Originally Posted by CliffFletcher
I’ll steelman this.
Before the 1930s, there was no public welfare state in Canada (or anywhere else). People who couldn’t work had no money. People who had no money could not house, clothe, and feed themselves. They had to rely on the charity of religious organizations (the only charities that existed at the time) or they would literally starve. Or more accurately, be weakened by malnutrition to the point where they would readily succumb to the diseases like TB, measles, or cholera that were rampant. Infant and maternal mortality rates were 30 or 40 times higher than today. In short, it was often fatal to be poor or without work.
Most Canadians worked in agriculture or resources. They farmed, logged, worked in mines. The rest did work that required numeracy and literacy - store clerks, bank tellers, teachers, etc.
Native Canadians for the most part lacked those skills. Efforts were made to teach them farming, but it didn’t take. The vast majority were innumerate and illiterate. Many did not speak english or french. They, and their children, could not participate in the regular job market.
So why couldn’t they just be left to live traditional lifestyles? Because those traditional lifestyles were no longer viable. A substinence hunter-gatherer lifestyle can support only very small numbers of people in a climate as hostile as Canada. And most of the big game was gone, hunted to near-extinction like the buffalo. There was fishing, and still a market for trapping (though not what there once was), but not enough to support indigenous populations that were growing due to modern medicine - which while still dire by our standards, enabled populations to grow larger than pre-columbian population levels that were effectively capped by horrific infant-mortality rates and periodic famines.
So keeping the old ways was not an option, even if cultural bigotry wasn’t in play (which it certainly was). The status quo at the time was dire, with endemic poverty in indigenous communities. That left assimilation as the best hope for future generations to improve their conditions in life. The thinking was that since their parents did not have modern work skills, and were themselves illiterate and often did not speak english or french, they could not raise their children to function in the modern world. For that, they would need to be immersed and raised in modern institutions where they could learn to read and write and make themselves employable.
Public government-run education was not widespread before the 30s, not in rural Canada anyway. Townsfolk in rural areas would often raise their own private money to build school houses and hire teachers. The state did not have anything close to the reach and resources it has today.
So the job of educating native children was outsourced to an institution that did have that reach - the Catholic Church. The Church had been running schools for centuries before the first government-schools were opened, and still ran most schools in Quebec right into the 50s. It happened to also be an institution with literally medieval notions of discipline, pedagogy, and suffering. And, we know now, rife with sadists and abusers.
Anyway, that’s a good faith attempt to present the thinking at the time. It’s tempting to imagine that the world’s evils are carried out only through deliberate malice (which undoubtedly played a part in the residential school system). But most of the evil done in the world has been carried out by people who believed they were doing good.
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