Be sure to read the outstanding take disputing the widespread assertion that 150,000 Indigenous children were forced to attend the government-funded Indian Residential Schools that operated between 1883 and 1996. It was written by outstanding researcher Nina Green, editor and publisher of the comprehensive research site Indian Residential School Records.
It has never been published elsewhere and is posted below with no paywall.
There are even more reasons to dispute the “forced to attend” assertion than the key one offered by Nina Green below.
Compulsory Indian Residential School education for status Indian children, if no local Indian Day School was available for their attendance, was only enacted by an amendment to the Indian Act in 1920, almost four decades after the first federally funded Indian residential schools were built.
Department of Indian Affairs records establish that many Indian bands petitioned the federal government to build residential schools for their children.
Only orphans and children from broken, negligent, or abusive homes were forced to attend these boarding schools in the absence of a fully developed foster care or group home system like the one now in place, increasingly run by aboriginals themselves, that annually rescues thousands of children across the land from unhealthy, neglectful, or abusive households.
Department of Indian Affairs records establish that the RCMP, the agency that from 1927 on was responsible for apprehending truants and children not attending Indian residential schools, rarely did so. The RCMP's role was primarily confined to searching for runaways to prevent them from suffering severe injury or death.
School absenteeism and truancy were high but rarely, if ever, punished.
In tiny communities widely scattered in remote areas, there were not enough students to support a reserve-based Indian Day School. Parents who wished their children to learn how to adapt to the changes wrought by European colonization were obliged to send their children to an often distant residential school.
Still, no more than one-third of Status Indians attended residential schools for an average of 4.5 years.
One-third of indigenous children had no education at all during the entire 113-year period in question, the greatest tragedy of all.
As Nina Green's findings prove, if an Indian Day School or ordinary public school was nearby, students could be enrolled there instead, depending on the wishes of their parents or other guardians.
Detailed documentation of all of these assertions can be found here, here, here, here, and here.
Because this is an original opinion piece published nowhere else, please distribute it as widely as possible.
“150,000 forced to attend” is a recently-invented myth
Nina Green
September 17, 2024
The thousands of Department of Indian Affairs documents which record applications signed by parents requesting that their children be admitted to residential schools, the reports by physicians of medical examinations to assess the children's health prior to admission, and the correspondence between the schools, the local Indian Agents, and the federal government regarding the admission and discharge of individual students from residential schools establish beyond question that the claim that 150,000 children were 'ripped from their parents' arms' and forced to attend federally-funded Indian residential schools is a recently-invented myth.
The relevant documents in the Library and Archives Canada School Files Series microfilms are available here.
However, few Canadians have the time to consult thousands of historical documents to disprove the myth that parents were forced to send their children to residential schools - a myth which has been actively promulgated by the federal government, the media, Indian activists, and the churches.
So let's take an easily accessible example of a parent who wasn't forced to send her children to residential school - Mildred Gottfriedson.
Mildred and her husband Gus Gottfriedson raised a family of twelve children and several foster children, and throughout her life Mildred was active in many community organizations. In 1964, she was named Mother of the Year, and in 1977 was awarded the Order of Canada.
According to this short video about her daughter Muriel Sasakamoose, and according to testimony from her son Garry Gottfriedson, Mildred Gottfriedson simply decided that her children were going to attend public schools in Kamloops in the 1940s.
And they did. All of them.
It underscores the fact that the reserve (and, of course, the residential school on the reserve) are so close to downtown Kamloops that the Gottfriedson children could walk from the reserve to downtown (so how could 215 murders have taken place right under the noses of Kamloops citizens?).
The quarterly returns for the Kamloops Indian Residential School for the years 1943-1952 show no Gottfriedson children enrolled at the Kamloops Indian Residential School apart from Frank Gottfriedson, Register #740, who was enrolled in September 1943 at the age of seven, but was discharged a few months later.
Mildred Gottfriedson then enrolled Frank in Stuart Wood Elementary School in downtown Kamloops. Class photos show him in Miss Ross's Grade 3 class in the 1945-1946 school year, in a split Grade 3-4 class in 1946-1947, and in Miss Diveen's split Grade 4-5 class in the 1947-1948 school year.
Mildred's son Robert Gottfriedson, later a professional rodeo rider, also received all his education in Kamloops public schools, a fact which was considered worthy of mention in his 1991 obituary in the Calgary Herald (see attachment):
Bob was the first native Indian, along with his sister, to attend a public school in Kamloops, subsequently receiving all his education in the school system.
And as she explains in the video mentioned above, Mildred's daughter Muriel also went to public school, enrolling at Stuart Wood Elementary at the age of eight, and graduating from Kamloops High School in 1959. Muriel married Peter Sasakamoose, brother of NHL hockey player, Fred Sasakamoose, and, like her mother, went on to a life filled with accomplishments. In April of this year she was awarded an honorary degree from Thompson Rivers University.
In a letter to the editor of Kamloops This Week on 8 June 2016, a friend of Muriel's and a fellow student at Stuart Wood Elementary recalled the Gottfriedson children walking to school from the reserve across the river:
The Gottfriedson kids walked across the Red Bridge to attend Stuart Wood as Gus Gottfriedson did not want his kids to attend the residential school.
“Ripped from their parents' arms” and forced to attend residential school? Obviously not.
The claim that 150,000 children were forced to attend federally-funded Indian residential schools is a myth, as this and thousands of other examples establish.
This essay is completely accurate. The shocking thing is that the CBC has all of this information, but still continues to publish the falsehood that “150,000 were forced to attend”. Murray Sinclair told the world years ago that “for seven generations nearly every indigenous child was forced to attend a residential school”. This claim was and is completely false, but the CBC is still publishing that falsehood.
There was a time when I supported "Friends of CBC" because I thought C B C was the only voice within the country that covered all of our population. I sure don't think that any more. I see it as the propaganda arm of the Liberal Government. Recently I watched an interview between Jody Raybould and Ian Hanomansing discussing the 'mass graves' story. For half an hour they repeated diatribes they knew very well were bald faced lies. I contacted CBC asking for a retraction....I am still waiting for a reply.