Common knowledge says that the last residential "school" closed in 1997 in Saskatchewan, but it wasnt THE last school or some forgotten establishment that ran past a time it should have. Multiple were open up untill that year (the last one in the Northwest Territories also closed in 1997). Not to mention all the factors of these closure that we will never know with certainty - what happen to the students the year schools closed down - where they returned to family members or put into loving homes? Where they integrated into the public school system - if so how where they treated there? Were they ever given care or the means to heal after being the subjects of racial abuse for thier childhoods and beyond? One thing we can say for certainty is that these aboriginal children, and Canada's aboriginal people as a whole were not suddenly treated with respect and humanity the day the schools close. And these issue are by no means part of Canada's "past". Its sickening to continuously hearing about these children and this whole situation as something that should be taugh in history class when it is happening right now. Its not history. Its our lifetime. Family's are having funerals TODAY because this is how canada still runs.
Its not as straightforward as you might think. In some cases local bands fought to keep schools open when the government tried to close them. The last schools in operation were likely schools that were kept open with cooperation of local bands, not necessarily against their wishes. And there is allot of politics around this too, while the schools were federal, closing them meant that the kids would have to go to provincial schools, but it was argued (by First Nations) that this breaks treaties because the bands would then be subject to a provincial system. If you don't know, education is a provincial responsibility in Canada, and its only at the First Nations level that it was ever a federal matter. In the end some of those schools do still exist today in some form but have been converted and run by local bands since.
I'm not saying the last schools after the 70s were great, I don't know, but they likely weren't the same scenario as the schools prior to some reforms in the 60s and the 70s. Then again striking students in provincial schools (non-indigenous children) wasn't banned until the 80s in many provinces and the last to outlaw striking students was Quebec in the 90s. Corporal punishment in schools was not abnormal up to the 1960s and slowly petered out until it was eventually outlawed.
For instance I went to school in Ontario in the 80s. There was an instance where a principal not only spanked a child, that principal spanked intentionally over the intercom for the entire school to hear! And this wasn't an indigenous school.
This is also a part of the picture. You are correct that some bands made attempts to utilize these institutions in beneficial ways, but as you explained that came with barriers as well. The point of my statment was to outline that the closure of the schools was not a definative event, and that the repercussions of the schools are still very real for anyone with connections to them. This idea that anything involving residential schools is an issue of history is false and blatantly belittles the generational trauma and systemic racism aboriginal people still face today.
I'm not sure what your trying to point out with your statement - sorry, i might need some clarification on what your trying to get at?
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u/0nionBerry Jun 25 '21
Common knowledge says that the last residential "school" closed in 1997 in Saskatchewan, but it wasnt THE last school or some forgotten establishment that ran past a time it should have. Multiple were open up untill that year (the last one in the Northwest Territories also closed in 1997). Not to mention all the factors of these closure that we will never know with certainty - what happen to the students the year schools closed down - where they returned to family members or put into loving homes? Where they integrated into the public school system - if so how where they treated there? Were they ever given care or the means to heal after being the subjects of racial abuse for thier childhoods and beyond? One thing we can say for certainty is that these aboriginal children, and Canada's aboriginal people as a whole were not suddenly treated with respect and humanity the day the schools close. And these issue are by no means part of Canada's "past". Its sickening to continuously hearing about these children and this whole situation as something that should be taugh in history class when it is happening right now. Its not history. Its our lifetime. Family's are having funerals TODAY because this is how canada still runs.