Inkless Wells

Paul Wells on all the latest out of Ottawa—along with the occasional post about jazz. Follow Paul on Twitter: @InklessPW
He also offers his thoughtful perspective of Stephen Harper’s last 10 years in his recent eBook, The Harper Decade.

Categories: Inkless Wells

National Post: Christie Blatchford has left the building

by Paul Wells on Monday, June 9, 2008 5:14pm - 0 Comments

Over at the very thoughtful National Post group blog, Karen Selick asks:

“My husband went to elementary school in small-town Eastern Ontario in the 1940s. He tells me that there were many occasions when his teachers gave him ‘the strap.’ Lots of kids were punished or disciplined that way, in those days…

“By modern standards, my husband and his classmates were physically abused. Should they now be getting an apology from the government, and perhaps some compensation?”

Gee, Karen, that’s an excellent question. I can certainly understand your concern, and I can tell you’re a really smart, thoughtful person. I’ve given this matter a little thought myself. Here’s a handy checklist to ascertain whether your husband’s treatment rises to the level of what the Prime Minister will be addressing this week. Ready?

• Was your husband systematically raped by authority figures at school for years on end?

• If he spoke the language he had learned from the cradle did he get beaten?

• Were his classmates dropping like flies from tuberculosis due to appalling hygiene and incompetent health care?

• Here’s an excerpt from a transcript of an interview with Bernadene Harper, who attended one of the residential schools: “In the evenings what I remember is, when all the girls were put to bed, we had night watchmen that would take care of the building. I always had the fear of having a night watchman coming in and shining the flashlight around, because I knew that’s when things were happening with the little girls. I guess that’s where the abuse had started.” Does that sort of institutionalized nightly horror ring a bell for your husband?

If you answered “Yes” to any of these questions, then your husband had a horrible time indeed and I think he’s owed an apology. If not, I think we’ll get around to your husband a little later. ‘Kay thanx.

Tags: Karen Selick, residential schools

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A reader

Thank you Paul. It could hardly be said better.
Tony

Go get ‘er Tiger!!! Well done…
Mike G

To be fair, the recent “coming up this week” teaser of The National‘s coverage of this chose to highlight not the rape, not the TB, not the language stuff, but the strap, and it confused me, too. It seems that some people aren’t able to articulate the horror of it quite as succinctly as this post.
DPat

And to add to your list – was he, or were his classmates, forceably removed from their family homes as 4, 5 or 6 year olds and removed in many cases hundreds of miles to a residential school, seeing their families once a year if they were lucky.
Wayne

Well said : and as a personal observation I simply am aghast at some of the posts I have seen on the TGM Forums and in other places about people against dealing with this form of genocide because make no misstake it was within one moral inch of being just that. I am forever grateful to Harper for actually dealing with this issue and though I admire and respect him for other reasons as well as this one – this alone puts him in a whole new position compared with our other leaders who had the opportunity – and to those who disagree – well … I don’t care.
http://deleted Sandi

Geez – her husband must be/was a woos. Get over it, you got in trouble for being a bad little boy.

Exellent post Mr. Wells.
Sisyphus

Just more evidence of the on-going triumph
of the Know-Nothings.
They rule the world. At least the North
American part of it.
Eric-Vancouver

Wow.
http://macleans.ca Nicholas

Having closed down residential schools, this is what we now have. I know of a 14 year old boy in a northern community who has NEVER gone to school because attendance is not enforced. He has poor health and near-zero social skills, education or life skills. It is a challenge for him to leave the house to go to the store, in any weather at any time of year. His father had FAS and hanged himself at age 19 and his mother is a fat, alcoholic, drug-addicted slob with her own serious health and life problems. An example of what it is to be a child today in one of some 300 Indian and Inuit communities that are clones of the former Davis Inlet or Kashechewan. I know of another youth who has just “graduated” from high school, having achieved a pass mark in one art class although his reading and writing skills are almost non-existent. Indian and Inuit leaders tell us so much about past grievances but they are akk but silent about asking for Head Start or getting for their children the education and skills required for the real world today.

Here is Alan Pope’s Report on the Kashechewan First Nation and its People, published in October 2006: “Due to recent evacuations, lack of employment, limited economic opportunities and the low value placed on education by some community members, the quality and availability of education services is actually declining in Kashechewan. St. Andrew’s Elementary School is closed due to health and safety concerns, site contamination and vandalism. It will not reopen any time soon. Elementary and secondary school students are sharing one facility and attendance and curriculum is reduced accordingly. Elementary students have neither gym classes nor recess. There are no after class sports as the gym is used by elementary students. Class hours for secondary students of 3:00pm to 8:00pm have cut attendance in half. Computers and computer programs are antiquated and ineffective. There are no cultural or traditional value programs. Science and mathematics are not offered because of inadequate class size….”
john k

Jeez, I got the strap 3 times and as late as 1963!
Let’s see, I figure $50K for each time I was abused and degraded and $100K for trauma affecting the rest of my life.
Round it off, I’ll go quietly for $100K.
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Kaplan

Nice post, Mr. Wells. Seems the wingnut brigade has descended on Maclean’s as of late. I pity the poor soul who can actually dare to criticize an official apology to residential schools.
Kaplan

…er, to residential school survivors.
Mike T.

