The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) report documenting the history, operation and legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools (IRSs) released in 2015 continues to haunt the nation..Officially titled Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, the summary first volume did neither..The mandate of the TRC was to “reveal to Canadians the complex truth about the history and the ongoing legacy of the church-run residential schools.”.By indigenous cultural standards of evidence gathering and truth telling, perhaps it did. By contemporary western juridical and objective social science standards however, the report is badly flawed..Among the report’s many shortcomings are: implying without evidence that most of the children who attended the schools were grievously damaged by the experience; conflating so-called “Survivors” (always capitalized and always applied to every former student) with the 70% of aboriginals who never attended these schools, thereby exaggerating the cumulative harm they caused; refusing to cast a wide net to capture the school experience of a random sample of attendees; accepting at face value the stories of a self-selected and unrepresentative cohort of 6,200 or so former students who appeared before the commission without cross-examination, corroboration or substantiation as representing the overall school experience of 150,000 attendees..A 2012 interim report by the TRC outlined what commissioners had heard since over the past two years:.“Many people came with stories of harsh discipline, of classroom errors corrected with a crack of a ruler, a sharp tug of the ear, hair pulling, or severe and frequent strappings."."The Commission heard of discipline crossing into abuse: of boys being beaten like men, of girls being whipped for running away. People spoke of children being forced to beat other children, sometimes their own brothers and sisters."."The Commission was told of runaways being placed in solitary confinement with bread-and-water diets and shaven heads. People spoke of being sexually abused within days of arriving at a residential school. In some cases, they were abused by staff; in others, by older students. Reports of abuse have come from all parts of the country and all types of schools.”.How true or typical were these findings?.No one knows for sure because the TRC never tried to comprehensively and scientifically find out, despite a budget of $72 million that would surely have allowed it to do so..The latest incarnation of the Report’s spectre are the following July 24 comments from Nigel Hannaford, the Western Standard’s opinion editor, who wrote:.“What one cannot argue however, is that no indigenous children were brutalised, mistreated or intentionally harmed by those who should have been caring for them. For that sadly, there is evidence enough. Even in a century when all Canadian schools were run with a rigour and harshness that appalls parents today, the worst residential schools were worse again, thoroughly nasty places where poor supervision and lax management gave sexual predators opportunity for vile crimes against young children. So lax was the system that even when apprehended, they were typically moved on without criminal charges being pressed..“Nobody wanted to deal with the problem.”.Perhaps “nobody wanted to deal with the problem” because there is not much of a problem to deal with unless one is consumed by 'presentism,' a simplistic, arrogant and illogical preoccupation with comparing contemporary values to historical ones, always finding the latter ethnically reprehensible..Physical, emotional and sexual abuse have long been known to be common in most boarding schools, as abhorrent as present values may see such abuse. But even reading the heartfelt stories of those reporting harsh IRS treatment suggests it was no different nor any more widespread than the school abuse reported by non-indigenous people..Although the extent of IRS abuse is difficult to compute with any degree of precision, there is lots of data if you look for it..For example, according to Professor James R. Miller in his seminal 1996 582-page University of Toronto Press book Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools, “The evidence is overwhelming that a great deal of the sexual exploitation and violence perpetrated on male and in rare instances female, students was the work of older students” (p. 424)..Nor is the IRS sexual and other exploitation relatively less common when vulnerable non-indigenous children are involved as the Mt. Cashel orphanage abuse scandal revealed..It's an appalling tragedy with no counterpart in the IRSs but painfully widespread on Canada’s Indian Reserves, a phenomenon many indigenous activists would call a legacy of the IRS system without offering any supporting evidence..In fact, many students were sent to these boarding schools to escape sexual predation, a practice reportedly still rampant on many Indian Reserves that even include the heinous practice of incest..There is also quantitative data of IRS sexual exploitation..One small study of IRS students found that a range of 48% to 70% of respondents said they had been sexually abused, depending on whether those refusing to answer the question were counted as “no” or not..It has also been estimated at least one of every five students suffered sexual abuse at the schools during their 113 years of government control and church administration..“It's horrible, it's monstrous," said Michael Cachagee, executive director and former president of a national group that helps former students, in reference to these figures. Liberal MP Todd Russell, an aboriginal, called these numbers “shocking.”.But compare these numbers to a 2018 Statistics Canada study that said, “Excluding incidents committed by intimate partners, 39% of women and 35% of men aged 15 years and older in Canada, or more than 11 million Canadians, reported experiencing at least one physical or sexual assault since age 15,” and the IRS figures are not so monstrous or shocking after all, except for the fact they involve helpless children..Almost ironically, such maltreatment now has been reversed: teachers and the elderly in nursing homes are on the receiving end with far less official or public condemnation than the abuses of long ago, perhaps signalling that hypocrisy knows no historical boundaries..Although it’s true that in 2016, private investigators contracted by the federal government identified 5,315 people — both students and staff — who are believed to have committed sexual abuse at a Canadian Indian Residential School, fewer than 50 people have ever been convicted for a sex crime committed at an Indian Residential School, according to analysis by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission..As for “poor supervision and lax management” being the cause of such abuse, as Hannaford suggests, it should be noted that even higher levels of such exploitation occur today in jails and prisons, institutions with much more rigorous supervision and management..But there are even more compelling reasons to challenge the ghost of the 2015 TRC report as it relates to student abuse and victimization..The severe corporal punishment often routinely doled out at these schools cannot be denied, based on the reports of former students and the fact that as alien as its practice may seem by present non-existent discipline standards, strapping and caning were the order of the day in most non-native parochial schools up to the 1960s. All too often, so was the unpunished sexual abuse of children..It is also important to qualify and contextualize the aboriginal residential schools in other ways..Up to the late 1960s, it was quite common for children and adolescents of various ethnicities to be sent to languish in large institutions — general hospitals, sanatoria, orphanages, reform schools, homes for unwed mothers, mental institutions, and boarding schools — for long periods of time and to be treated in ways that seem inhumane by today’s 'woke' standards allowing many such people to homelessly languish on our city streets..Similar traumas, indignities and deprivations faced by aboriginal students — loneliness, sexual and physical exploitation, and harsh living conditions — have been reported by the children of wealthy parents forced to attend elite boarding schools throughout the former British Empire..And when we call all aboriginal children educated in residential schools 'survivors,' capitalized or not, this erroneously implies that they are equivalent to Holocaust survivors..This libel also denigrates the sacrifices made by the many caring Christian teachers, religious leaders and other school personnel who devoted years of service trying to enhance the life chances of their young charges, thousands of whom have benefited from their residential school experience to become productive and influential figures in Canadian society and role models for their people..That few of these successful 'survivors' chose to give testimony before TRC should come as no surprise. Nor should using the label 'residential school denialists' to vilify and silence those claiming that the IRS experiment did more good than harm..Hymie Rubenstein is editor of The REAL Indigenous Issues Newsletter and a retired professor of anthropology, University of Manitoba.
