Chapter 2 The Destruction of Families Canadian Indian Residential Schools and the Refamilialization of Indigenous Children

Mettray

According to Jacques Donzelot (1997), the family has long been a target for policing in western societies. Whether seen as the bastion of pro-social morals and values by conservatives, or as a protector of the private realm by liberals, the family has been upheld as both a model and a project. As Donzelot (1997, 3–8) notes, the family is an aspirational ideal and a problem to be fixed, optimized, or simply improved. It is in this manner that the family comes to the fore as a site of social regulation, serving as a mode of discipline and governance, both shaping and inculcating social order through the members of families. However, when families are deemed by governing agents, such as police and social workers, to provide inadequate regulation, state intervention is seen as necessary. Under the logic of refamilialization, such families were not themselves targeted for reform, since the parents were viewed to be set in their ways; only their children possessed the necessary plasticity to be proper targets for civilizing transformation (Maxwell 2017). For this reason, refamilialization came to be organized through the creation of alternate family arrangements designed to place the young person on the path toward responsible citizenship. Mettray is one such example where the social institutions of prison and family intersect through refamilialization.

Mettray was based on the “family system of moral training” (Driver 1990, 272). The grounds of the reformatory were unwalled and situated on a flat plain in a rural area near the city of Tours. This rural location provided opportunity for the young boys held in the institution to be trained in agricultural work in addition to trades. A chapel sat in the centre of the compound and was open for the children to visit during their free time, in addition to their mandatory attendance on Sundays. Most of the children detained in the carceral space were considered “orphans” by the staff at Mettray, though this term was often applied not because of a lack of parents, but rather on the assessment that their parents had failed to provide proper moral and religious socialization.

Over 17,000 young boys who had found themselves in trouble with the French justice system were held in Mettray during its 76 years of operation. The reformatory organized these children into “families” of 30–60 charges who were assigned to the same unit for the entire period of their detention. According to the colony’s founder, Frederic Demetz, this organization was beneficent because the family is “the great moralizing agent of the human race” (Driver 1990, 277). These makeshift families lodged together in “houses” that were arranged around the central square and were led by one adult and one or two “older brothers,” representing a “natural family” and not just a household (Ripley 2006, 406). However, Mettray family groupings were blended when inmates were sent for training in industry or agriculture.2

Of the family system, William Henry Baron Leigh, a visitor to Mettray from the Committee of the Warwickshire Reformatory, wrote in a letter from 1856:

To return to the family division, to which I conceive the success of Mettray to be greatly due: I am of opinion that this system alone allows of that attention to every individual child, which is indispensable to the reformation of each individual character, while it procures for children who have perhaps never experienced them before, the happy influences inspired by the love of home.3

As such, Mettray “families” were conceived not only as a model of organization, but as a means to address birth families that were found wanting in their ability to provide the child development necessary for production of a responsible citizenry. In this manner, distance from the family of origin is not incidental to the reformatory strategy of Mettray. As J. C. Symons, an English barrister and school inspector, asserted in 1849, “distance is a great advantage, as it entirely removes the prisoner from his former habits, his bad relations, and he is thus in some measure transported into the interior.”4

In addition to the artificial family units that introduced techniques of peer observation and pressure to control and correct the children, the Mettray staff were also intended to foster the refamilialization of the delinquents:

As for the employés themselves, who are gentlemen by nature if not always by birth, it is quite impossible to see and converse with these intelligent, well-educated, and benevolent men without feeling how great must be their elevating influence upon the character and general tone of the boys.5

Substitute families thus proliferated within the carceral space of Mettray, beginning with one’s fellow students, and moving upward to staff, the school, and the nation. New bonds were to be forged to replace those thought to be broken, regressive, or a source of moral taint. This is not to suggest that staff at Mettray were above resorting to violence when the rules of the reformatory were flouted; and there were many rules—247 according to Toth (2019, 3). Social order at the institution was often maintained through slaps, kicks, intimidation, and fear when gentler disciplinary measures failed (Toth 2019, 81).

The Canadian Residential School System

That the techniques used in Mettray would be deployed in boarding schools for Indigenous children should give us pause to consider the ongoing criminalization and mass incarceration of Indigenous youth and adults in Canadian prisons (Department of Justice Canada 2017).6 One can see in this example that contemporary Canadian prisons are not far removed from the IRS system (see Adema 2015). As well, in his discussion of refamilialization, Foucault notes how its use within carceral institutions was eventually replaced by child removal and “placement with [alternate] families” (Foucault 2009, 16). The same shift can be viewed within Canadian settler colonialism when residential schooling morphed into increasing levels of forced adoption of Indigenous children into non-Indigenous families (MacDonald 2019, chap. 4), as well as increased federal imprisonment (Chartrand 2019). As the Canadian government gravitated away from the language of assimilation to that of “integration” in the 1960s, forced adoptions such as those perpetrated under the “Sixties Scoop” sought to refamilialize Indigenous children through direct insertion into settler families (MacDonald 2019, chap. 4). However, the focus of this chapter is the extent to which refamilializing techniques homed in on penal colonies like Mettray to reform criminalized youth were re-purposed to assimilate Indigenous children toward the settler norm.

