How Did Literacy Come to be "Cultural Genocide"?
We need without fear to to ask questions about Canadian residential schools and "cultural genocide". Those who established the schools intended two things: to educate aboriginal people by imparting literacy and academic knowledge, and to draw aboriginals into the mainstream as employed non-dependent members of society. Would this change them? Undoubtedly. (Education is supposed to change people.) Was that "genocide"? That buzzword hadn't been invented when native schools were set up, and wouldn't have been understood. Education was education, and boarding school a common institution.
Does that mean nothing bad ever happened in them? No strict discipline, no separation from families? No, it doesn't mean that. Pedagogical theory was not what it is today, and the churches who ran many of the schools had additional agenda of their own, which now seem questionable.
Presumably some pupils did learn to read, however. Did they learn math, and something of the world -- its history, its geography? Undoubtedly. Was that bad, from an inclusion-and-equity point of view? Presumably universal education has social value? Or do we really now think general literacy is "cultural genocide"?
Reason suggests that perpetuating an underclass of unemployable illiterates excluded from schooling would have been a lot more like cultural genocide than was establishing places where academic skills were learned.
Maybe they were under-funded and some staff were under-qualified: that we can picture. Can we not also picture that dedicated well-qualified individuals also joined residential school staffs because they had a teaching ideal of their own? A personal career goal, a desire to contribute?
There used to be abundant writings (histories, diaries, correspondence) describing students' positive memories of residential school -- but you won't find them now. They've been excised from the record and from library shelves; they don't fit present ideology. Censorship is no sin in present political ideology; in fact it's becoming a national pastime. Why?
Is it fair that teachers who were caring and gifted at their jobs should be lumped in with those who were the opposite? That is what we do through hysterical outbursts every time anyone suggests there might have been principled educators who went to remote lonely parts of Canada to teach first nations kids for commendable reasons. They sure didn't go for high pay and creature comforts. In their worldview, literacy mattered. We are the ones who demote it, who parrot ideological slogans out of fear of being "racist", and of being de-platformed from jobs and social media. Tell those early educators that they "stole" aboriginal languages (which had no written form at all, of course, and weren't shared among the warring tribes themselves), and they would think their descendants had gone mad.
We've gone unjust. We've marginalized and victimized many now-anonymous teachers who might have enriched the lives, in many ways, of some first nations students.
Our favourite national pastime is toppling statues of people who for better or worse built our (passably democratic and prosperous) country. Maybe a generation from now they'll erect a Memorial to the Unknown Teacher, the one who inspired a kid here and there but whose name we have made a point of erasing from the history books. That erasure will come back to bite the ideologues one day, for there's no reconciliation with censorship.
