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The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by LSE Theses Online The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools: A Meaning-Centred Analysis of the Long Road to Apology By Eric Taylor Woods A thesis submitted to the Department of Government of the London School of Economics and Political Science for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. London, January 2012 1 The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools Declaration I certify that the thesis I have presented for examination for the MPhil/PhD degree of the London School of Economics and Political Science is solely my own work. The copyright of this thesis rests with the author. Quotation from it is permitted, provided that full acknowledgement is made. This thesis may not be reproduced without the prior written consent of the author. I warrant that this authorization does not, to the best of my belief, infringe the rights of any third party. 2 The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................. 4 Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 5 Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 6 Chapter 1 ........................................................................................................................... 13 Chapter 2 ........................................................................................................................... 29 Chapter 3 ........................................................................................................................... 54 Chapter 4 ........................................................................................................................... 79 Chapter 5 ......................................................................................................................... 104 Chapter 6 ......................................................................................................................... 126 Conclusion ...................................................................................................................... 153 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 164 3 The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools Acknowledgements The completion of this thesis would not have been possible without the generous support of my supervisors, John Hutchinson and Eric Kaufmann. For the duration of the project, they were unstinting in their willingness to provide helpful comments and critique. I am also deeply indebted to Jeff Alexander and Ron Eyerman for commenting on earlier drafts and for inviting me to participate in the life of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale. I am grateful also for the help provided by Nancy Hurn and Laurel Parson during my sojourn in the Anglican Church of Canada Archives. Thanks are also due to Alan Hayes for arranging office space at Wycliffe College. I will also be forever thankful to Farah Jamal for her emotional, psychological and intellectual support. Finally, and most importantly, I want to acknowledge the love and support of my parents, Dennis and Florence Woods. It is to them that this thesis is dedicated. 4 The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools Abstract The Canadian residential school system, which operated from the 1880s until the 1970s, was a church-state enterprise designed to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture and was characterized by poor sanitation and widespread abuse. Recently, it has been the object of the most significant and most successful struggle for redress in Canadian history. However, for most of its long history, the many failings of the residential school system went unacknowledged by the organizations formerly involved in its operation. In this thesis, I seek to explain why. In doing so, I provide a framework for further study on the residential schools and on comparable cases. To resolve my question, I conduct a comparative historical analysis of the Anglican Church of Canada, which was formerly an important partner in the operation of the residential schools. My data is drawn from a wide range of archival material. My analysis is framed by a meaning- centred approach to social behaviour referred to as the Strong Program. In sum, I argue that the initial meaning of the school system as a sacred enterprise hindered acknowledgement of its failings. For the church to acknowledge the failings of the residential schools, such a meaning needed to be replaced with a new meaning emphasizing the tragic consequences of the school system. This could only occur once the balance of social power had shifted away from the defenders of the sacred meaning and towards its detractors. 5 The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools Introduction The Canadian residential school system, which operated from the 1880s until the 1970s, was a church-state enterprise designed to assimilate Aboriginal children into Euro-Canadian culture and was characterized by poor sanitation and widespread abuse. Recently, it has been the subject of the most significant and most successful struggle for redress in Canadian history. However, for most of its long history, the many failings of the residential school system went unacknowledged by the organizations formerly involved in its operation. In this thesis, I seek to explain why. In doing so, I hope the thesis will provide a framework for further study on the residential schools and on comparable cases. To resolve my question, I conduct a comparative historical analysis of the Anglican Church of Canada, which was formerly an important partner in the operation of the residential schools. My data is drawn from a wide range of archival material. My analysis is framed by a meaning-centred approach to social behaviour referred to as the Strong Program. In this introductory chapter, I briefly provide the context for my question and introduce the approach that I will engage with to resolve it. Following this, I provide an outline of how I will resolve my question over the course of the chapters that comprise this thesis. The Indian Residential School System After being ceded the vast north-western territory of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson’s Bay Company, as prescribed in the Rupert’s Land Act of 1868, the Canadian administration acquired de facto sovereignty over 100,000 Aboriginals and Métis whose life-worlds differed sharply from the British cum Canadian civilization that it hoped to establish in the new territory. To resolve this ‘problem’, a country-wide system of residential schools that were intended to assimilate Aboriginal children into the lower classes of Euro-Canadian culture was established. It was funded by the federal government and staffed by several mainline Christian churches whose missionaries had already long been involved in Aboriginal education, including the Catholic Church in Canada, the Anglican Church of Canada, the Presbyterian Church of Canada, and the United Church of Canada. The fundamentals of the new school system were based on a similar system already in operation in the United States, although in Canada it was much more ambitious and carried out on a much wider scale. In Canada, the school system was optimistically represented by federal 6 The Anglican Church of Canada and the Indian Residential Schools administrators as the central mechanism by which the ‘heathen red man’ in Canada would be ‘civilized’. In sum, the logic of the residential schools was as follows: by removing Aboriginal children from the influence of their parents, and placing them under the care of Christian educators, it was thought that the children would more quickly be assimilated. In other words, separation of parent from child was thought to be central to the predicted success of the residential schools. The Indian residential school system – as it has come to be known – existed from roughly the 1880s until the 1970s. In the 20th Century, Aboriginal children across Canada were legally mandated to attend a residential school. In the 1930s, over 75 per cent of Aboriginal children in Canada were enrolled in a residential school. In total, over 150,000 Aboriginal children spent some time in a residential school, where they were taught to reject the culture of their parents and embrace Christianity, Euro-Canadian culture and the British Empire. Often students were placed in a residential school against the will of their parents. Attempts by students to run away from the schools were common. In the 1990s, thousands of former students publicly came forward with allegations that they had suffered a variety of physical, sexual and psychological abuses whilst at residential school. This was immediately succeeded by a concerted political campaign for redress. Around this time, social researchers began to be more involved in the study of the residential schools. As I will discuss in more depth in the literature review in Chapter One, their findings tended to indicate that the failings of the residential schools went far beyond the issue of abuse. Some of these findings are as
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