Cuthand: Reminders of residential schools strong as term starts

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This week, families observed the ritual of attending the first day of school. For First Nations parents, it is a day of mixed feelings. On one hand, we now have schools on reserve that are run by a majority First Nations teachers and support staff.

In the past, the start of a new school year was a time of fear and loneliness as families were ripped apart and the school-age children sent away to boarding school. Not all children were sent away; some communities had day schools which covered their elementary education. Further education meant going to a residential school.

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The grain trucks would drive around the reserve and scoop up the children. Later, school buses would be used. According to the Indian Act, school attendance was mandatory up to age 16 or a parent could face jail time. There were no options and religious boarding schools were the only choice.

Sometimes the schools were far away, and the children wouldn’t see their parents until spring. The lucky ones might get home for Christmas. Sometime the institutions would be in the middle of the reserve, and they could see their parents’ homes, but they couldn’t go visit.

Parents who wanted to be close to their children would camp near the school and visit their children through a fence. The government enforced the pass system to keep the parents away from their children.

Gradually the residential schools were closed or became outdated and dangerous. The wood-structured ones burned down, sometimes with disastrous results. In 1927, the school at Beauval burned with the loss of 19 male students and a nun. The school at Delmas was burned down by the older students.

In the 1960s, the federal government developed a system of joint school agreements where students from reserves were bused to the local towns.

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There was no representation on school boards, no native studies and once again the parents were left on the sidelines with no control. In most cases the local town had a diminishing student population, while the reserve population was growing.

It was an untenable situation, and it blew up in the face of the government. In many cases the chiefs and councils had requested a school on the reserve as promised in the treaties. The government dismissed their requests out of hand, citing the joint school agreements.

Finally, the people took direct action and children were withdrawn from the joint school, leaving the government with the prospect of creating a new school and breaking the local agreement. In the 1970s, reserve schools consisted of portable classrooms, trailers and other makeshift structures.

On the surface the school strikes created chaos, but behind the scenes it was an exciting time. We had the rare opportunity to create an education system from the ground up. At the local level, the people were hiring teachers and creating institutions out of trailers and portable classrooms.

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We had the Saskatchewan Indian Cultural Centre, which became the developmental institution that created the new curriculum and incubated the future Indigenous Institute of Technology and the First Nations University of Canada.

Our post-secondary institution created an Indigenous teacher education program along with the University of Saskatchewan that was also creating the Indian Teachers Education Program.

Gradually the new schools were built, and the teachers and staff were trained. Now we had Indigenous teachers, support staff, janitorial workers and bus drivers.

In the past, our people were denied these jobs, but with the schools on reserve it opened employment and both the education level and standard of living increased.

In was once customary for the parents and elders to educate their children. Years of lack of control took this away and the parents had to learn to get involved. We’ve come full circle and once again have control over the education of our children. But there is still a lot of work to do. We need to improve the retention rate.

We need to improve our capacity in the professions, the sciences and medicine. There are growing opportunities in the trades and we need to take advantage.

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We have come a long way, and we did it ourselves. We had to drop the control of the churches and government and do it our way.

Doug Cuthand is the Indigenous affairs columnist for the Saskatoon StarPhoenix and the Regina Leader-Post. He is a member of the Little Pine First Nation.

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