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Mothering & Residential Schools
Rose McCormick
In less than one hundred and fifty years, Canadian Residential Schools served to tear apart the individual lives and larger cultural and family structures of First Nations Peoples all over what we now call Canada. Underpinned by the ideology of‘ kill the Indian, save the child’, the Residential Schooling system, a series of boarding schools found all across the nation( s), systematically removed Indigenous children from their homes and communities. These schools, operated by members of the Catholic church of Canada, taught Indigenous children‘ dominant Canadian values’ as a way to erase centuries of Indigenous knowledge, traditional cultural practices, and a wealth of Native languages.
In teaching‘ Canadian’ values to the students, these schools hoped to eradicate what various Canadian leaders perceived over time as the‘ Indian problem’, i. e.: the existence of many Indigenous communities of rich culture, knowledge, and languages over the entirety of the‘ newly’ settled land. This method of teaching not only stripped Indigenous children of their sense of self as Indigenous peoples, it also willfully and purposefully tore apart Native families. In these schools, education only truly came about upon separating Native children from their families, who were understood to be uncivilized and detrimental to the advancement of a‘ new’ society.
For Indigenous mothers, having their children forcibly removed and placed into institutions had dire consequences. In taking away their children, the Canadian government told Indigenous women that their ways of parenting were unacceptable, uncivilized, and a hindrance to the furthering of‘ Canadian’ progress. On a cultural level, Residen-