Such efforts require teachers with an understanding of Mi’kmaw culture and the ability to connect with Mi’kmaw students. Without that, classroom misunderstandings rooted in cultural bias keep Mi’kmaw students from succeeding. For example, non-Mi’kmaw teachers sometimes feel disrespected by Mi’kmaw students if they don’t look them in the eyes. In Euro-Canadian culture, you look someone in the eye to show respect and trustworthiness. In Mi’kmaw culture, you show respect to Elders by not looking them in the eye. How a teacher responds—if he raises his voice and shouts a demand for respect—can quickly, unwittingly, destroy all potential for learning.
To begin dismantling such cultural barriers, Mike Isaac would like to see more indigenous content in Bachelor of Education programs in universities, so they can better understand cultural differences and learn more about Mi’kmaw traditional knowledge and its connection to curriculum. “It’s not taught in education programs how to understand Mi’kmaw students,” he says. He recalls teaching a course in indigenous education at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. “Their jaws dropped,” he says, because they had never before learned about laws and governance pertaining to the Mi’kmaq. He told his students that they couldn’t possibly learn everything in a ten-week course, but that he hoped they’d learn to question what they heard about the Mi’kmaq in the media. He urged them to weave what they learned into their lessons, and told them it was possible to do so while meeting the required educational outcomes.
Mi’kmaq Studies
In 1996 Nova Scotia piloted a high school course in Mi’kmaq Studies, one of five options in the Canadian Studies stream. (Students need only one of the five to graduate.) With a curriculum that emphasizes tolerance and open-mindedness, the course was designed by a task force, including Mi’kmaw and non-Mi’kmaw educators, in response to the misrepresentation of the Mi’kmaq in high school curriculum to that point. “It’s pretty progressive,” says Ben Sichel, who teaches the course at a Dartmouth high school. “There’s an outcome that says students must understand the paternalistic nature of the Indian Act.” The goal is to create a better understanding and appreciation of contemporary Mi’kmaw culture. But while the course focuses on Mi’kmaw culture, spirituality, education, governance, and historical and contemporary injustices, it fails to critique Canadian colonial history or contemporary racism. According to Sichel it has a reputation as an easy course. “Some students take it for the wrong reasons,” he says.
The greater danger is perhaps that teachers without any education, background in, or exposure to Mi’kmaw people, history, or culture often teach the course. In 2011 Nova Scotia teachers told Pamela Rogers, a graduate student researcher in education, that there’s a lack of interest in Mi’kmaw culture among teachers. When the province held a special professional development day on the subject, only twelve people attended. Sometimes teachers get stuck with it against their wills, and they resent it or are simply uninterested. “If done badly, it reinforces stereotypes,” Sichel says, adding that if a non-Mi’kmaw teacher is going to be responsible for educating mostly non-Mi’kmaw kids about the Mi’kmaq, she needs proper training. He feels that Aboriginal Studies course content should be mandatory for all Bachelor of Education programs. When teachers take an interest, Sichel feels Mi’kmaq Studies can be a great course. He works hard to find and include contemporary readings and issues to discuss. Otherwise it is essentially a history course—though the history goes beyond pre-European contact and includes the long and complex relationship between the Mi’kmaq and Canadian governments.
Mike Isaac feels that however good the few courses in Mi’kmaq Studies in provincial schools may be, they are merely “snippets,” not enough to understand a culture and the history of European-Canadian and Mi’kmaw relations. “The Mi’kmaq have been here thirteen thousand years, Europeans about six hundred,” he says. “We know more about European history, values, and knowledge than they do the reverse.” And as a result, Mi’kmaw students are tuning their teachers out at provincial schools.
Studies by Dalhousie’s Victor Thiessen in 2009 and by the Province in 2013 show that Mi’kmaw students in provincial schools still score well below the provincial average on annual literacy and numeracy tests. At heart is a remaining inability to embrace the validity of Mi’kmaw science, math, and politics—the understanding of which was traditionally passed down orally, through stories like Muin and the Seven Bird Hunters. “A lot of those stories are gone and forgotten,” Isaac says, along with their ability to instill pride among Mi’kmaw learners about their heritage and abilities. “There are a lot of people within Mi’kma’ki who are not proud of who they are because there’s nothing positive ever taught or spoken about us as a people.”
Isaac is gently pushing for the persistent use of indigenous knowledge to become deeply embedded into the curriculum for all students, Mi’kmaw and non-Mi’kmaw, Primary to Grade 12. He’s not talking only about the song and dance and drum and regalia, but also the whole way of being and seeing. The more holistic Mi’kmaw way of understanding science, for example, is of great value. To date, Isaac works for an office that the Province chronically under-funds. The Mi’kmaq Liaison Office, which provides support to the education community for Mi’kmaw students in public schools, is supposed to have five full-time staff. “Most of the time there are two. So how can we provide that service?” he wonders. The same question applies to Mi’kmaw representatives on regional school boards: some boards have them and others don’t. The representatives in place are vulnerable to budget cuts. At the same time, educators are benefiting from Mi’kmaw and Aboriginal knowledge. A few elementary and high schools use restorative justice circles in Nova Scotia, and the justice department is developing a pilot project to do the same at another hundred schools.
