Abstract
Some books define their themes and narratives by the brilliance of their cover illustrations. Such a work is The Sleeping Giant Awakens with Kent Monkman’s explicit painting depicting Catholic priests and nuns, reinforced by constables of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in their ‘Mountie’ uniforms – etched into the colonial consciousness of postwar children like me as incorruptible and brave heroes – ripping indigenous children from their desperate mothers and carrying them away to Canada’s ‘Indian Residential Schools’ for instructional barbarism, language assassination, physical, mental and sexual abuse and cultural genocide.
Such monumental human loss for a child and the alienating process of coercive acculturation was poignantly expressed in 1988 by the Mi’kmaq poet and elder of Cape Breton Island, Rita Joe: I lost my talk The talk you took away When I was a little girl At Shubenacadie school. You snatched it away: I speak like you I think like you I create like you The scrambled ballad, about my word. Two ways I talk Both ways I say, Your way is more powerful. So gently I offer my hand and ask, Let me find my talk So I can teach you about me.
The book’s author, David B. MacDonald, describes himself as a ‘settler academic’, a non-indigenous scholar whose mother was an immigrant from southern Trinidad and whose father’s Scottish lineage goes back via Nova Scotia, to the Highland Clearances. He grew up in the Prairie city of Regina, Saskatchewan, where he remembers the ‘stark segregation’ of fresh white suburbs and neighbourhoods of indigenous poverty in a province where 4.5 per cent of the population and 81 per cent of prison inmates are indigenous, and where one of the survivors of the last federally funded indigenous schools wrote that: ‘It is their system, not ours. Every institution belongs to them.’ For MacDonald, the narrative of Indian Residential Schools ‘was not just a “dark chapter” in Canadian history – it IS the story of Canada – and the system was integral to our country’s formation’.
His quest is to establish that this history is a story of genocide, with its primary intention ‘to kill the Indian in the child’, or, as the strategy was first articulated in the US by the pioneer army officer Richard Henry Pratt who developed the Carlisle Industrial School in Pennsylvania from 1879: ‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man’. MacDonald shows conclusively how such schools in Canada were formed by the kidnapping and forcible transfer of indigenous children, alienating them from their families, languages and cultures and exposing them to intensive levels of disease, mental illness and suicide. In the process, this ‘brought about genocide without international warfare or industrial mass murder’. It was, he shows, another violence of delayed destruction that still corrodes and resonates in the heart of the nation. And why? Because as Duncan Campbell Scott, deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs from 1913–1932, lucidly declared: indigenous people themselves and their many forms of survival and resistance were ‘a real menace to the colonization of Canada’.
The ‘sleeping giant’ to which MacDonald refers in his title is, of course, the indigenous people themselves who, despite their centuries of governmental oppression, have never stopped resisting politically, culturally, educationally, forcing admissions and confessions from the ruling powers to the level of the official apology of the Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2008 and the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. MacDonald asserts that his use of the term ‘genocide’ is ‘neither hyperbole or an unwarranted accusation’, but more ‘a carefully considered analytical tool to make better sense of Canada’s past and aspects of its ongoing aspects into the present’. Certainly genocide is what it was and is: the wholesale and willful destruction of a people’s culture, as defined by MacDonald, ‘the bedrock from which the people and their ideas flourished’. All carefully managed in their residential schools by Canada’s churches; Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian, agencies of a violent assimilation strategy expressed by Ted Quewezance of the Keeseekoose First Nation. He spoke about the impact of St. George’s Anglican School in Lytton, British Columbia in his statement to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission: ‘This is genocide Mr. Commissioner. We as little boys and girls lost our innocence. We lost our lives, our identity, our language, our culture and our family.’
The book’s significance goes beyond Canada and these atrocities. It illustrates a universal truth, that the destruction and strategies of deliberate ignorance of a suppressed people’s culture comprise a common form of intellectual and actual genocide. As Sivanandan reminded us in the title of his epochal Sri Lankan novel, ‘When Memory Dies’ as part of the vast imperial enterprise, history risks dying too, killed by those who hold power but also who hold fear of its living truth and humanity. This is a reality as fundamental to the teaching of history and culture in schools in now-times Britain, as it is in the rest of Europe and the Americas.
As for the consciousness and resistance of indigenous peoples in Canada and their struggle to take back everything stolen from them over centuries, a 13-year-old Mohawk boy expressed the mindset of a people in a poem he wrote in an Ontario reservation school in 2006: I am quiet I speak, talk and shout, but soon silenced I am. I was once great, filled with pride and glee Now I have been spoiled with carelessness And procrastination, That all have displayed My heart and blood. The rivers, lakes, the creeks and ponds, It’s all the same, Filled with garbage and put away to shame. They never clean me to show that they care, Just putting down garbage and poisoning me more. I cry for help without any success, Putting more trash on me, I’m wasting away. Though some are wicked, tainted with malice, I will never give in, surrender I will not! They say many things, most are lies, Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’m right, The one thing I know, there will be a fight.
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