The Canadian turn toward systematic use of assimilative schooling occurred in the late nineteenth century (Reyhner and Eder 2004). At this time, discussion of the so-called “Indian problem,” a notion that Indigenous groups presented an obstacle to land acquisition and settlement, turned toward ideas of “assimilation” and “civilization” as solutions (Dyck 1997). Education—a technique long used by missionaries in efforts to proselytize and convert Indigenous young people—came to be viewed as the primary vehicle for addressing the “Indian problem.” Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt’s experiment with “industrial” education in the United States was particularly influential. Pratt’s model adopted many of the strategies used at Mettray. It involved removing Indigenous children from their home communities and placing them in schools closer to what was defined as “civilization” by settler societies. Such propinquity to European settlers was seen as a necessary means to distance Indigenous children from the ways of their parents and attach them instead to European life. To facilitate this transformation, Pratt sought to discipline children through a combination of military style regimentation, work training, and basic education. Students would spend each day of the school year rising early to assemble on the grounds for marching and inspection before splitting the remainder of their day between work and school (Fear-Segal 2007). Pratt’s vision of the industrial boarding school did not simply arise from his own imagination; it drew from his experiences in the US army, but also from recent innovations in youth reform developed in Europe (Sinclair 2015, 135).

Pratt’s ideas traveled across the border to influence Canada’s initial effort to enhance assimilative education. Canada had not engaged in warfare with Indigenous populations to the extent experienced in the US and had long sought a more assimilative path for dealing with its “Indian problem.” However, after Nicholas Flood Davin was dispatched in 1879 by John A. MacDonald’s Conservative government to study Indian education in the United States, a clearer embrace of industrial education was promoted with one exception—Davin felt that a state-run system was impractical because Indigenous communities tended to be isolated and widely dispersed. He argued that Canada should build its boarding school system through the missions that were already established near Indigenous communities.7 Canada initially developed an industrial school system comprised of large schools equipped to prepare male students for menial labour in agriculture and the trades, and females for caring for the household; however, the costs of this system gradually drove the government to opt for a residential school system based more, though not exclusively, on smaller schools located closer to Indigenous communities (Miller 1996). Under this adaptation, children were still prohibited from having regular contact with their families; but the government spent less on transporting them to and from school. As well, the missionary societies, already located in reserve communities, were able to solidify control over those communities, such as by ensuring competing Christian denominations could not enter to recruit promising students.8

The relationship between the government and the Protestant and Catholic missionaries assigned to operate government-funded schools was problematic. The churches maintained a great deal of influence over educational policy, given the government’s dependence on their services. Canada’s schools were thus consistently defined by a regime of monastic discipline oriented first and foremost toward reshaping the souls of the students toward Christian ideals (Woolford 2015, chap. 5). As well, the relationship was defined by the government’s desire to keep costs for IRS to a bare minimum (Miller 1996, 12). Because of the poor funding, children regularly suffered from overcrowding, poor nutrition, inadequate clothing, a lack of health care, and other problems. This was in addition to the high levels of physical and sexual violence experienced within the schools (Miller 1996; Woolford 2015). These conditions often proved deadly, as the children lost their lives to murder at the hands of their keepers, unchecked disease and malnutrition, suicide, freezing or drowning when running away, among other causes—a fact attested to by the 215 possible unmarked graves of Indigenous children found in 2021at the Kamloops Indian Residential School (Warick 2021). The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (2021) has identified 4,117 children who perished in residential schools, though this is likely an underestimate as efforts continue to account for all who went missing during or shortly after their time at a school.

There was very little turnover among the bureaucrats running the residential school system. Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs Duncan Campbell Scott, for example, managed the system between 1913 and 1932 in an exceedingly frugal manner (see in general Titley 1986). It was not until the late 1960s that the system started to decline through the closing of residential schools, and during this period other institutions began to carry the burden of Indigenous institutionalization, namely the aforementioned practices of forced adoption through child welfare and incarceration in the prison system (Chartrand 2019; see also Hounslow 2018). With respect to Indigenous education, government resources were shifted toward promoting public schools as the key conversion point for Indigenous children, with the buzzword “integration” replacing “assimilation” (see for example Big White Owl 1962, 2). Public schools, like IRS, operated under the auspices of the “Indian problem,” since Indigenous children continued to be viewed as a challenge to the settler colonial norm. Integration, unlike assimilation, was meant to communicate the values of liberal egalitarianism, with Indigenous children receiving the same opportunities as those provided to non-Indigenous children (Hounslow 2018). But as with the 1969 White Paper, which sought to eliminate the 1876 Indian Act and impose a blanket equality on Indigenous peoples in Canada, the negative flipside of this variant of liberalism for Indigenous people was the loss of their distinct identity, culture, and practices as they were to be immersed and lost in mainstream Canadian society (Woolford and Benvenuto 2015).