Many survivors, including Wayne Nicholas, say that Maritime students need to learn the history of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recommends provincial education departments develop “age-appropriate educational materials about residential schools for use in public schools.” The school at Shubenacadie was just one part of a colonial education system, which itself was one of many weapons in a failed attempt at cultural genocide. And while we no longer speak of assimilation, governments continue to treat First Nations peoples as a burden to be minimized and controlled. But if we don’t learn this, we can’t change it.
Circling Back
Five hundred years ago, the Europeans who arrived in what they called the “New World” missed an opportunity. Okay, maybe you can’t pinpoint it to a moment. The French, in general, proved more open than the Brits to working with the Mi’kmaq and other First Nations they encountered here. Maybe that was a cultural difference between the two empires, but more likely the difference was the situation they encountered when they arrived. The French needed the Mi’kmaq to survive. The English found the Mi’kmaq working with their old enemies.
Despite their war-inspiring differences, the French and English shared a sense of manifest destiny: that God granted them the superiority to “discover,” conquer, and tame all foreign lands. Indeed, it was each country’s respective confidence in its own superiority that made each fight the other for domestic and foreign territory. Both countries’ inability to see any other people, or ways of thinking and living, as worthy of respect, drove their pathological need to take land and resources for themselves. On some level, they believed they were giving back. Not recognizing the complexity of the societies they encountered or the effectiveness of those societies as they thrived in good health and contentedness for thousands of years, European leaders believed they were giving the gift of civilization. But that act of giving was actually another attempted theft, of culture. Our culture—the way we think and act—is who we are. In trying to steal other people’s cultures, those early Europeans were trying to eliminate them.
I said this opportunity was missed and this theft attempted five hundred years ago, b
ut both of these things have happened time and again through the centuries. They continue as our federal government forces European-Canadian legal systems—based more on checking things off a gruesome list than storytelling or sharing—onto victims of residential school abuse. They continue as the same federal government tries to force its singular vision of First Nations education on diverse peoples across Canada. These efforts are rooted in denial as we refuse to call this history what it was: attempted cultural genocide.
Residential schools are the most enduring and visceral example of Euro-Canada’s violent attempted cultural genocide. We stole and culture-washed 150,000 children. At least 3,000 were killed. Based on Indian Affairs reports on disease, the real number of deaths is 30,000 or more. The survivors suffered lifelong injury. Many survived the school only to succumb to its ghosts, eventually taking their own lives to escape the pain.
As with any holocaust, fully understanding residential school is impossible. Even looking at one school, there are thousands of stories that often disagree with each other. Many stories have been lost. The school’s creators are all dead, as are most of its teachers. The children have long since grown into adult versions of what they once were. Some are no longer with us. The ones who remain are now Elders. The foggy picture we get of the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School, from the archives and survivor stories, is one of much horror, an atrocity.
As with any other atrocity, there are more people to blame than fingers to point. It is perhaps satisfying to shun the church, as many survivors have done, or point at the cruel ways of dour nuns. We can condemn the impracticality of an archaic hierarchy of faith that isolates clergy inside a priest’s inherently explosive God complex then put him in charge of children. We can also point toward a racist past, as mainstream Canadians often do. But in the school’s thirty-seven years, the Maritime settler population never seemed to mind the idea of taking kids from their homes, communities, and cultures and making them live where they’d learn from nuns and priests to think and act white. The press described the school as a service to the “poor Indians,” and the public applauded. When Father Mackey’s brutal lashing and permanent scarring of nineteen boys made the news in 1934, the papers mocked the children for so audaciously complaining. The governments and churches were in fact enacting, in Shubenacadie and other residential schools, the will of the people—Euro-Canadian people anyway. When Shubenacadie’s first students arrived, Canada was sixty-two years old. It was high time the Indians got with the program, and Shubenacadie would do the job.
Assigning blame is easy and there’s lots to go around between federal bureaucrats and church representatives, RCMP officers, media representatives who didn’t look deeply enough, child-welfare workers who were happy to let someone else take care of the Indians, scientists who saw starving, beaten down people as a research opportunity. The more you look at the school, the more you will find went wrong. And the more people involved. Ultimately, assigning blame becomes, while perhaps cathartic for some, less important than understanding that the residential school was based on supremacist assumptions that First Nations and Inuit peoples were outdated, a precursor to civilized man. And as long as those assumptions linger, bureaucrats, religious people, scientists, educators, bleeding heart social workers, journalists hunting out good stories, all of us are likely to be complicit in the next atrocity against a people we think need help, because we believe we are just a little bit, or a lot, further along in our development than they are.
