Forgot to post...residential schools

I finished this one...oh, a month ago? Still to come, shortly: Heteronormativity/constructing knowledge about sex and gender, and native/newcomer relations. After that, land/treaties, indigenous resistance, indigenous methodologies, gender and indigenous peoples. For this one, my aim was brevity, as I can write forever on this topic.

The key differences in these complementary monographs stem from their motivations. Tsianina Lomawaima, partly inspired by her father’s experiences at the Chilocco Indian School, has written an oral history of this school that focuses on students’ memories to emphasize life at school, rather than policy. John Milloy’s work was drawn from his contribution to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, and thus largely uses records from residential schools and the government agencies and churches that formed them. This resulted in his quite exhaustive history of residential schools in Canada, showing how government actions and inactions, in collaboration with churches, formed and maintained a harmful system. Margaret Jacobs has pulled out maternalism as an ideology that underpinned the removal and institutionalization of indigenous children. In her transnational study, she follows maternalism as a thread that pulls together the work of reformers, children’s experiences of having their bodies and sexualities policed, the scrutiny placed on indigenous mothers, and resistance to child removal, among many other facets of these institutions and the people who built, maintained, and were incarcerated within them. Ultimately, Jacobs points to intimacy as a critical element of institutionalization; by removing indigenous children, she argues, maternalist social reformers reconfigured children’s and parents’ intimacies with one another and with their land, undermining indigenous land claims. Milloy makes similar arguments, noting that residential schools aimed to install European “meanings” to change children’s ontology (37) while operating on a misguided presumption that they were “parenting” indigenous children.

As Lomawaima was the only one of these historians to foreground children’s experiences, it is unsurprising that she is the only one to conduct her own oral history research. Lomawaima presents appendices detailing her research methodology, including a comprehensive but flexible list of questions that guided her interview. Some interviewees had prepared statements, written or oral, then responded to questions; for others, it was a more conversational process (176). Jacobs does not conduct her own interviews, but draws extensively from interviews conducted by other researchers, particularly those for the Bringing Them Home report (bibliography). Milloy’s work does not use oral history - he cites concerns about properly supporting his informants afterwards (preface). Instead, he pulls children’s voices from school files, conscious that these are filtered through adult Euro-Canadian officials. While oral history could certainly augment Milloy’s work, I noticed remarkable consistencies between his accounts from official documents and those presented by Lomawaima and Jacobs; drawing from oral recollections would not likely alter the substance of Milloy’s arguments.

Residential schools and other institutions were a means of restructuring children’s intimacies: away from parents and land, and towards trappings of white “civilization.” The severing of intimacies and ontologies is a common theme in these three studies, and one that plays out in Milloy’s, Jacobs’s, and Lomawaima’s discussions of maternalism, relationships between students, the monitoring of children’s sexuality, and as Jacobs notes, land claims. While intimacies are less explicitly central to Milloy’s work, which focuses more on policy and practice, it is a persistent undercurrent that underpins his argument that residential schools were, by their very nature, abusive. The intimacy between children and the land is one that Jacobs particularly pulls out. The link of schools to land claims is, I think, quite indisputable; that this happened through changing intimacies was a new idea for me. Jacobs’s idea here is quite convincing, even though it does not appear to be explicit in the policies that led towards child removal.

Maternalism is the central focus of Jacobs’s book, which outlines how white women’s maternalist ideologies shaped their role in child removal, and their complex relationships with indigenous children in the United States and Australia. Maternalism was key to many women’s decisions to become involved in child removal. Some of these women had genuinely benevolent intentions, which sometimes metamorphosed into concern that their own actions were harmful, as she points out in a final chapter on resistance to child removal. Often a concern about children’s welfare was mixed with women’s self-interest - child removal was a means of escaping from the restrictions on middle-class women’s careers, and of avoiding marriage in an attempt to gain independence. Particularly in Australia, Jacobs argued, this placed maternalist reformers at odds with male authorities who made policies. Jacobs presents maternalism as a counterpoint to the paternalism of the state, in its presumption that it could parent indigenous children. This presumption is also central to Milloy’s work, which meticulously documents how the state was an unfit parent.

While maternalism aimed to reorient children’s intimacies towards white school staff, and away from their parents and communities, this was seriously undermined by the abuses faced by many children. Instead, children’s resilience is clear in the formation of quasi-familial relationships between certain students. These are most apparent in Lomawaima’s work, where children’s relationships were central to their experiences at Chilocco school. Chilocco students had great loyalty to one another, generally superseding their relationships with school staff (Lomawaima, 48). Unsurprisingly for a school environment, Chilocco students recounted bullying. Some relationships between students thus had a critical protective element. Lomawaima describes how gangs protected the very youngest boys, making tribal affiliation particularly important for these students (157)

As well as monitoring and attempting to restructure children’s relationships with their communities and one another, colonial institutions focused on children’s relationships with their own bodies. The monitoring of sexuality, particularly for girls, was a common concern for school staff. Accounts from Chilocco and Australian institutions recall staff monitoring menstruation as a way of keeping tabs on girls’ sexuality, and sleeping arrangements were intended to prevent masturbation, as well as contact between boys and girls (L. 61). Sometimes this separation of dormitories was also hazardous to children’s health and safety, by locking them away from the washrooms and preventing a means of escaping in case of fire. This monitoring was based on a dual construction of indigenous children’s sexuality as deviant and as vulnerable, a construction that itself led to child removal, which was sometimes premised largely on a need to protect girls’ sexuality from unscrupulous indigenous men or white settlers.

All three historians position residential schools and other institutions as a site of struggle. Indigenous people resisted the removal of their children in many ways, often hiding children from white visitors. In response, authorities used rations as a coercive tool, or obtained children through force or deception. Once in the schools, indigenous children displayed a remarkable capacity for resilience. Some students developed at school an identity beyond that of their individual tribe, as their experiences entrenched their identity as an Indian, or an institutionalized child (“dormitory girls” in Jacobs). Many children took pride in their work in agriculture or domestic service, although some also aspired to careers that residential schools did not intend for them. American communities were particularly keen to claim residential schools as their own, claiming agency over their own education.