The Theme of Secret Path The story of “Secret Path” follows Chanie Wenjack, an Indigenous boy who ran from residential school and passed away of starvation, and one of the 150,000 victims of the residential school system created by the Canadian government intended to assimilate the Indigenous population of Canada during the 1800s. This graphic novel incorporates various emotions within the music composed by Gord Downie by using specific lyrics and adding connotations within the lyrics. Gord Downie was a Canadian rock musician, songwriter, writer, and activist. He was committed to Canada’s First Peoples and created a fund that persists as part of the legacy left by him to date. The combined illustrations by Jeff Lemire cleverly describe values …show more content…
Punishing and prohibiting the use of Indigenous languages was one of the methods used by residential schools to shred the students of their identity. This was done to “convert” First People to Canadian citizens and to have them practice Canadian culture. We can see in the graphic novel that all students are monitored constantly as the priests supervise Chanie and the other students even in the shower depicting the controlled environment within the schools allowing for the complete annihilation of inherited culture. As depicted in one of the panels, all students had their hair cut, an important figure in Indigenous culture representing spirit and the connection between man and earth. We can see this affecting Chanie personally as we can see his sad and emotional expression in the panel of the following occurrence. Residential schools promoted the idea that being an “Indian” was shameful and prohibited from practicing cultural traditions. Additionally, school locations were meticulously planned to be in areas far from Indigenous communities. As an example, Chanie had to attempt an astounding 600-kilometer journey to reunite with his father at Ogoki Post. Due to these circumstances, there was little to no social interaction leading to
With the last residential school shutting down just over twenty years ago, Monchalin’s examination of the impacts of residential schools illustrates the prejudice and discrimination against Indigenous peoples within Canada’s recent history. Not far in Canada’s past is the use of the word “civilizing” to describe the forcing of children from their homes in attempt to eliminate any affiliation with their Indigenous culture and traditions. Based on this, while reading through this chapter I feel that it is important to note the terminology used in the descriptions of these schools and the abuse that took place within them. By looking at the terminology used throughout the chapter, it can be seen just how discriminatory and bigoted Canada’s history
Theodore Fontaine is one of the thousands of young aboriginal peoples who were subjected through the early Canadian system of the Indian residential schools, was physically tortured. Originally speaking Ojibwe, Theodore relates the encounters of a young man deprived of his culture and parents, who were taken away from him at the age of seven, during which he would no longer be free to choose what to say, how to say it, with whom to live and even what culture to embrace. Theodore would then spend the next twelve years undoing what had been done to him since birth, and the rest of his life attempting a reversal of his elementary education culture shock, traumatization, and indoctrination of ethnicity and Canadian supremacy. Out of these experiences, he wrote the “Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools-A Memoir” and in this review, I considered the Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd publication.
“The School Days of an Indian Girl,” a novella by Zitakla-Sa explores the impact of familial loss on Native Americans during the Compulsory Indian Education Act of 1891. The Compulsory Indian Education Act of 1891 was a law enacted by the US Congress that enabled federal officers to legally take young native children from their families and homes on their reservations. The young native children would then be shipped to boarding schools to assimilate into Western European ways, enduring radical beliefs and abuse. Zitakala-Sa recounts her first-hand experience of being stripped away from her family and placed in a boarding school. The author meticulously alludes to the young age at which she is taken away from her family in the quote: “Among us
Boarding School Seasons by Brenda J. Child offers a look into the boarding school experiences of many American Indian students. Child favors unpublished sources such as letters to give an uncensored inside look into boarding school experiences. However, she also includes other sources such as school newspapers, oral history collections, photographs, biographies, United States government publications, and annual reports. Government boarding schools were created to help the American government gain more control over Indians and to push the Natives to adopt the white ways of life such as language, skill, and education. While integration was the ultimate objective, Child sets out “to show that even with the challenges of cultural assimilation and a devastating land policy, American Indian people, even children, placed limits on assimilation and also defined and shaped the boarding school era.” (viii) The boarding schools designed to tear American Indian families apart did not succeed in isolating children from their tribes, but created bonds and
THE NATIONAL RESEARCH CENTRE ON INDIAN RESIDENTIAL SCHOOLS. (n.d.). Retrieved April 05, 2016, from http://www.trc.ca/websites/trcinstitution/index.php?p=815
According to John A. Macdonald, the goal of residential schools was to “take the Indian out of the child”. This quote is a perfect example of how the Europeans thought that they were superior to the Indigenous population. In the 1600’s, the Europeans discovered Canada. Relations between the Europeans and the Indigenous people were very civil up until this point. In fact, the power in this relationship was first with the Indigenous people because they had the fur trade and the greater population. Gradually, the power started to shift the opposite way, and with that, the Europeans began to colonize Canada. Soon after, the Europeans started to pity the Indigenous people. They believed that their eurocentric beliefs were above that of the Indigenous, and decided to force the Indigenous population to assimilate into their culture. This is where residential schools stem from: the ideology that the Europeans
For the time in which Residential Schools were attended, children were affected physically and emotionally. Primary objectives of the system were to remove, then isolate children from family and cultural influences, and to assimilate into dominant culture (Harper). This underfunded system alienated children from their families for extended periods of time, prohibiting acknowledgement of Aboriginal heritage, culture, or to speak mother tongues
Residential School’s were introduced back in the 1870’s, they were made to change the way native children spoke their languages and how they viewed their cultures. The residential school system in Canada was operated by the government, where the native children were aggressively forced away from their loved ones to participate in these schools (1000 Conversations). The government had a concept, where they can modernize the native children, aged of three to eighteen and extinguish the aboriginal culture. In the twentieth century the Canadian Public School’s had arrived and had improved treatments than residential schools. In Contrast, the treatments within these schools were both different, whereas Canadian public school students had more freedom than residential school students because children were taken away from their families. However, the treatment in these schools were different and some what similar. Even though Residential schools and Canadian Public schools were similar in some form, there were numerous amounts of differences in how the children were taught, how they were treated and how their living conditions were like throughout these schools.