I sincerely hope Ms. Selick was trying to generate controversy rather than provide thoughtful analysis.
sw

It really takes a special effort to stand out as one of the bigger jerks on Full Comment. (I won’t say “the biggest jerk” as Lorne Gunter’s post blaming Robert Dziekanski’s mother for her son’s death is still fresh in my memory.) So…congratulations, Karen?
Jack M.

It would be nice to dig up material on what mainstream (i.e. non-aboriginal) Canadians were saying about the residential schools at the time. My understanding was that it was all do-goody: enlightening the barbarians, basically. It would be good to juxtapose that kind of cant with what was actually going on.

While I’m sure nobody at the time was in favour of systematic sexual abuse or TB epidemics or brutal neglect, they sure as hell were in favour of stripping the First Nations of their culture and language, which, all in all, was the worst of these crimes (because it affects all future time, not just the immediate victims).

The point: cant sucks, especially the kind that patronises our aboriginal comrades, and it can be extremely deadly.

Didn’t see the National Post piece but I can pretty much imagine it word for word from Mr. Wells’ summary. Bastards.
Bill Simpson

Karen’s message was pretty tasteless but we seem to have moved to the point where ANY questioning of the residential school experience seems to be some sort of blasphemy. I don’t see what is served by that, and it makes the apology less than convincing if there is no acknowledgment of the context of the whole sorry affair. Also – if there is no recognition that not ALL teachers were sadistic pederasts and that not ALL children were irrecoverably damaged for life, then we are diminishing the blame on the former and the suffering on the latter.
Terry86

I agree with Bill. I think the goal of better integrating natives was a laudable one. Residential schools turned out to be the wrong tool to do it.
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ebt

You aren’t so completely insane as to believe that all children in residential schools were raped as a matter of policy? Please tell me you’re just deliberately lying for the fun of it.

You almost certainly are insane enough to believe that the conditions the children encountered in residential schools weren’t appreciably better than anything they could have expected at home, so I won’t waste my breath making the point.
Shenping

Kind of sounds like how my grandfather was treated as a linguistic & ethnic “enemy of communism” in early Stalinist Russia.
jmacfarlane

Mr Wells, you make a good point. Please clarify for me, though… were ALL (or even most) students at ALL residential schools (or even most) abused in this horrific way? I have to say that it would certainly seem so, but just as all Catholic alter boys were not molested, I’m sure that not all first nations children were either, although I concede that by today’s standards removing the children from their homes would be quite traumatic enough, and certainly wrong.
As awful as this chapter was in our history, and as wrong, I’m not sure it’s fair to judge it by today’s values… I think they were set up by misguided yet well-meaning people to give aboriginal children the same access to Canadian society as everyone else.
It’s not always so different today, either, as we might like to believe–think of the children removed from their homes by the state and placed into foster care. Sometimes they get a good, caring placement, and sometimes not.
I sure hope this apology is satisfactory and sincere enough for the people it is directed towards… at some point, you have to move on.
Paul Wells

jmacfarlane, about one-sixth of the total residential-school population applied for compensation when the federal government offered it. Take that for whatever it’s worth. To answer an earlier commenter, I don’t believe I ever argued that molestation was a matter of policy. It seems to have been a kind of hobby.

Nor, in general, am I arguing that state apologies, truth-and-reconciliation commissions, and the rest of the agreed-upon apparatus for atonement are incontestably the only response to events of a generation ago. There’s plenty of room for debate about all of it. We’ve had a good story about these questions ready to go in Maclean’s for a while now, and I hope you get to read it soon. What I did find morally obscene was the suggestion by some twit in Toronto that her husband’s strapping at school was an appropriate comparison to the agony too many children went through.
Wayne

Personally I think that the real abuse here was not sexual or physical but cultural : What happened was a form of cultural genocide. This is a long and I mean long overdue statement and makes me proud to be Canadian. PM Harper deserves a special note of mention here as other leaders have had the opportunity to address this crime and crime it was the worst abuse immaginable- think about this folks what would happen if you were forcibly removed from your parents and then ” Re-educated ” being punished if you spoke your own lanaguage and then taught daily that your parents were backwards primitves worshipping devils in the forest. Many of the children did not want to go home finally as by that time they started to believe their new teachers and they felt ashamed of their parents : this is a form of cultural genocide which is worse than what Hitler did after all gas was quicker than this generational form of abuse that we as Canadians perpetuated in the name of ” Assimilation ” or ” Civilization ” this was a high crime and one rightly acknowledged that we can go forth as a people now and be honest with one and another and hopefully the descendants of these torture academies can reconcile with themselves and us to make something useful out of this so that we learn from our past and never repeat this.
Mike T.

The church (and too a lesser extent the state), took on the care of these children, often by force and against the wishes of their relatives. They then created a system which allowed for frequent if not universal molestation of these children, often over the course of several years. Any attempts to detect or monitor the siutation were obviously wholly inadequate. Damn right an apology is in order.

I hope it satisfies the aboriginal community, because it’s all they’re likely to see from Harper. (In contrast, even sports parents got a 17% non-refundable tax credit).