The Two Stories of Residential Schools

Our local museum is working with survivors and their families on an upcoming exhibit dealing with Indian Residential Schools. It’s about time. Their tragic experience needs telling to the broadest possible public. But it seems to me that there are two tales in the Residential School saga… there is the terrible story of the victims and their families but there is also an important story behind the actions of the perpetrators.

Folks who specialize in such things generally agree that in order to avoid the repetition of crimes, offenders should be encouraged to understand the nature and implications of their offences. They should also understand the underlying motivation behind their offences. With the understanding of their impact they can experience true remorse for the harm that they have done to others. With the understanding of their own deeper motivations they can recognize the patterns of wrong thinking and bad behaviour that led to the offence and they can equip themselves to avoid similar patterns and conditions in the future.

The Indian Residential Schools were morally and, too frequently, criminally offensive and yet, so far as I have seen, the perpetrators, (which is to say every one of us who is not a victim,) have not yet been called upon to examine the underlying thought processes that led to the original offence. What kind of pretzel logic, what sort of twisted rationalizations led a group of professedly “caring people” to believe that they had the right to take away other peoples’ children? What philosophy, what beliefs led to this cruelly destructive form of cultural arrogance? It seems to me that these are important questions that should be explored in any retrospective look at this terrible period. If the fundamental assumptions and motivations behind the offence are not exposed and addressed then there is a danger that the behaviour will be repeated into the future.

In short, I figure that any meaningful enquiry into the residential schools should include a deeper exploration of the beliefs and the rationalizations behind their creation. It’s a very important story and it too needs widespread public exposure.

My fear is that the same patterns of thinking, the same sort of cultural arrogance that brought us Indian Residential Schools is still very much at work in the world. It can sometimes be glimpsed behind the eyes of folks selling Coca Cola in Calcutta and “democracy” at the point of a gun.