Defamilialization and Refamilialization

In this section, examples from residential schools in Southern Manitoba, in particular the Fort Alexander (FAIRS), Portage la Prairie (PLPIRS), and Assiniboia (ARS) schools, are used to illustrate the twin processes of defamilialization and refamilialization common in many Canadian residential schools. Given that most Survivor testimony collected by the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission comes from Survivors who attended these schools after 1940, the information presented below is more reflective of the later stages of the IRS system, though some examples of earlier practices are also given. I will first focus on defamilialization, the breaking of family bonds, before turning to refamilialization, the creation of replacement bonds. Beforehand, however, it is worthwhile to examine the broader policy context in which defamilialization and refamilialization took place.

Indigenous families were, throughout most of the residential school period, perceived to be obstacles to rapid assimilation (Byler 1977). The home environment was believed to tempt students away from the lessons in civilization provided at the schools. The Archbishop of St. Boniface (located in Winnipeg), Louis Philip Langevin, argued in the early twentieth century that Indigenous children needed to be “caught young to be saved from what is on the whole the degenerating influence of their home environment” (Dussault 1996, 314). This was a view common among missionaries and which found regular expression in colonial policy (Sinclair 2015, chap. 9). It also informed government policy once the residential school system was underway. For example, in 1883, Public Works Minister Hector Langevin argued before the House of Commons that

if you wish to educate these children you must separate them from their parents during the time that they are being educated. If you leave them in the family they may know how to read and write, but they still remain savages, whereas by separating them in the way proposed, they acquire the habits and tastes—it is to be hoped only the good tastes—of civilized people. (Sinclair 2015, 161)

These words were echoed in the same year by Prime Minister John A. Macdonald:

When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men. (Sinclair 2015, 164).

These statements are a subset of broader arguments that discouraged the use of government sponsored days schools, where children were exposed to religious education during the day before returning home at night. These schools were deemed inadequate in the project of cultivating civilization among Indigenous children because the children still received regular exposure to their families and communities (Sinclair 2015, chap. 9).

Defamilialization

The above statements were not mere rhetoric. Practices of defamilialization were applied in Canadian residential schools with disastrous consequences, several of which will be illustrated in this section. Drawing children away from their families and communities, and imposing upon them European notions of liberal individualism, disrupted familial and social relations in Indigenous life. A child of Survivors testified to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, “these people that raised us were basically raised by priests and nuns, and they were not taught by their own parents . . . how to be parents, so they didn’t know how to be parents, and I don’t blame my father for what he did to me.”9 For this person, knowledge of the artificiality of residential school refamilialization helps her understand the failings of her own parents, who were raised by these inadequate substitutes. In this instance, one can see that the experience of defamilialization was not confined to the children within the schools; it reverberated throughout Indigenous communities and continues to have an impact on Indigenous families today (Dussault 1996, chap. 13). Many communities attribute persistent cycles of violence, sexual abuse, addiction, suicide, and other harms to the residential schools (see Wesley-Esquimaux and Magdelena Smolewski 2004).

In addition to losing out on socialization into the patterns of Indigenous parenting, the removal of children from families often resulted in resentment toward parents, who became suspect in the child’s eyes because they were unable to offer protection from the schools. This contributed to severing the child-parent bond. Staff at IRS sometimes actively promoted such disconnection from parents. A Survivor who attended FAIRS in the 1960s reported, “I remember one of the nuns one day told me, told us not to call our mum ‘mum’ because she’s not your mum—she’s your mum, but call her by her Christian name. And when you go home, and once and a while we do call her [. . .] I did call her by her name a few times in the summer. And she used to get mad, she’d get upset and [say] ‘call me, call me mama. I’m your mum, call me mama.’ Took me a while for me to call her mum.”10 Another FAIRS Survivor recalls returning home to her parents’ house and chastising her father for speaking Anishinaabemowin:

I just absolutely hated my own parents. Not because I thought they abandon[ed] me; I hated their brown faces. I hated them because they were Indians; they were Indian. And here I was, you know coming from [residential school]. I looked at my dad and I challenged him, and I said, ‘From now on we speak only English in this house,’ I said to my dad. And, when in a traditional home like where I was raised, the first thing that we all were always taught was to respect your elders and never to challenge them.11.

Resentment toward parents is a common theme in the testimony of Survivors from schools in Southern Manitoba and throughout Canada. This resentment, too, was at times actively encouraged; notes one FAIRS Survivor,

At that point in my life, when I was going to residential school, I thought my life had ended because the love that I had from my parents was taken away from me and we were not taught that in residential school. We were not told that our parents still loved us. We were told differently, that’s why we were in residential school, that our parents didn’t love us anymore. That we would have to stay there until we were adults and able to go back to our communities as educated people.12

Parents were thus not only resented because they were perceived to have left their children at the schools, but also because staff often gave the children the impression their parents were unloving, backward, and sinful. The latter characteristic was communicated by the Lacombe’s ladder that was prominently on display in FAIRS. In this particular 1874 version of the Catholic ladder, Indigenous peoples were illustrated as facing a choice between two roads, one leading through civilization toward eternal salvation and the other through the ways of savagery toward damnation. Ozaawi Bineziikwe recalls being confronted with this device while at FAIRS:

Every morning we had catechism. The priest hung this calendar in the classroom as a reminder of our unworthiness. This calendar was known as Lacombe’s Calendar. I remember always worrying about meeting God and having to hear Him say, ‘You were bad and you’re an Indian so you go to hell,’—that is where the people who stood on the left-hand side of God went. According to the priest and the nuns, we were standing on that left-hand side of God. I struggled to memorize every prayer that the priest ever taught me. (Bineziikwe 2005, 13)

Family members, however, did not have access to the left-hand side of God. They were thus to be abandoned to their damnation.

