A national crime : the Canadian government and the residential school system 1879 to 1986
For over 100 years, thousands of Aboriginal children passed through the Canadian residential school system. Begun in the 1870s, it was intended, in the words of government officials, to bring these children into the "circle of civilization, " the results, however, were far different. More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse. Using previously unreleased government documents, historian John S. Milloy provides a full picture of the history and reality of the residential school system. He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. In the early decades, the system grew without planning or restraint. Despite numerous critical commissions and reports, it persisted into the 1970s, when it transformed itself into a social welfare system without improving conditions for its thousands of wards. A National Crime shows that the residential system was chronically underfunded and often mismanaged, and documents in detail and how this affected the health, education, and well-being of entire generations of Aboriginal children.
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- ISBN: 9780887557897
- Physical Description 440 pages.
- Edition Anniversary edition.
- Publisher Winnipeg, Manitoba : University of Manitoba Press, 2017.
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Bibliography, etc. Note: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
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Summary
A National Crime : The Canadian Government and the Residential School System
With the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, more Canadians than ever are aware of the ugly history of Canada's residential schools. Nearly twenty years earlier, UMP published John Milloy's A National Crime, a groundbreaking history of the schools that exposed details of the system to thousands of readers. Using previously unreleased government documents accessed during his work for the Royal Commission on Aborginal Peoples, A National Crime was one of the first comprehensive studies of the history of residential schools, and it remains a powerful indictment of the racist and colonial policies that inspired and sustained them.A National Crime convincingly argues that rather than bringing Indigenous childern into what its planners called ""the circle of civiziliation"" the schools more often provided an inferior eduction in an atmosphere of neglect, disease and abuse. As UMP marks its fifth decade, and Canada struggles towards truth and reconciliation, it is fitting to reissue A National Crime -one of our most influential publications and a cornerstone of our Indigenous studies list-with a new foreword by a scholar in the vanguard of Indigenous historians in Canada. Mary Jane Logan McCallum's foreword sets the story of A National Crime in the context of Indigenous historiography and her own family history, from the broad level of national Indian policy to its impacton individual lives lived.