Education Work: Canadian Schools and the Emergence of Indigenous Social Movements

EDUCATION WORK: CANADIAN SCHOOLS AND THE EMERGENCE OF INDIGENOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS BY CAMERON RIOPELLE DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2017 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Monica McDermott, Chair Associate Professor Zsuzsa Gille Associate Professor Rebecca Sandefur Associate Professor Jodi Byrd Associate Professor Michael Kral, Wayne State University ABSTRACT This dissertation explores 20th century Canadian assimilationist educational systems and the emergence of contemporary indigenous social movements. It focuses on the ways in which schools contributed to transformations in identities and the division of labor in indigenous communities at the local scale, and, conversely, how the state transformed the division of labor for indigenous peoples. Finally, I examine how shared experiences and symbols from resistance to these schooling processes were used by indigenous activists in the construction of indigenous social movements pushing for indigenous land rights and sovereignty. Each substantive chapter of this dissertation reflects a different site that helps illustrate these processes at work. First, I detail the genocidal consequences of transformations in the division of labor in the first half of the twentieth century. Next, I examine vocational training programs for Residential School students and the ways in which labor, gender, and morality interacted in the mid-twentieth century. I then study efforts by a local indigenous community to have a day school built after forced relocation to a reserve without a school. After that, I study racialized integrated schooling efforts and the use of quota systems for the admittance of indigenous children in public schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Finally, I look to the historical moment of the White Paper of 1969 and its effect on indigenous social movements, particularly in the context of news media. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………....1 CHAPTER 2: HISTORICAL BACKGROUND……………………………………………….....9 CHAPTER 3: GENOCIDAL CONSEQUENCES OF COLONIAL CAPITALISM……………46 CHAPTER 4: MAKING GOOD: VOCATIONAL TRAINING……………………...................84 CHAPTER 5: THE BUILDING OF THE MATTAGAMI DAY SCHOOL..………………….116 CHAPTER 6: WORKING THE RACIAL RATIO: INTEGRATED SCHOOLS……………..135 CHAPTER 7: THE WHITE PAPER AND INDIGENOUS SOCIAL MOVEMENTS………..181 CHAPTER 8: CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………212 iii CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION The end purpose of this dissertation is reconcile two incontrovertible facts. First, in the colonial context of North America, indigenous peoples have been subjected to genocide, assimilation, disease, and a shift from mercantile to corporate capitalist modes of production, among other things—all the while working to maintain their daily lives. Second, beginning in the 1960s—and out of a rich tradition of resistance—there arose several allied indigenous social movements and social organizations in North America. My research question, at the very broadest, reflects these facts and links them together as so: what is the relationship between assimilationist and resistance in colonial capitalist contexts? In the Canadian context, schooling systems were central to cycles of assimilation and resistance. Schooling systems played contradictory roles, with often distinctive outcomes, in fulfilling the state’s assimilationist agenda. All the while, they worked to enfold indigenous communities into exploitative relationships with colonial capitalism, while sharpening certain boundaries between indigenous and exogenous communities through processes of racial formation that followed hierarchical colonial patterns of meaning- and difference-making. In 1998, the Canadian government allocated 350 million dollars for community healing projects through the Aboriginal Healing Foundation (BSHS, 2013, 7; Milloy, 1999). In 2008, a series of complaints filed to the Canadian Human Rights Commission led to the creation of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2008. The focus of research on residential schools has been largely to treat survivors of abuse and neglect, rather than focus on longstanding social and structural problems (Boarding School Healing Project, 2013; Milloy, 1999; Chrisjohn, Young, 1 and Maraun, 2006). This narrative has been criticized by scholars and activists for being a way for the Canadian government to “move forward” from focus on its treatment of indigenous peoples (Taylor, 1994; Coulthard, 2007), ignoring contemporary problems in favor of narratives of healing and wellbeing (Castellano, Archibald, and DeGagné, 2008), and differentiate reconciliation with indigenous self-determination goals (Corntassel and Holder, 2008). In her work States of Injury, Wendy Brown (1995) argues that “‘freedom’ has shown itself to be easily appropriated in liberal regimes for the most cynical and unemancipatory political ends” (5). Following Stuart Hall and Hannah Arendt, Brown suggests that our ideas of freedom reflect “contemporary modalities of domination” (6), constructed “in opposition to whatever is locally and ideologically conceived as unfreedom” (6). She finds that we often discuss rights and freedoms as ideals that are abstracted from their historical and local contexts, which “not only prevents appreciation of their local and historical character but preempts perception of what is denied and suppressed by them, of what kinds of domination are enacted by particular practices of freedom” (6). Goals of freedom necessarily become reactionary: Initial figurations of freedom are inevitably reactionary in the sense of emerging in reaction to perceived injuries or constraints of a regime from within its own terms. Ideals of freedom ordinarily emerge to vanquish their imagined immediate enemies, but in this move they frequently recycle and reinstate rather than transform the terms of domination that generated them…Such images of freedom perform mirror reversals of suffering without transforming the organization of the activity through which the suffering is produced and without addressing the subject constitution that domination effects (7). Identities are constructed in paradoxical ways in regards to goals of freedom, with the paradox “in which the first imaginings of freedom are always constrained by and potentially even require the very structure of oppression that freedom emerges to oppose” (7). In other words, freedom, when institutionalized, requires submitting to a particular mode of domination. This is particularly important in a historical context in which “Western leftists have largely forsaken 2 analyses of the liberal state and capitalism as sites of domination and have focused instead on their implication in political and economic inequalities. At the same time, progressives have implicitly assumed the relatively unproblematic instrumental value of the state and capitalism in redressing such inequalities” (10). The capitalist state’s role as a site of domination goes ignored in language of equality and redress. Following Foucault and Marcuse, Brown argues that “disciplinary power is extraordinarily effective in "colonizing" allegedly free subjects, for example, those highly individuated, self-interested subjects produced by liberal cultures and capitalist political economies” (19). In liberal states, efforts to gain freedom require subsuming oneself to the “regulatory force» of the state,” (28), often through demonstrating proof of wrongdoing in legal contexts. This demonstration of “woundedness” constructs certain kinds of subjects to be treated so that the issues can be closed—after all, the burden of proof lies with the subject harmed, and even if evidence proves wrongdoing, it still can ignore the more structural consequences of colonial institutional programs of assimilation and control. The construction of the “woundedness” narrative is also a construction of a certain “evidential politics of presence” (Kuletz, 1998: 67) in which the proof of wrongdoing requires following a certain established scientific-legal process of knowledge legitimation in which indigenous peoples often do not constitute an adequate sample size. What, then, can be gained by shifting the focus (even in the study of assimilationist schooling) away from the legacy of residential schools and toward the broader historical context in which they were seen as necessary? By refiguring this discussion, the dialog that ensues can go beyond healing those damaged by schools. I conducted qualitative analysis of archival data and print media from three transitional periods: the “era of retreat” (pre-1945), the “era of integration” (1945-1971), and the “era of self- 3 determination” from the 1970s until the present. The data itself proved to be largely unindexed and difficult to access. Often, the microfilm and microfiche would have scanned empty folders. Other times, requests for data would be denied to protect living subjects. Most problematically, the data management of the archives having to with indigenous peoples is a political issue: part of the Truth and Reconciliation agreement was that the archival data would be indexed and returned to indigenous populations; however, this did not happen: “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), which was created by that deal, argues that the government is not living up to its part of the bargain by failing to retrieve and organize as many as four million

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