The competence of the teachers and other school staff was regularly in question. J. R. Miller (1996, 320) writes of “a tendency to use the residential schools as a dumping ground for missionary workers who were a problem for the evangelical bodies.” Up into the 1950s, the churches possessed full control over hiring of teaching staff. The Catholic Church, for instance, typically hired from female religious orders, “whose recruits were often young women from rural backgrounds” (Sinclair 2012, 71). Examples of teaching incompetence are frequent in the testimony of former students from PLPIRS and FAIRS, but criticism of teaching staff is less frequent in Canadian government records. Nonetheless, one does see on occasion mild concern expressed by inspectors who uncover that certain teachers lacked the skills or training to fulfill their position.13 They also lacked the life skills that would enable them to serve as replacement parents for the student. Theodore Fontaine observes that his parents did not know when they dropped him off at FAIRS that, “From this point on, my life would not be my own. I would no longer be a son with a family structure. I would be parented by people who’d never known the joy of parenthood and in some cases hadn’t been parented themselves” (Fontaine 2010, 20). Parents immersed and socialized into a community of families and familial practices were replaced by teachers who did not have this same parenting background.

From the moment children were dropped off at the school, defamilialization was underway. The rituals of institutionalization made sure of this. Children were immediately taken from parents, if parents had accompanied them to the school, once they crossed the threshold of the building. Clothes, often lovingly selected by parents, were removed and taken away.14 Hair, a symbolic connection to family and community, was shorn. New names, and numbers, were assigned, further distancing children from their familial heritage. Siblings, if members of the opposite sex, were kept separate from the incoming child, while same-sex siblings and extended family members were enlisted in orienting the new student, making them accomplices rather than allies (Chrisjohn and Young 1997; see also Wolochatiuk 2012). A Survivor who attended FAIRS in the 1940s testified,

My sister abused me in school, my older sister; she was very mean to me. And I figured maybe that was just the way of life. She was looking after me when I first went to school and the nuns ordered her to comb my hair and she’d braid my hair and bang my head against the sink if I didn’t keep still. Very abusive! That’s all I remember—is being abused. If you don’t do things right, disciplined right away.15

The feelings of being quickly and brutally disconnected from family were exacerbated by restrictions the schools and government sought to place on parental visits and time at home. Policies on visits from parents and visits by the children to their homes varied by region and era. However, for much of the time, both local and central school management agreed that parents were a disruptive influence and that their contact with children should be minimized (Sinclair 2015, chap. 25). At FAIRS, the proximity of the school to the reserve resulted in school staff complaints about parents: “Interference by the parents and guardians, is the chief source of trouble experienced by the school staff in maintaining discipline. The parents want to visit and talk to their children in a free and easy manner, and it is difficult to make them understand that they are causing trouble.”16 A year after this remark, Sagkeeng leaders attempted to gain access and inspect FAIRS, as well as another school to which their children had been sent. A 28 February 1923 letter from Chief William Mann requested that the Department of Indian Affairs, “Kindly tell us if Chief and Councillors of the Band of this Reserve has any rights to see if the schools are well conducted by the teachers or the Principals.”17 J. D. McLean, secretary of the Department of Indian Affairs, responded on 6 March 1923 that the schools are under the auspices of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches, respectively, and chief and councillors possessed no authority to direct policy in this regard. if they had complaints, they were directed to bring them to the attention of Indian Affairs through the Indian agent. McLean noted in his last sentence, “It is the duty of yourself and the councillors to assist the principal and teachers in any way that you can in encouraging the Indian parents to send their children to school.”18

It was not just in the schools that families were fractured by settler colonial policy; competing religious denominations also divided families as they laid claim to communities of adherents. In Fort Alexander, the Catholic and Anglican churches split the community, with the Anglicans claiming those Sagkeeng living closer to the town and the Catholics claiming the remainder. Marcel Courchene remembers the pain caused by the separation from his grandmother, who was considered Anglican: “But these priests, their [sic] the ones that were separating us—a religious thing. It was not right, their teaching was it was not right to associate with Anglican” (Charbonneau Fontaine 2006, 23). This division prevented community unity, since the teachings were that the other side was tainted by their profane faith: “That’s what the church teachings were, ‘You don’t wink at a protestant girl or even smile at them—the Anglicans are going to hell and the Catholics are going to heaven’—that’s what they said” (Charbonneau Fontaine 2006, 55).

