This post is part of a series entitled “Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education.” You can find the introduction here.
This post and series discusses Indian residential and day schools. Please take care as you read. If you are a Survivor or intergenerational Survivor of residential or day school and you need help, there’s a free 24-hour support line. Call 1-866-925-4419. Additional resources are available here.
This is an excerpt from Antoine Mountain’s memoir, From Bear Rock Mountain: The Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor (2019).
Besides being forcibly separated from our parents for ten months out of every year, the timing of the separation was all wrong. The months of the year we were taken to the residential schools, from September, just when our People would return to the land for winter, was traditionally a time for young boys to learn the art of hunting and for girls to learn how to sew with caribou and moose hides.
We returned home in June to go out to the fish camps, yes, but we boys were not expected, nor even allowed, to handle the fish as the girls did. They, in turn, didn’t have access to the hides needed to make moccasins, gloves, and other clothing for most of the year.
We all grew up not knowing what it meant to be a part of a society that respected those who could provide for the community. Of course, our parents were happy to have us back, but they had been pushed to the side, in a very real way, as far as our cultural education was involved. They had no way of bridging the emotional and psychological gaps to our way of being, which was largely one based on survival.
Even our grandparents were helpless to step in to help. The churches saw to it that anyone who still had anything in the way of traditional medicine ways was shunned, with their savage and evil ways.
In time, all we could do was go through the motions of life as we knew it before—even to the point of being glad to be going away again.
The kind of deep-seated lack of identity that we developed is something we yet have to resolve, and perhaps never will.
We were definitely guinea pigs caught in a foreign culture that only valued the way we could think, our intellect. All First Nations cultures place just as much importance on how much a person cares for others, the ability to do a great number of physical activities on the land, and a spiritual connection to the Dene way of life.
What makes the residential schools a genuine cultural genocide is that our own People were eventually made to feel that they did not have a right to their own children and, by extension, to the future of our First Nations, be it Inuit, Métis, or Dene.
What makes the residential schools a genuine cultural genocide is that our own People were eventually made to feel that they did not have a right to their own children and, by extension, to the future of our First Nations, be it Inuit, Métis, or Dene.
Feature Image: Antoine Mountain, Bear Rock Relatives.
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