Residential school cases: how do you learn to be a family if you don't grow up in one?

• Author: Fenwick, Fred R.

Remember the Dionne quintuplets? Everybody in Canada does. They were, in 1934, the first surviving quintuplets and quite remarkably so, especially in light of modern standards. They were born in northern Ontario, miles from the nearest hospital without the aide of fertility drugs or modern obstetrical care. After their birth, they were in essence forcibly removed from their parent's care and spent the first 10 years of their lives in a specially built Quintland -- a combination freak show/museum growing up behind glass and only seeing visitors (including their parents!) if the visitors wore surgical masks. Later, when the girls were about 10 years old, the parents managed to be reunited with them in a fashion, but the closest they ever got to a normal childhood was growing up in the institutionalized setting of Quintland and going to school with carefully selected companions.

Their later lives were marred by an unfortunate series of physical illnesses and other difficulties and the three surviving quintuplets have just now (at 65 years old) received a pension from the Ontario government to help them through their remaining years.

But what's that got to do with aboriginal law? Just this, partly because of the Dionnes and partly because of the demonstrably poor experience in raising children in institutional settings, it was well known by the 1950s that an institutional setting is probably the worst way to raise a child and the most conducive to all kinds of developmental, emotional, and educational problems. Yet well through this period, native children were taken away from their families to be put into residential training schools. Now we have all heard about the residential school abuse cases and later on in this article I would like to outline some of the details in one of the recent cases. But even aside from the abuse, the residential school system created huge difficulties even if we assume the best intentions of all involved. Those rather more general difficulties are what I would like to discuss first.

First off, here is a really simple example: scheduling. Most schools in Canada have for years run from September to June, not as a result of some immutable law of schooling but rather to mirror the agricultural basis of the early Canadian/European economy. Children went to school in the winter but were available in the summer to help out with farm chores. So naturally, when the Indian Affairs Department was setting up the schools this...