These efforts by the schools to sever connections to culture, family, and community had long-term consequences for the children subject to these defamilializing strategies. Theodore Fontaine, quoted earlier, remembers his entry into FAIRS with the following words, “Thus were born the abandonment issues I would struggle with for years henceforth” (Fontaine 2010, 30). And with abandonment came an abatement of the trust that is essential to human relationships. As one Manitoba-based Survivor remarked about his experience of relationships after residential schools,

I called those people who ran the boarding school, “stone people.” What did I learn from those stone people? I learned how to suppress my natural feelings, my feelings of love, compassion, natural sharing and gentleness. I learned to replace my feelings with a heart of stone. I became a non-human, non-person, with no language, no love, no home, no people, and a person without an identity. In this heart of stone grew anger, hate, black rages against the cruel and unfeeling world. I was lost in a veil reaching up to the black robes and priests and nuns trying to make sense of all of this anger and cruelty around me. Why were these people so cold? Did they not have parents somewhere who loved them? Why did they despise us so much? In the beginning, I was constantly confused and always, always lost to their ways. I even went so far as to find a woman to marry that had no family connections, literally an orphan, my wife was an orphan, she has no family so that way I didn’t have these people touch me. I didn’t love this woman and I told her I didn’t love her because I didn’t know how. It was a cold calculated act, like buying a car. She had to meet certain requirements and function properly, but I didn’t love her. (Quoted in Dalseg 2003, 76–77)

A Survivor, who attended FAIRS in the 1960s, also explained the feeling of loss of familial love:

A typical day, I guess like, they separate the family. Like you know family like, things to do with your family, the way you grew up. And when you’re being separated after and you don’t know how to function with your life normally, how you grew up. Like love was gone, like love was not there no more. Love was kind of . . . a stranger I used to know. Now . . . love is not there, you sort of just like, something like military camp; get up certain time and do a certain thing.19

A Survivor from PLPIRS echoes this point. Reflecting on her time at the school in the 1950s, she discussed how her connections with family members were severed. She noted,

I keep all these things to myself because I got nobody to tell it to and especially family, I don’t like to talk about family. Today, my brothers and sisters I just see them as people, I don’t think of them as my brothers and sisters because I never grew up with them. All I know is they are my brothers and sisters and that’s it. I don’t know their personal life; I don’t know anything about them.20

Indeed, loss of connection and the ability to feel and communicate love are two of the most frequent remembrances within Survivor statements to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

Defamilialization in this fashion disrupted Indigenous family life, and in doing so disrupted Indigenous nations built upon familial networks. The family is the primary transmitter of culture for Indigenous young people. Removal from Indigenous families meant disconnection from the building blocks of culture, including language, land, and stories. Defamilialization thus threatened the loss of collective identity as represented within stories. Stories carried the time and space, the knowledge, the lessons of the group between generations. As well, family was a source for connecting children to their territory, which was also intimately entangled with their language; separation from these three essential foundations—family, language, and territory—often meant separation from the group itself through the loss of collective identity.

Refamilialization

Residential schools diminished family and community connections, but this work was not done solely to foster individualism among the students. Formation of new group identities were also attempted through refamilialization (Margolis 2004). The new identities on offer often seemed to lack the depth and connectedness of Indigenous ontologies, and students rarely felt that they could be fully admitted into a new family of the school or the nation as they did not feel accepted as equals by the settler society (see Bradshaw 1962a, 22). But because they felt isolated and alone in the schools, and suffered from homesickness, students were at times drawn to the staff members, who were presented as a substitute family. Though frequently poorly trained in the skills of parental warmth, staff members would on occasion offer small kindnesses to foster commitment to the assimilative project (Jacobs 2009). Ann Laura Stoler refers to this widely used colonial technique as “intimate colonialism,” describing how colonization takes place not just at the level of policy but also in everyday, intimate relationships (Stoler 2002). Building on this idea, Cathleen Cahill provides a close-up examination of how in the United States the Bureau of Indian Affairs sought to form familial relationships between Indigenous students and school staff as a means to impart the habits of citizenship among these children (Cahill 2011). In the Canadian context, there is less evidence of refamilialization explicitly promoted by government as policy. However, the very notions of assimilation and “civilization” as responses to the so-called Indian problem presupposed bonding the children to non-Indigenous ways of being. Defamilialization operated to negate Indigenous identities, but refamilialization was deployed by those charged with assimilating Indigenous children to provide a replacement set of relationships for those lost to defamilialization. Teachers, dormitory supervisors, cooks, nurses, and other staff members were in place to serve meals, enforce bedtimes, care for the sick, and engage the children in extracurricular activities. Some exploited this intimacy by preying on them with sexual violence. Others simply were not up to the challenge of showing the care required by refamilialization, or responded to the children’s resistance to refamilialization with physical violence.

