Re-Storying Education: Decolonizing Your Practice Using a Critical Lens

1

History

I want to get rid of the Indian problem... Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.

Duncan Campbell Scott¹

Playlist

How Civilization Has Tricked Us All, talk by Dr. Lyla June Johnston at Wisdom 2.0

Stolen Land, live performance by William Prince and Elisapie Isaac (song by Bruce Cockburn)

How to Steal a Canoe, music/poem video, by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Sky World, song by Bear Fox, dance performed by Teio Swathe

Performance for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, live performance with music from A Tribe Called Red

Scan this QR code for links to these videos.

Before we step into the work of decolonizing education, we need to look back at how we got to where we are today, to fully understand how we can repair the damage done. It is not new information that the Canadian government and education system has been devastatingly harmful for Indigenous people. In fact, starting in 1907 , report after report about this very topic has been written in the colonial society of this place known as Canada today. These reports have been explaining, discussing, and educating the government about the harms that have happened and continue to happen to Indigenous people within the education system.

The current public education system in Canada was built by white, colonial, settler society for white, colonial, settler society. The education system that is in place in Canada today was built by one of the key designers of the Indian Residential School System (IRSS)—Egerton Ryerson, the superintendent of education from 1844 to 1876. He is known as the father of the public education system, and he was responsible for introducing school boards, free elementary education for all, compulsory attendance, and the elementary, high school, and college levels of education. He, along with John A. Macdonald, wrote the blueprint for the IRSS. Ryerson, gathering information from the Bagot Report that addressed industrial schools being the better choice for Indigenous students, created a separate report for Macdonald in 1847 stating that Indigenous students needed to be minimally educated in reading, writing, and math, and that their schooling needed to focus on manual labour training and teaching of religion. Ryerson believed that teaching religion was the only way Indigenous people would be willing to give up their cultural ways. As a part of this report, it was also noted that day schools were not successful, and children needed to be taken out of their home communities to civilize them into settler society.²

Ryerson brought the model of labour schools to Canada, with the goal of total assimilation. The Indian Residential School System decimated Indigenous languages, separated Indigenous families, and allowed for rampant sexual abuse and harm to happen to children as young as five years old. These places they called schools also forcibly indoctrinated Indigenous children into the english language and religion that was not their own. Indian Residential Schools, along with governmental genocidal policies and laws, have destroyed Indigenous families, people, and culture.

This was just one of the many ways the Government of Canada tried to eliminate Indigenous peoples. I think of what the Government of Canada did to destroy Indigenous peoples as a one-thousand-piece puzzle. The IRSS is just one piece of that puzzle. You need each piece of the puzzle to see the whole picture. Learning about the history of colonization on this land and the people of this land is built on those pieces. Some days I feel like I have six hundred to seven hundred pieces of the puzzle and then I listen to something new or a new book comes out, and I find out that I only have about four hundred pieces. The number of pieces to the puzzle I have shifts and changes all the time because I am constantly learning new things and adding to my knowledge.

That is the process of the learning and unlearning journey. Your understanding will always fluctuate, but the goal is to continue to listen, learn, and build understanding. The hope is that change will happen for Indigenous students within the colonial education system, because in this moment, Indigenous peoples are surviving a cultural genocide that continues to happen to them within the current educational system. This chapter will help you see some of the many different ways Indigenous people have been harmed and continue to be harmed by colonization. You can think of it like death by a million paper cuts.

Reports on Indigenous Education in Canada

Part of the history of Indigenous education comes through reports that the government and Indigenous people have written, to show what is needed within the education system for things to get better for Indigenous students and communities. Unfortunately, with every new report, we can see that what the report is asking for sounds very familiar to a report that came before it. Let’s take a walk through some of the key reports that have been written over time to better understand some of the issues. Please take note that this is not an extensive list of reports; there are others. These are just a few that I believe are important for education and educators to know about.

Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba

and the Northwest Territories

One of the first official reports about the educational system’s failure to support Indigenous students in this place known as Canada today was the Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories of 1907, written by Dr. Peter Bryce, which later became a book called A National Crime.³ Bryce was trained as a doctor and was appointed the chief medical officer of the federal government’s Department of Indian Affairs in 1904. Part of Bryce’s work was to travel to Indian Residential Schools in Manitoba and the Northwest Territories. The schools had an extremely high death rate and Bryce was sent by the government to find out why.

Bryce’s report told the story of how the residential schools were failing and killing Indigenous students at an alarming rate. He found the schools were underfunded, under-staffed, and that 50 to 70 percent of students who attended the schools were dying. Bryce demanded that Indigenous children deserved a better education and a place where they were safe. He reported that the schools should be either shut down or funded properly. Because his report demanded better for Indigenous children, when Bryce brought it to the government, it was thrown out and he was forced to retire. The government did not want to address the issues at the Indian Residential Schools. To the contrary, in 1920, thirteen years after the report, Duncan Campbell Scott created a law that made it mandatory for all Indigenous children to attend Indian Residential Schools or day schools. If the children did not go to these schools, their parents would be thrown in jail and the children would be taken anyway.

I see the Report on the Indian Schools of Manitoba and the Northwest Territories as a key piece in identifying the assimilation process enacted by the Canadian government on Indigenous peoples. The government knew the schools were underfunded and children were dying, but it continued to remove children from Indigenous homes, sending them to places that were detrimental to their well-being and Indigeneity.

Hawthorn Report (A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada)

The next report that I believe is important is known as the Hawthorn Report, named for its editor, H.B. Hawthorn. The full name of the report, published in 1966, is A Survey of the Contemporary Indians of Canada: Economic, Political, Educational Needs and Policies.⁴ This report was requested by the federal Minister of Citizenship and Immigration in 1964. The University of British Columbia was asked to research and compile this report about the social, educational, and economic situation of Indigenous peoples across Canada to determine what support they needed from the government. This research included forty academics consulting with Indigenous peoples and groups across Canada. The report clearly stated that Indigenous peoples in Canada had been marginalized and disadvantaged by the Canadian governmental system, including harm, racism, and genocide from the Indian Residential School System. Within the report, Hawthorn concluded from the research that Indigenous peoples of Canada were citizens minus because of their unpreparedness to participate in western society. The Hawthorn Report called for Indigenous peoples to be treated like equal citizens of Canada and be provided with the resources for self-determination. Hawthorn used the term citizens plus as a way to address that Indigenous peoples needed to be provided opportunities to be equal citizens in Canadian society. Essentially, the report was saying that Indigenous people would be absorbed into society and lose their land rights. This report started the conversation in government that lead to the White Paper, which I will speak to in the next