We prefer to think that’s all in the past. We shake our heads at the tragedy of it. What a horrible thing it was, and we thank God it’s over. We now know better. We fail to acknowledge though that we—Euro-Canadians that is—have been the ones to benefit from colonial policies, including residential schools. We forget, or never learned, that we benefited from every policy that took First Nations land, pushed them onto reserves and into poverty, and forced them to try, in vain, to be more like us. We benefited from the land that was taken. And every dollar not spent on the reserves—for schools and other needs—was one spent on us.
We also fail to consider that all the steps forward in First Nations education and child welfare have been forced on the government by determined and resilient Aboriginal leadership. In the Maritimes, survivors of Shubenacadie pushed for the school to be closed in 1967. Nationally, survivors from many schools worked hard to create Indian Control of Indian Education first as a policy paper and next as a driving philosophy of change. Nora Bernard and many other fearless survivors pushed until the federal government finally acknowledged its role in the residential schools and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. John Jerome Paul and many other Mi’kmaq have been tireless language and education warriors, making Mi’kmaw Kina’matnewey the most successful First Nations education program in Canada.
Aboriginal Affairs, representing the interests of mainstream Canadians, has resisted most of these changes or pushed for more regressive policies. It continues to use its money to control First Nations. In that respect, nothing has changed since the residential school era. There is an often-quoted myth that Aboriginal people get all the benefits of a social welfare system without paying the costs. In reality, in terms of money spent per person, they are the most underserved demographic in Canada by a wide margin. As a result, while Canada consistently ranks in the top ten nations on all international standards of quality of life, the same standards applied to Aboriginal peoples in Canada would rarely put them in the top fifty.
When money is invested in reserves or systems supporting Aboriginal peoples, the supported are expected to surrender a degree of autonomy, to become more like the rest of us Canadians. It is the same, ongoing attempt at cultural theft. For 500 years, settler Europeans and their Canadian descendants have missed the chance to learn from and work with Aboriginal peoples as true partners. It would perhaps be naïve to expect that to change now. But then, surely no one on Mi’kma’ki 501 years ago expected giant ships to appear on the horizon and change everything.
If an organization of nuns whose members once terrorized, culture-washed, and abused First Nations children at either end of Canada can learn to follow the Mi’kmaw lead in reconciliation efforts, there is hope. If the victims of education as a tool of oppression can transform that tool to reclaim language and culture, there is hope. And if we can learn to recognize that Euro-Canada tried to destroy the hundreds of original cultures of this land, there is hope that we can end the ongoing attempts by our government to control and assimilate Aboriginal peoples, and move forward together along a more just, sustainable path.
Sources and Acknowledgements
This book is possible in part because of the good work of those who have long contemplated the residential school system, and particularly the Maritime school. I wish to acknowledge Micmac News journalist Conrad W. Paul who, in 1978, in the face of formidable resistance from the Sisters of Charity and his newspaper’s own printer, courageously blew the whistle on truths about the school that had been known but little discussed within the community for years. Freelance journalist Heather Laskey followed suit in the 1980s and was the first to bring survivor stories to the mainstream press, including CBC Radio.
In 1992 Isabelle Knockwood’s germinal work on the school, Out of the Depths, was published. It was an account of experiences of survivors, including her story and those of the people she interviewed. It contains some of the most vivid descriptions of life at the Shubenacadie school for the children. Four years later, the Mi’kmaw poet Rita Joe released her autobiography, Song of Rita Joe, which added important personal details of life at the school and its long-term impacts on her life. These two works provide an important sense of life in a dreary institution for those of us who weren’t there.
To understand how the school came to be, its reason for existence, the men behind it, the thinking of the churches and government bureaucrats, I drew from letters in Library Archives Canada, reports in the pro
vincial archives, and important thesis work by numerous students over the decades, especially Marilyn Thomson-Millward, Kathleen Kearns, and Briar Dawn Ransberry. For their efforts and reports contextualizing the school’s place in our history, I am grateful. I also relied on academic work of those striving to understand historical and contemporary Mi’kmaw childcare and education, including Pamela Rogers, Barbara Muriel Johnson, Roberta D. Clark, Jeff Orr, Fred Wien, and the twenty-four other authors of the critical Wen:de report, Jane MacMillan, Martha Walls, Nancy MacDonald, and Judy MacDonald.
I am particularly grateful to the many people who granted me their time, wisdom, perspective, and personal stories as I wrote this book. Wayne Nicholas opened up to me, a complete stranger, about his experiences at “Shubie,” because he believes this shameful part of Maritime history remains too little known, and he hopes this book will be part of an ongoing effort to acknowledge and perhaps eventually reconcile. I much appreciate the honest assessments of Mi’kmaw education efforts from John Jerome Paul, who was also kind enough to recommend numerous useful reports and papers on the subject. Ben Sichel did the same, and along with Mike Isaac helped me understand efforts to improve education with Mi’kmaw content in Nova Scotia public schools. Lisa Lunney Borden and Stephen Augustin helped me better understand Mi’kmaw science and math, historically and contemporarily. And in an interview she granted several years ago, Jean Knockwood was the first to get me excited by the idea of on-reserve schools run by and for Mi’kmaq.
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