of these kids became the final holder of knowledge in their families and could not pass down traditions in their families because they had learnt to forget their pasts and memories.

Disobedience

However, if you were a proud indigenous child, which most of them were; there was a major amount of punishments to be handed out if you: 1. Spoke in your native language, 2. acknowledged your indigenous past 3. Required to speak in French or English 4. forced haircut to seem more presentable 5. must partake in prayer of the religion studied at the school (often Christianity). If you broke any of these or other rules, you were subjected to punishment. As a side note, even if you did not break any of these rules, it was often the case that you would still be punished for being different a simple case of racism was nearly always evident in the residential schools.

Punishments

What you are about to read will make you uncomfortable, as it should. These are tales told by the aboriginal survivors who have been abused, raped and beaten. If you believe this to be too harsh to include, i would respectfully disagree. We must own up to our past and face the music to what we have done to these people, the shock you will face now is only a smidge of everything that the survivors have been through with these schools.

Hit with a strap (depicted below)/ruler/cat-o-ninetails (a cotton cord with 9 knitted thongs, used in old UK Military punishments)

*(A handmade strap once used to punish Indigenous children at St. Margaret’s Indian Residential School in Couchiching First Nation, Ont. Photo: Martha Troian/APTN)*

2. beaten by hand and or objects (piano leg was one I found to be very brutal)

3. Emotional Abuse

4. Sexual Abuse (rape)

5. Lack of cleanliness causing disease (elevated rate of tuberculosis in the schools compared to the general public)

6. Electric shocks for severe disobedience

7. If you threw up, the nuns would make you eat your throw up once again (this cycle continues until you do not throw it up once again)

8. Forced abortions

9. Strait jackets were used to tie students to their bed to make sexual abuse and physicsl abuse easier

10. St. Anne's was made famous for implementing an ELECTRIC CHAIR (yes that's as brutal as you think it is

These are just a few of the many punishments endured by these indigenous people, if you would like to see more, i recommend reading more about it, it opened my eyes on to how poorly we treated them and how we weren't really educated on this subject enough, it almost seems like japan where they erased the memories of WW2 from their textbooks.

Finally, This study was very beneficial for me as a Canadian, I learned a lot about the history of this country; but also learned that obedience does not always make you safe from danger like it did in Adolf Eichmann’s case. Eichmann was able to pin his mass role in the holocaust because he was simply obeying Hitler’s orders, these students obeyed, and were still beat and punished, taken away from their families, simply because they were not “normal” in the Christian communities eyes. I now have tremendous amounts of respect for the survivors of these schools and their bravery to share these stories. It has inspired me to not take my life for granted as easy just because we live in Canada, this country clearly has some issues that are swept under the rug. My next post may not touch on the subject of obedience, but it does touch on further genocide and i will see if there somehow is a tie into it, but i plan on educating myself on the Rwandan genocide. Thank you!

Sources

Barrera, Jorge. “The Horrors of St. Anne’s Residential School Revealed by Police Files.” CBCnews, CBC/Radio Canada, 29 Mar. 2018, newsinteractives.cbc.ca/longform/st-anne-residential-school-opp-documents.

Carleton, Sean. “John A. Macdonald Was the Real Architect of Residential Schools.” Thestar.com, 9 July 2017, www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2017/07/09/john-a-macdonald-was-the-real-architect-of-residential-schools.html.

College, Centennial. “Indian Residential School System.” Our Stories, ecampusontario.pressbooks.pub/indigstudies/chapter/chapter-1/.

Electric Chair Torture — Catholic School in Fort Albany, Ontario, canadiangenocide.nativeweb.org/photoelectricchair.html.

Forester, Brett. “St. Anne’s Indian Residential School Archives.” APTN News, 1 Nov. 2013, www.aptnnews.ca/tag/st-annes-indian-residential-school/.

“Punishment and Abuse.” Facing History and Ourselves, www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/chapter-4/punishment-and-abuse.

“The Residential School System.” Indigenousfoundations, indigenousfoundations.arts.ubc.ca/the_residential_school_system/.

Troian, Martha. “‘A Very Painful Artifact’: Strap Used at Residential School Moves from Family Home to Archives.” APTN News, 7 Feb. 2019, www.aptnnews.ca/national-news/a-very-painful-artifact-strap-used-at-residential-school-moves-from-family-home-to-archives/.

Young, Leslie. “Residential Schools Subjected Students to Disease, Abuse, Experiments: TRC Report.” Global News, Global News, 16 Dec. 2015, globalnews.ca/news/2402492/residential-schools-subjected-students-to-disease-abuse-experiments-trc-report/.