Thus, for many reasons, refamilialization failed. On occasion, however, the desolate circumstances of boarding schools provoked refamilialization in a manner that successfully contributed to the intended assimilative project. Theodore Fontaine remarks on his time at FAIRS, “As young children, easily manipulated, we created new connections and rapidly bonded with some of our captors. Being malleable and wanting kindness and love, we slowly came to believe that there was kindness in those we were around every day and attached ourselves to those who looked after us” (Fontaine 2010, 132). Likewise, a sense of longing for home might lead a child to seek home-like connections within the school setting. Ozaawi Bineziikwe, who began school at FAIRS in 1949, goes so far as to compare her time in residential school to being adopted into a white family: “Now when I think about those times and the feelings I felt then, it was almost like being adopted into a white family. The clergymen were our fathers, the nuns were our mothers, and all the children at the school were our siblings” (Bineziikwe 2005, 12).

Ozaawi Bineziikwe’s comparison of the school to a family is neither random nor accidental. The Principal of Assiniboia Residential School, another school she attended, spoke directly to the “family atmosphere” at his school.21 He is remembered by many of the students as a kind principal, especially when compared to those they recall from other residential schools they attended (see Survivors of the Assiniboia Indian Residential School 2021). Principals and other staff did not always assume the role of a kind parental figures, though. In a 1949 statement, Rowena Smoke describes how she was punished by the principal at PLPIRS when she complained about an abusive teacher: “Mrs. Ross hits us on the head with her fists. . . . We ran away because we do not like Mrs. Ross. . . . Mr. Jones [the principal] cut my hair off last year because I ran away. I ran away last year because I was treated badly by Mrs. Ross. Mr. Jones whips us when we say anything back to Mrs. Ross.”22 Several other girls complained of their treatment by Mrs. Ross, the school matron, and Mr. Jones, the principal, which were the reasons they provided for running away. Mrs. Ross responded by pointing out that she sometimes pulled hair and rapped the girls on the head with her knuckles, but not out of anger.23 Jones requested through the Indian agent that he be permitted to punish one of the other girls further, by cutting her hair, so that she might serve as an example to the students. However, Indian Affairs instead reined him in, and he was told to practice punishment like “a kind, firm and judicious parent in his family.”24 Jones was later removed as principal from PLPIRS.25 He clearly went beyond Indian Affairs’ vision of a tough but fair father figure guiding his charges into an assimilated world.

Instead of simply accepting such stern parents, children often developed or solidified relationships among themselves, forging families independent of those the school sought to refamilialize them into.26 Rather than bond with the school, nation or a new religion, students found camaraderie among themselves, creating connections that would, in many cases, last a lifetime, and networks that could be mobilized for later political involvements (Lomawaima 1994). Such camaraderie might be facilitated by a “house” system whereby the students were separated into different houses who would compete against one another in sport or debate. In other instances, school teams and groups were the vehicle for these new attachments: cadets, hockey teams, MAMI (Missionary Associations of Mary Immaculate), and other such avenues made possible further community bonding. Student councils were formed at some IRS to provide peer oversight and to ensure students followed school rules.

Refamilialization at an IRS also included preparation for an assimilated family life after graduation, complete with prescribed gender roles. The young women at Assiniboia took part in Home Economics classes where they engaged in activities such as embroidering, knitting, sewing, baking, and preparing a fancy dinner to celebrate the principal’s birthday, complete with white tablecloth, silverware, and candles.27 The young men, in contrast, were engaged in typical masculine activities, including sports such as football, and cadet corps, which involved drilling and weapon training. On occasions like the Winter Carnival, the cadets displayed their skills. Reporter Theda Bradshaw describes the following at the 1962 carnival: “the school corps of 20 uniformed members marched down the ice in varying formations. Affiliated with the 39^th Regiment, the boys have weekly practice drill and a lecture at Fort Osborne” (Bradshaw 1962b). These gendered activities were intended to train the students to take their assigned marital roles within a heteronormative family, with young women always encouraged toward care of the household, or employment in domestic labour or nursing, while the young men were pushed toward the military, farming, and certain trades.

Indeed, Indigenous marriages were often at the forefront of IRS concerns about refamilialization. This is most apparent in the forced marriages that students were subject to at the end of their time at school. This program traces back to 1896, when deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs Hayter Reed described how marriage might be the basis for discharging students from residential schools, suggesting that “It is considered advisable, where pupils are advanced in years and considered capable of providing for themselves, to bring about a matrimonial alliance, either at the time of being discharged from the school or as soon after as possible” (Sinclair 2015, 658). Such marriages, bringing together students from different cultural groups, were viewed as a bulwark against post-graduation retrogression into Indigenous ways, as the married students would be able to keep one another in check. This practice was not continuous throughout the residential schooling era; it was discontinued in the 1930s. For this reason, it is not as widely discussed in the testimony gathered by the TRC of Canada eighty years later.

IRS operated not only to disrupt families and foster individualism, they also sought to confer new family-like attachments on Indigenous children. In this manner, practices of defamilialization and refamilialization run parallel to a settler colonial logic of elimination that removes Indigenous peoples to be replaced by settlers (Wolfe 2006). Through mechanisms such as trust and loyalty formation, refamilialization wrenched the Indigenous child from the world of family and community and encouraged them to find succour in school, Christianity, and nation, those replacement institutions that promised the Indigenous child a new life and a new identity.

