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 discuss 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.
In her interview for the “Land, Memory, and Schooling: Environmental Histories of Colonial Education” series, Anishinaabe water protector Taylor Galvin notes that her family lost language, ceremonies, songs, and teachings when “family members were forcibly removed from community to residential school.” She calls it “kind of ironic” that it was through education in university that she found a pathway to reclaiming and revitalizing her community’s teachings. In the University of Manitoba’s Master of Science in Environment and Geography program, Galvin’s work focuses on Indigenous science, storytelling, and the conservation of sturgeon; she is also co-instructing a course on Indigenous-led conservation. She connects her experience of post-secondary education to the Honourable Murray Sinclair’s comment that education got us into the mess of the Indian residential school system and education is key to getting us out. Galvin’s post offers a promising example of the potential for educational systems to hold up and learn from Indigenous knowledge systems.
“Galvin … offers a promising example of the potential for educational systems to hold up and learn from Indigenous knowledge systems.”
Other posts in the Land, Memory, Schooling series demonstrate the degree to which education in residential schools came at the direct expense of education within communities. In an excerpt from his memoir, for example, Dene artist and scholar Antoine Mountain observes, “Besides being forcibly separated from our parents for ten months out of every year, the timing of the separation was all wrong.” He and his peers missed returning to the land in the fall and learning the arts of sewing hides and hunting. They also lost the opportunity to grow up in a society that values “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.” Mountain describes residential schools as part of a “foreign culture that only valued the way we could think.” Over time, the residential school system “pushed to the side” parents and grandparents in the “cultural education” of children, resulting in cultural genocide.
Settler-Anishinaabe historian Jackson Pind argues in his post about law and schooling as tools of dispossession that the Curve Lake Indian Day School functioned in a similar way to residential schools, dismissing or punishing Anishinaabeg knowledge. Children arrived at school “from households that lived close to the Land: harvesting rice, hunting deer, tapping maple trees, and fishing year-round.” At school, children “were forced to speak English. They were taught the history of Canada but not of their own people. They learned to sit still, not to follow the rhythm of the seasons.” One form of education served not to supplement but to supplant another.
Settler historian Robert Olajos’s post about the history of the Bear Island Indian Day School asserts that in the first half of the twentieth century the seasonal day school worked well for the Teme-Augama Anishnabeg families whose children attended during the summer months. In part because the school operated only during the time of year when the community was already gathered on Bear Island, many families welcomed the school’s provision of a Euro-Canadian education, which they believed would help children prepare to navigate a changing world. Olajos’s post provides an example of a settler education system that worked within rather than displacing the Anishnabeg education system, at least for a time. Families continued their seasonal practice of gathering in the summer and spending winters on their individual family hunting territories. It wasn’t until 1950 that the provincial government mandated year-round public-school attendance on Bear Island, a move that signaled the end of “a model of co-existence” that “allowed children to receive instruction in the summer without sacrificing their culture, language, or land-based education in the winter.”
Gwich’in and Anishinaabe scholar Jack Hoggarth points out in his post that “Indian Education… was never just about education. It was about assimilation.” Attempted assimilation took place, for example, through training students to become “working farmers and agricultural laborers, fortified…by Christian principles, feelings and habits.” Although Hoggarth didn’t attend residential school, he describes the lessons of his private catholic elementary school as upholding similar colonial ideas of Indigenous inferiority and white/Christian superiority. He credits the Land and his family members for teaching him differently: “how to live with the Land, how to track, hunt, and listen.” As a result, assimilationist policies and practices failed. Hoggarth says, “I speak my language, I offer semaa, I have built and sat within teaching lodges, and I carry teachings passed down through generations.” His story, he says, is “about Indian Education, but it is also about Land-based resistance.”
Reading this series of blogposts gives me serious pause as a settler educator dedicated to anti-racist feminist research and teaching in a Canadian university. Almost every post offers an example of how a colonial education interrupted an Indigenous education. It wasn’t necessarily that residential and day schools kept children away from their territories, although sometimes children were forced to go to school hundreds of kilometres from their homes. It was that residential schools enforced different relationships between people and Land than those which kids learned in their own families and communities. Instead of following seasonal flows and learning to live sustainably in their territories, children had to participate in the work of transforming diverse territories into farmlands and resource hinterlands.
“In the present-day, ten years after the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, and as the environmental effects of colonial policies are increasingly recognized and felt across the globe, it is urgent for all of us to respect Indigenous teachings about the place of human beings in relation to the rest of the planet that sustains all of us.”
In the present-day, ten years after the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action, and as the environmental effects of colonial policies are increasingly recognized and felt across the globe, it is urgent for all of us to respect Indigenous teachings about the place of human beings in relation to the rest of the planet that sustains all of us. Galvin’s post suggests it is possible for educational institutions that are rooted in settler colonialism to change, in part by accepting that what they have to offer is not the only, or the most important, source of education. What forms of education we can create together across difference within relationships of mutual respect are works in progress whose outcomes we cannot yet know. We do know, however, that we cannot continue to plunder the planet and expect that our descendants will have a place to call home. The contributors to this series offer Indigenous-led educational options that all of us would do well to heed.
positionality/community connection statement: I am a settler of mixed European origin and a guest in Winnipeg, which is within Treaty One territory and the original lands of Anishinaabeg, Ininiwak, Anisininewuk, and Dakota Oyate, and the National Homeland of the Red River Métis. I didn’t learn about the history of settler colonialism until near the end of my undergraduate degree; learning about this history and its present-day effects led me to continue on to graduate school in order to learn more. When the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began, I followed its movement as an interested person invested in listening to Survivors’ stories of their experiences. I sat on the floor in the packed conference room when the Commissioners released the TRC report, and have taken seriously what the Honourable Murray Sinclair said there, which is that there is a place for all of us in the TRC’s Calls to Action. Since then, as an educator cross-appointed in History and Women’s and Gender Studies, I have done my best to learn from and highlight the voices of Survivors of residential schools as well as of Indigenous writers, filmmakers, and educators as they lead the way toward decolonization and environmental justice.
Feature Image: Portion of Christi Belcourt and Isaac Murdoch, Thunderbird Uprising, 2019. Photo credit: Amber Ostermann, University of Manitoba.
Jocelyn Thorpe
Latest posts by Jocelyn Thorpe (see all)
- Education Need Not Mean Assimilation - March 2, 2026
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- Indian Residential Schools: An Environmental and Gender History - April 27, 2016
- Truth and Reconciliation - October 24, 2012