The lost children

I’ve always thought that there was a right to be mothered when young, and a right to mother when grown. In fact, I would have said that in Canada we have a consensus on this.

But this week, when I mentioned to a friend of mine that I would be writing about mothering, she suggested that I do something on “the lost children.” The lost children? “The children from the residential schools,” she said. “The ones who never came home.”

No one knows exactly how many there were.

The federal government ran residential schools in tandem with the major churches of Canada from 1831 right up to 1969. At their peak, in 1931, there were 80 schools operating across Canada. The law required aboriginal people to send their children to the schools from age seven, and children were frequently seized and sent at younger ages. The children weren’t sent there to be “raised,” as a mother would raise a child. They were there to be assimilated into white culture. Siblings were separated and discipline was harsh. Food was scarce and abuse flourished. Their parents, their history, their language and religion were denigrated. Speaking their mother tongue brought severe punishment.

Even when the children survived the schools, the families died. The children returned home shocked and damaged and without their language. The aboriginal women who had been forced to give them up were left unable to communicate with them, and lost their roles as mothers and caregivers. The children, deprived of their mothers, lost their chance to learn how to mother the next generation.

In the 1991 census, about 105,000 people reported that they had been through the residential schools. They were counted – because they survived the schools.

But as early as 1907, school inspectors reported deteriorating shelter, hunger, disease, and overcrowding in the schools to Indian Affairs.

So in 1907, the chief medical officer for Indian affairs, Peter Bryce, was instructed to investigate the health of aboriginal children in the schools in the Prairie provinces.

At this time, the major public health issue in Canada was tuberculosis. Advances had been made in the control of the disease; it was known to be contagious, and isolation was used to control its spread.

When Bryce looked into the aboriginal school population, he found death tolls ranging from 15 to 24 percent among the children due to the rapid spread of infectious diseases, principally tuberculosis. At File Hills Boarding School, the only institution to submit detailed statistics, the death rate for former students was 69 percent. At this time, the incidence of tuberculosis in the general population of Canada was 0.18 percent.

Medical examinations of children prior to their entering the schools were not done. Children who sickened shared beds with those not yet sick. So the schools had cemeteries; they needed them. And children who died there were buried there, without the knowledge of their parents, in places their parents could not get to. Records were kept, or not kept; graves were marked, or unmarked, depending on the school.

Bryce made his report to Indian Affairs in 1907. The report provoked a squabble between the government and the churches over who was responsible for its findings, and was then hushed up. It effectively destroyed Bryce’s career but no significant changes in practice were made in the schools. Bryce was so frustrated that after his retirement he published a pamphlet titled A National Crime, outlining his findings.

A National Working Group has now been set up, made up of members of the federal government, churches, and aboriginal groups. Its purpose is to advise the federal government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission on how to investigate residential school deaths and missing students, including how many children died and where they might be buried.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission will have to search for records in church files, provincial government files, in Indian Affairs, and in other government agencies. When they do, I hope that they find every one of the lost children, give them back their names, return them to their people, and lay them to rest beside their mothers. Then we will have found the children.

Whether we find reconciliation is another matter.

Joan Barton is a former family law lawyer and current rural entrepreneur. She can be reached via the Women's Portal.