In the early 1990s, the Commissioners of the Federal Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples crossed the country holding public hearings. Many people, leaders of Aboriginal organizations but ordinary men and women too, stepped forward - witnesses to the too often depressed conditions of their communities and to the scarred lives of friends, family members and neighbours. They spoke of a history of government wardship, economic marginalization and aggressive Christian missionization, forces that had integrated them into Canadian society but only as an impoverished minority in their own land. “It is,” Chief Eli Mandamin told the Commissioners, “the damage inflicted on our First Nations cultures by everything from epidemics to boarding schools to systemic legal discrimination against our cultures that brought our Aboriginal people to the point where it has been difficult to survive.”

In those few words, Chief Mandamin described brilliantly the arc, and consequences, of Aboriginal-Euro Canadian relations. From confident, self-sustaining nations - with the capacity to take care of their needs - the education of their children, the care of the aged and infirm - on the basis of beliefs and values which by language, ceremony and spirituality bore the burden of culture from one generation to the next, they became the neglected step-children of the Canadian state. Both “Step” and “children,” because while they have been, as individuals, legally citizens like all others since 1947, they have been, unlike others, held in a state of near perpetual wardship, prevented from governing their own communities by the light of their own cultures as other Canadian communities have done in a country proud of its reputation for tolerance based on a decentralized federation that, from its inception in the 1860s, was meant to shelter and nurture cultural and regional difference. Certainly, neither Aboriginal communities nor, sorrowfully, many Aboriginal individuals, have been either nurtured or nourished by the Canadian state, by their inclusion in the wider Canadian family. For others in that federal family, there has been a partnership in confederation, for First Nations people only the restrictive power of the Indian Act and the oversight of the Department of Indian Affairs. They have been of the family, but not truly in it.

Elements of this profound tragedy were in a sense collateral, the result of the simple fact of European presence and the persistence of western culture in North America - extensive18th century depopulation triggered by the onslaught of European disease, marginalization by the capitalist appropriation of the traditional resources of land and sea, or the influence of a pervasive popular culture which through radio, television and the internet reaches into even the most remote communities. Much of it, however, was the result of mindfully overt government, and government-sponsored, activity. Micmac Captain, John Joe Sark, asserted before the Commission, that there has been a persistent government “policy of destroying our language and culture.” Some 5000 miles to the west a Coastal Nuu-Chah-Nulth Councillor, Charlie Cootes, termed those same policies a joint church-government “attempt to wipe out our heritage, our very existence as a distinct people. In a word, they attempted genocide.”

Such policies, ethnocidal at least, are now recognized, even by some in government, as having brought scores of Aboriginal communities from independent self-sufficiency to a sorrowful state of dependence, and, most critically, dysfunction. All of us here know the outward signs of what was the deep spiritual wound of colonialism, the dreadful statistics - infant mortality, death from violent accidents, suicide, tuberculosis, AIDS, drug and alcohol abuse, low levels of income and education, poor housing and sanitation and high levels of incarceration and child apprehension - a persistent condition that has done much, National Chief Phil Fontaine told the Commission, “to undermine the integrity of our people.”

As powerful as those statistics are, it is even more sobering to realize that those colonial policies targeted, in the main, the most vulnerable sector of the Aboriginal population-Aboriginal children. For the Canadian masters of Indian Affairs, and indeed for Victorian social engineers throughout the British empire, child centred policy in the colonial context had a clear and compelling logic one not wholly unfamiliar to us here today. One of the elemental constructs in the western discourse on “children” is that of “our future.” Thus “children” are, in a real sense, the stuff of dreams, a foundation for visions, plans and planners. From at least the mid-19 th through the 20 th centuries, for the dreamers, the futurists, those interested in social reform, social security, social purity and so forth, the content, and the particular articulation, of “family and child” were most often the starting point for their projects, the vehicle for moving from a problematic present to an envisioned better future.

And thus it is not surprising that the Aboriginal child, its heart, mind, and its cultural conformation, was of particular interest to those whose self-appointed mission was to reshape Indian cultures in the image of god, yeoman farmers, or useful urban laborers. As we know no policy was more central to that process than residential schools. Such education, would the Minister of the Department, Frank Oliver, wrote in 1908, “Elevate the Indian from his condition of savagery” and make “him a self-supporting member of the State, and eventually a citizen in good standing.”

Unfortunately, in thought and implementation, there was in this campaign to civilize children, in “the circle of civilized conditions” where the child was to receive a first rate education and “the care of a mother” (or so ran the rhetoric of the school system) an inherent savagery. The project intended as a necessary first principle to cut the artery of culture that ran between the generations, to, in the parlance of the day, “kill the Indian in the child.” For the child to be properly educated the family had to be dismantled - the child needed to escape the baleful influence of savage parents and community, what was called the “influence of the wigwam,” and made white, in thought, deed and language. A school with a standard provincial curriculum taught in English and imbued with the values of western culture and the strict oversight of the children’s every waking hour would reset the child’s ontological clock - it was social alchemy ... from dross they would become white gold.

Here was, despite the stated good intention of Indian agent and missionary, the heart of darkness. The system quickly proved unable to reach its goals - educating children and finding a place for them in the evolving settler society. It was, moreover, neglectful, careless and destructive. It often did not provide the necessities of life - nourishing food, adequate clothes and shelter. It was a site for catastrophic rates of infectious disease and a much elevated level of childhood mortality. It was a site for persistent, physical, psychological and sexual abuse. It produced the most negative social, psychological and culture consequences not only for the children who experienced the schools but for the families and communities they returned to and as we know for the generations who followed.