After the Europeans invaded Canada, the assimilation of the aboriginal peoples began to boom. Europeans believed that their way of life and actions were the right and only way of life within Canadian people. In the early 1880’s, a system of education began forming, in order to “kill the Indian in the child”(1). This system of education is further known as residential schooling. This schooling did not so much provide students with mathematics, reading and writing, but forced them into an English lifestyle completely abandoning their native way of living, their religion and beliefs, their language, history, and culture.
After days, months, years of being physically and sexually abused, shamed, bullied, breaking ties with their families and having their identity stripped because they were “different”; let anxiety and depression start to get ahold of them. “Separated from their parents, they grew up knowing neither respect nor affection. A school system that mocked and suppressed their families’ cultures and traditions, destroyed their sense of self-worth.”(TRC Introduction). This introduces the idea of depression and anxiety beginning to unfold as words can not explain the pain and hurting they went through. “Children who had been bullied and abused, carried a burden of shame and anger for the rest of their lives. Overwhelmed by this legacy, many succumbed to despair and depression. Countless lives were lost to alcohol and drugs.”(TRC Introduction). There is no doubt that the Canadian government was racist towards the First Nation Peoples. The racism lead to the school system and the Survivors depression and anxiety. “The residential school environment was deeply racist. It presumed the intellectual inferiority of the children and it demeaned Aboriginal culture, language and parenting. The students were treated as if they were prisoners who required strict discipline simply because they were Aboriginal.”(TRC 227). Racism and the feeling of anger
History shows that Residential School created a big problem for the Indigenous people. Furthermore, children were ripped from their traditional homes and families, they didn’t receive the same education as the other children in regular public schools. Students were discourage from pursuing further educations. Not to mention, the, the emotional, physical and sexual abuse they suffer from the hands of their abuser
Residential schools are a dark past of Canadian history which many people are not educated about. Residential schools were the extremity of day schools and were traumatizing and disturbing. A residential school was an institution for the first nations children where the child was forced to attend to learn about Christianity, and be taught the English language and the European ways. The residential schooling system was run by the Canadian government. The idea of the schools was to “kill the Indian in the child”. The meaning of this assimilation is that the purpose of the establishments was to take away all of the culture and identity of the First Nations children. In the peaks of residential schools, the Europeans believed highly that the first
Barnes and Cole (2006) explain, “Aboriginal children who attended Residential Schools were leaving culturally rich societies where family was central, complex religious beliefs were the basis for numerous ceremonies, and knowledge was passed from one generation to the next through oral traditions; the children had little, if any, exposure to a language outside of the language of their societies” (p. 19).The government thought that Aboriginal children needed to be civilized as their communities had their own way of raising and educating children. By forcing attendance to Residential Schools, this resulted which resulted in Aboriginal children losing their culture as they were robbed of the opportunity
Previously, government agents, missionaries, and educational reformers such as Pratt employed various enticements and coercions to compel Indian parents and tribal elders to enroll their children in the new boarding schools. Benefitting from two hundred years of sporadic efforts to civilize Indians, the schools proposed “to change them forever,” as one superintendent in Oklahoma declared regarding his Kiowa students. Success was contingent upon separating children as young as practicable from the contaminating influence of their tribes. To the often-repeated maxim that the “only good Indian is a dead one,” Pratt countered, “Kill the Indian in him and save the man” (Warren,
From 1863 to 1996, many Indigenous child were forced to attend residential schools, where they were separated from their families and culture and experienced neglect, abuse and trauma (Bombay, Matheson, & Anisman, 2011, p.367). This essay will explore the history and purpose of residential schools, how it impacted Indigenous children and families at the time of the events, and how to this day it still affects them. Indigenous Residential Schools impacted the First Peoples of Canada physically, mentally and emotionally which resulted in their loss of identity, culture, spirituality, and traditions in the past and present.