Refamilialization and Genocide

Returning to Senator Beyak and her claim that the negative story of residential schools misses the “well-intentioned” staff members who carry out “good deeds,” we see that the practice of refamilialization further refutes her argument, which was already extremely questionable based upon the misery and suffering caused by Canadian residential schools. Even in the odd instances where seemingly kind staff members formed familial relationships with students, these relationships are not, as Beyak imagines, a counterpoint to the charge of cultural genocide or genocide.

It may on first blush seem odd to suggest that practices of refamilialization can play a role in genocidal processes (see Krieken 2004). This is not to say that they always constitute genocide, or by themselves are genocide, but merely that they can be deployed for group destroying purposes. One could build such an argument based upon the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (1948), particularly section II(e) on the “transfer of children,” as David MacDonald (2014, 306–24) does. Following this argument, the removal of children from Indigenous families and communities can be construed as destroying “in whole or in part” the cultural, biological, and even physical existence of the group, since having children socialized into the patterns of the group is essential to its continued existence. However, it is worth noting that the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (UNGC) is built on colonial foundations (see Woolford 2019). Despite the involvement of representatives from around the globe in the final formulation of the UNGC, colonial rationalities were the basis for decisions made that have had consequences for how we understand genocide against Indigenous peoples in settler societies. This is particularly evident in the discussions surrounding so-called cultural genocide, where the arguments that won the day and resulted in the removal of Raphael Lemkin’s Section III on cultural genocide, which among other things sought to protect of the language and artistic works of groups, included claims that some cultures were simply too primitive and backward and required forced assimilation (Abtahi and Webb 2008). Canada played a role in denying cultural genocide a place within the UNGC, again showing that this law is a political creation, and we must be careful about giving it objective status without critiquing its generative conditions and assumptions (Woolford 2019).

Beyond the legal definition, a sociological approach to genocide focuses more on the particular mechanisms that make the persistence of a specific group possible and works to identify when those mechanisms are purposefully targeted in a manner where it should be evident that the consequences will place the continued existence of the group in jeopardy (Powell 2011; Short 2010). This is certainly the case for the role of family and its interdiction as experienced by Indigenous groups in Manitoba, such as the Anishinaabe, Dakota and Cree children who attended the schools under consideration here. For each community, family is the store of culture, language, relationship to the land, and the complex of relations that are central to an Anishinaabe, Dakota, or Cree ontology. These elements of Indigenous group life fit what Lemkin referred to as the “essential foundations” of collective life, which he argued to be the target for genocide, because they are the practices and knowledges that allow the group to preserve its sense of itself as a group (Lemkin 1944, 79).

In this light, practices of defamilialization and refamilialization were incredibly detrimental to generations of Indigenous families in Manitoba (and elsewhere), not just because families are central to the reproduction of any group, but because of the specific and profound role of family for Anishinaabe, Cree, and Dakota peoples. Not only did the children lose familiarity with language, territory, and the story cycles through which their communal knowledge and history were carried; they also lost the ability to trust others, to form positive and healthy relationships, to love, to care, and to nurture future generations of their families. Defamilialization and refamilialization marked not only a severing of a relationship to the familial past, they deformed the potential for constituting and reconstituting Indigenous familial relations in the present and future.

Genocidal processes do not only negate, they also produce (Benvenuto 2014). Lemkin captures this aspect quite well:

Genocide has two phases: one, destruction of the national pattern of the oppressed group: the other, the imposition of the national pattern of the oppressor. This imposition, in turn, may be made upon the oppressed population which is allowed to remain, or upon the territory alone, after removal of the population and the colonization of the area by the oppressor’s own nationals. (Lemkin 1944, 76)

Likewise, more recent work by scholars such as Patrick Wolfe points to how the “logic of elimination” both eliminates and produces settler colonial society in the void created by elimination (Wolfe 2006). Defamilialization and refamilialization are part of the same destructive movement. They seek to erase Indigenous ties to their cultures, only to produce new connections to the settler society that would enable the ongoing dispossession of Indigenous lands.

Conclusion

The refamilialization practices developed at Mettray were not meticulously applied at Canadian residential schools in part because of the physical and sexual violence rampant in these schools, and the general inability of staff members to forge these connections. More emphasis appears to have been placed on breaking down Indigenous families than on connecting Indigenous children to new staff and student communities, though certainly efforts were made, as demonstrated above, to form new family-like relationships. In this sense, the void created by aggressive practices of defamilialization made possible moments of refamilialization that stuck with Indigenous children as they formed new family-like relations with their fellow students and even, in some cases, staff members. The consequences of this sort of relationship building should not be seen as something outside of genocidal processes, or as somehow illustrating the so-called benevolence of IRS.

