Indigenous Studies: Indigenous Peoples of Canada: Residential Schools

Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system.

In this first comprehensive history of these institutions, J.R. Miller explores the motives of all three agents in the story. He looks at the separate experiences and agendas of the government officials who authorized the schools, the missionaries who taught in them, and the students who attended them. Based on extensive interviews as well as archival research, Miller's history is particularly rich in Native accounts of the school system.
Co-winner of the 1996 Saskatchewan Book Award for nonfiction. Winner of the 1996 John Wesley Dafoe Foundation competition for Distinguished Writing by Canadians. Named an 'Outstanding Book on the subject of human rights in North America' by the Gustavus Myer Center for the Study of Human Rights in North America.

Andrew Woolford analyzes the formulation of the "Indian problem" as a policy concern in the United States and Canada and examines how the "solution" of Indigenous boarding schools was implemented in Manitoba and New Mexico. The genocidal project inherent in these boarding schools, however, did not unfold in either nation without diversion, resistance, and unintended consequences. This Benevolent Experiment offers a multilayered, comparative analysis of Indigenous boarding schools in the United States and Canada.

The authors of this book argue that existing accounts of Residential Schools in various Canadian and Aboriginal media systematically obscure and misinform about the facts and their interpretation; that, rather than undoing the harm done by Indian Residential Schools, present day accounts maintain and extend the abominable era.

Shattered Spirits in the Land of the Little Sticks traces the impacts of residential school experiences within the life of a male survivor of Woodland Cree heritage. Dr Michell also places these experiences within the context of residential schools and colonization in Canada, and describes the lasting impact of Residential school abuse at the family and community levels.

The Education of Augie Merasty offers a courageous and intimate memoir of life in a residential school.
Selected as the Saskatchewan Library Association's 2017 One Book One Province book.

In a series of chronological vignettes, Arthur Bear Chief depicts the punishment, cruelty, abuse, and injustice that he endured at Old Sun Residential School and then later relived in the traumatic process of retelling his story at an examination for discovery in connection with a lawsuit brought against the federal government. Late in life, he returned to Gleichen, Alberta on the Siksika nation--to the home left to him by his mother--and it was there that he began to reconnect with Blackfoot language and culture. Although the terrific adversity Bear Chief faced in his childhood made an indelible mark on his life, his unyielding spirit is evident throughout his story.

Xat'sull Chief Bev Sellars spent her childhood in a church-run residential school whose aim it was to "civilize" Native children through Christian teachings, forced separation from family and culture, and discipline. In addition, beginning at the age of five, Sellars was isolated for two years at Coqualeetza Indian Turberculosis Hospital in Sardis, British Columbia, nearly six hours' drive from home. The trauma of these experiences has reverberated throughout her life. The first full-length memoir to be published out of St. Joseph's Mission at Williams Lake, BC, Sellars tells of three generations of women who attended the school, interweaving the personal histories of her grandmother and her mother with her own. She tells of hunger, forced labour, and physical beatings, often with a leather strap, and also of the demand for conformity in a culturally alien institution where children were confined and denigrated for failure to be White and Roman Catholic. Like Native children forced by law to attend schools across Canada and the United States, Sellars and other students of St. Joseph's Mission were allowed home only for two months in the summer and for two weeks at Christmas. The rest of the year they lived, worked, and studied at the school. St. Joseph's Mission is the site of the controversial and well-publicized sex-related offences of Bishop Hubert O'Connor, which took place during Sellars's student days, between 1962 and 1967, when O'Connor was the school principal. After the school's closure, those who had been forced to attend came from surrounding reserves and smashed windows, tore doors and cabinets from the wall, and broke anything that could be broken. Overnight their anger turned a site of shameful memory into a pile of rubble. In this frank and poignant memoir, Sellars breaks her silence about the institution's lasting effects, and eloquently articulates her own path to healing.