My Life in Two Indian Residential Schools

A message to free subscribers and other readers

The beautifully and compassionately written reminiscences of Rodney Clifton about his experiences working in two Indian Residential Schools found below present a stark contrast to the testimonies of most former students at the informal hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of these boarding schools.

It is reproduced here in it entirety for paid subscribers with his kind permission.

Approximately 6,500 testimonies were given by former IRS students at TRC gatherings. It is likely that most of these testifiers were self-selected from the 28,000 claimants who were given financial awards totaling $3.2 billion as part of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement for the mainly unverified abuse they claimed to have been subjected to in their boarding schools.

An objective observer might conclude that “truth” is both complex and often difficult to discern especially when linked to large financial rewards.

A critical observer might conclude that human memory is a fallible and often shifting phenomenon tempered by the interplay between conscious and unconscious motivations.

A perceptive observer might conclude that these testimonies were based on the delusional phenomenon called “mass psychosis.”

A skeptical observer might conclude that only carefully verified and cross-examined recollections by actors who are seeking no social or material rewards for their testimonies should be believed.

Objective, critical, perceptive, or skeptical observers might consider the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and everything that followed from it highly questionable, if not totally alien to truth telling.

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Rodney Clifton is a free-thinking but humane professor emeritus of education, University of Manitoba, and a senior fellow at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy. A highly published author, his most recent book is From Truth Comes Reconciliation: An Assessment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (2021), with Mark DeWolf. The book is available for purchase here.

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According to the introduction to the essay written by the editor of the journal where it first appeared:

Canadians seem to think they know all about their country’s discredited Indian Residential Schools. They’ve certainly been made painfully aware by governments, Indigenous organizations and leaders, academia and the mainstream media of the official narrative – a litany of sheer horror. But what was life at and around these schools actually like? At a time when “lived experience” is all the rage, the voices of the dwindling surviving number of the many thousands of people who once worked in them have fallen silent. Rodney Clifton is one, and his lived experience includes falling in love with and marrying a Siksika woman. In this clear-eyed and deeply humane account, Clifton bares his heart in recounting his times working as a young man in the residential schools system in Alberta and the Far North.

Paid subscribers can now read this outstanding narrative below.

Others need to decide whether they are willing to take out a modest and easily cancelled paid subscription to do so. Five dollars down the drain would be their only penalty for jumping over the following paywall.