In this chapter, an argument has been presented that links Canadian residential schools to nineteenth-century changes to youth reformatory practices in Europe. In particular, the practice of refamilialization, creating new family relations to replace those deemed generative of delinquency, finds expression in the effort of residential schools to “assimilate” Indigenous children into European society. In addition to showing the carceral origins of IRS, raising questions about whether or not such institutions should even be called schools, this argument is presented to counter those who contend that the “good intentions” and perceived benevolence of some staff members somehow modifies or absolves the destructive (that is, genocidal) nature of residential schools. When examined in light of the carceral origins of residential schools, and the strategic use of family-like relations to transform inmates, these good intentions take on a different hue, showing how even the seeming kindnesses of intimate colonialism can be viewed as part of a strategy that seeks the erasure of Indigeneity and the consolidation of Canadian settler colonialism.

Notes

1. 1 On a personal note, in 1909, after my great-grandfather was arrested for horse thievery in London, and my great-grandmother subsequently fell into poverty, my grandfather was removed from her household by the Barnardo’s Orphanage, from which he was sent to Canada to be a farm labourer at the age of 10. Such practices were common at the time but could be turned to genocidal ends when targeted toward a specific group, such as Indigenous nations.

2. 2 W. H. L. Leigh, The Reformatory at Mettray: A Letter (London: Thomas Hatchard, 1856).

3. 3 Leigh, The Reformatory at Mettray, 5.

4. 4 J. C. Symons, Tactics for the Times as Regards the Condition and Treatment of the Dangerous Classes (London: John Ollivier, 1849), 96.

5. 5 Leigh, The Reformatory at Mettray, 13.

6. 6 The Department notes that Indigenous peoples (adults and youth) are overrepresented both as victims and in custody relative to the non-Indigenous population. I prefer to use the term mass incarceration, since overrepresentation suggests that there exists a “normal” amount of representation in corrections, which by naturalizes incarceration and ignores the possibility of abolition.

7. 7 Nicholas Flood Davin, Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half Breeds (Ottawa: Government of Canada, 14 March 1879).

8. 8 Note that the Christian denominations that ran the bulk of the Indian residential schools (Catholic, Presbyterian, Anglican, and Methodist) had already laid claim to the various Indigenous reserves of Canada. They viewed these reserves as their personal recruiting grounds and complained loudly to the government when another denomination recruited from what they perceived to be their turf (Woolford 2015, 73).

9. 9 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; 01-MB-3–6SE10–001; Beausejour, MB; 10 April 2010, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

10. 10 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; case file no. 2011–2619; Winnipeg, MB; 5 July 2011 Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

11. 11 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; case file no. 2011–2515; Pine Creek First Nation, MB; 28 November 2011, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

12. 12 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; case file no. 02-MB-18JU10–002; Winnipeg, MB, 18 June 2010, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

13. 13 For example, see Philip Phelan, chief of training division, to reverend J. O. Plourde, OMI, 5 July 1938, RG 10, volume 8448, file 506/23-5-019, Library and Archives Canada.

14. 14 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; case file no. 02-MB-18JU10–057, The Forks; Winnipeg, MB; 2010-06–18, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

15. 15 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada; case file no. 02-MB-18JU10–057, The Forks; Winnipeg, MB; 2010-06–18, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.

16. 16 Report by R. H. Cairns, inspector of Indian schools, to deputy superintendent D. C. Scott, 16 Feb 1922, RG 10, volume 8448, file 506/23-5-019, Library and Archives Canada.

17. 17 Chief William Mann and councillors, Fort Alexander, to Department of Indian Affairs, 28 Feb 1923, RG 10, Volume 6264, File 579–1, part 1, General Administration 1900–35, Library and Archives Canada.

18. 18 Secretary J. D. McLean to Chief William Mann and Councillors, 6 March 1923, RG 10, Volume 6264, File 579–1, part 1, General Administration 1900–35, Library and Archives Canada.

19. 19 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, case file no. 2011–2656, Winnipeg, MB; 2012-01-18.

20. 20 Survivor testimony, Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, case file no. 02-MB-17JU10–074, Winnipeg, MB, 17 June 2010.

21. 21 Assiniboia Residential School Newsletter, Assiniboia Highlights 3(2) (1960). National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

22. 22 Statement from Rowena Smoke, Long Plain Sioux to department of Indian and northern development, INAC—Resolution Sector—Indian Residential Schools Historical Files Collection—Ottawa File 501/25-1-067, Vol. 1, Library and Archives Canada.

23. 23 Mary B. Ross, Matron, INAC—Resolution Sector—Indian Residential Schools Historical Files Collection—Ottawa File 501/25-1-067, Vol. 1, Library and Archives Canada.

24. 24 Bernard Neary, superintendent of Indian education, to inspector A. C. Hamilton, 25 Feb 1949, RG 10, volume 6275, file 583–10, part 2, Library and Archives Canada.

25. 25 See, The Children Remembered, Residential School Archive Project, “Portage la Prairie Indian Residential School,” The United Church of Canada Archives, http://thechildrenremembered.ca/school-locations/portage-la-prairie/.

26. 26 Based on these bonds, it is not surprising that many Survivors from Indian residential schools refer to their fellow students as their “family,” a point made several times at a recent Assiniboia school reunion. This event was held on 24–25 June of 2017 at the former school site.

27. 27 Assiniboia Residential School Newsletter, Assiniboia Highlights 3(2) (1960). National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

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