I have often been asked how a system whose existence was marked by overwhelming evidence of sustained violations of the criminal code, of provincial child welfare legislation, provincial discipline codes, sanitary codes and federal health regulations designed especially for the schools, to name just a few, could escape public sanction, could persist unchecked for over a century, particularly as many of these conditions were open secrets (coroner’s inquests) and were well-known in the Department of Indian Affairs and to Churches operating the schools, throughout the life of the schools. It was not until 1986, that the litigation storm broke and continues to build.

I have no answer except to say that, for most of the confederation period, Indian business was private business, unseen business, cloaked in public disinterest, in an odd way it operated outside the law, certainly with almost no legal oversight. Once we moved on from the fur trade, and the Indian treaties physically moved Indian people aside allowing an unrestricted path to national development, national attention, imagination, energy and public funds were consumed by nation building. Indians, not in anyway relevant to that national project, were placed in a separate administrative box from other Canadians, a federal responsibility handed over to the Indian Affairs Department, which was given complete control over every aspect of community and family life. All of this was to Victorian Canadians no less than as it should be, because it was indeed, moral, godly. In its 1891 annual report, the Department proclaimed that it carried a “sacred trust with which Providence has invested the country in the charge of ... the aborigines committed to it” and the Prime Minister himself, Macdonald, pledged, that the country would do its duty; it would “do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian peoples in all respects to the inhabitants of the Dominion.”

Over the years the Department insisted on that isolation - other Federal Departments were warned off. All other servicemen during and after the Second World War were dealt with by Veteran Affairs, but Indian service men had their wartime allowances and post-war benefits were commandeered by the Department. The RCMP were warned off as well. One officer for example having seen the horrid condition of one of the schools and condition of the students wrote tellingly: “If this was a white school, I would have the principal in court tomorrow.” Such reports from the Commissioner of the Force had been rebuffed by the Deputy Superintendent of Indian Affairs. And effortlessly the Department, despite its private knowledge, turned aside public scandal and criticism. To questions asked in Parliament about the death from exposure of Charlie Wenjack who had run away from school, a death written up in McLeans, the Minister said that yes it was a tragedy but if Charlie had only told the principal what his problems were, they certainly would have been quickly remedied. This was a well-established pattern public defense of the system and private critique and admission. In the Wenjack case, the Department admitted in confidential correspondence that when children ran away, and many did, it was often from abusive treatment but suggested that the remedy might be to give students survival training. No mention was made of what sort of education school administrators should be given.

The decision, in 1948, to close the residential schools, in favour of integration, was not the end of the cultural assault on communities and children. Under post-war, welfare state principles, promising increased social security and services for all Canadians, the Department’s focus moved to the reserves. In 1964, it brought forth its first economic community development program since the 1830s. But more critically, in line with general social development strategies, common throughout the nation, it adopted, in the early 1950s, a socio-cultural program focused on families, particularly on the role of women as mothers, and as a part of that, it built upon an existing community- run child welfare program. It hired 8 social workers, for all of Canada, and after parliament opened the door of the reserves to provincial legislation, it contracted across the country with CAS’s for the delivery of services. Not all provinces cooperated. The program bore, many of the familiar marks of the residential schools. It was persistently underfunded and thus a child welfare organization which combined municipal, provincial and federal treasuries relied at the coal-face, at the working end, on charity funding, community chests, united way etc to make up persistent short falls in funding. This could not be done and thus as in the residential funding story, it was communities, families and children that bore the consequences of that fiscal fact. The most time-consuming and thus costly part of the child welfare program, working with families to prevent family failures to ensure that damaged families could heal, could remain together, was neglected in favour of what could be done because, relatively, it was quick and cheap - child apprehension and removal of children from communities.

A range of factors, beyond the question of funding, combined, in the post-war period, to produce what we know as the 60s scoop, - child apprehension rates soared, and as a result the child welfare system amounted to a child removal system which replicated the residential school consequences for thousands of children taken into care. They lost family and community and in all likelihood, culture and language. In many regions of the country communities in the 40s and 50s struggled to meet child care challenges, but in the 1960s, those precipitating factors completely undercut community capacity. They were - the failure of reserve economies with escalating unemployment rates, high levels of disease, particularly tuberculosis, increasing levels of dysfunction, family break down, alcohol use, family violence, much of it caused by the return to communities of the largest residential school generation as the residential schools were closed, and a mushrooming population. By 1961, 46% of Aboriginal people were under the age of 15 while the percentage of care-givers, the grand-parental category, did not grow - in fact was smaller than the national average. A final and invisible factor, as research did not bring it to public recognition until the 1980s, was, in the 50s 60s and 70s then but a ghostly shadow in the files - fetal alcohol syndrome. Families weakened by all these factors and communities could not cope, nor could under-funded CAS manage the crisis on best-practice principles . .. the scoop was unavoidable. The injury done to communities by the residential schools was carried forward by the child welfare system continues

Historians, of course, talk about the past, we are not very good with the present and probably as hopeless in forecasting the future as are economists. To talk about moving to a better child welfare future is hardly my business and my own culture, Scottish, is normally one of grizzly hard-boiled cynicism. And there is here a lot of room for cynicism about the possibility of moving beyond a relationship, a set of policies and attitudes that has not been and is not now healthy for Aboriginal Canadians or for Canada itself. Certainly there is a resistance to change. Drawing a line from the 1982 constitutional recognition of Aboriginal rights, through the failed constitutional conferences to the ignored Royal Commission report would seem to lead to that conclusion. To dismantle the constructs of colonialism is a difficult task - for it is more than a legislative-policy infrastructure - it is carried forward unconsciously in the socialization of citizens, preserved as attitudes as common sense ways of seeing the word, talk to our children in schools.