Restoring Cultural Herniation

Restoring Cultural Herniation

Britton Jacob-Schram ER 326 Traditional Systems of Land and Resource Management

Dr Brenda Beckwith 23 March 2012

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Above: Thomas Moore, photographed in traditional Cree attire and at the Regina Indian Industrial School, circa 1897 (Saskatchewan

Archives Board).

White domination is so complete that even American Indianchildren

want to be cowboys. It’s as if Jewish children wanted to playNazis.

—Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race

Traditional systems of management will never function at the same

level they did prior to European colonization. Every intention

to restore these systems, whether for land management, resource

protection or conservation, will result in a handicapped

facsimile of what once was. A number of obstacles present these

systems from being restored, including, but not limited to, an

exponentially growing human population, invasive species, global

climate change, increased anthropogenic infrastructure, and the

over-arching concept of human “ownership” of land.

I will argue, however, one of the greatest reasons for this

deterioration in system functioning is the colonial wedge and the

distance it drove between First Peoples, their traditional

ecological knowledge and their culture. Arguably the sharpest

part of the European colonial wedge came in the form of the

country’s residential schools. Such institutions robbed native

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families of their children—some of whom were never to return home

—and successfully dissolved thousands of years old oral

traditions.

Figure 1: An ever-adapting cultural progression of First Peoples increases steadily over thousands of years of adaptive management, with traditional knowledge passed down generationally, becomes broken by European colonization and forced assimilation. The rupture of the oral tradition led to the extinction of aboriginal languages and the disintegration of community. The rhetoric of “bridging the gap” between knowledge-holders and children is often expressed in post-colonial movements, while generations of residential school survivors speak of remaining traumatically trapped in a pocket of space and time(Jacob-Schram 2012).

I intend to use the metaphor of a hernia to refer to this rupture

in linear oral tradition. Like a biological hernia, the space

between what was and what continues to be fills with the toxic

effects of colonialism, compromising the system as a whole. A

strict focus on restoring these eco-cultural systems through

Western science only blinds ecological restoration practitioners

to the myriad way in which First Peoples subtly influenced,

managed and adapted their environment to suit their needs. It

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also runs the risk of viewing traditional ecological knowledge

and native culture as separate spheres, when in reality they are

interdependent, layered one upon the other through space and

time.

Cultural Herniation

Canada’s last residential school, White Calf Collegiate, was shut

down in 1996. This little matter of genocide—to poach a phrase

from Ward Churchill—what the Canadian Government referred to as

“aggressive assimilation”, was just one in a string of insidious

attacks on First Peoples during European colonization of the

Americas. The residential school system was by no means the only

onslaught on native culture, though it was one completely

legitimized by the Crown. Assimilation policies allowed the

Canadian government to take children as young as four years old

and place them into a forced immersion program, including arduous

forced labour masquerading as skills-training—severe physical and

emotional abuse, rampant tuberculosis, malnutrition, and

conditions which could only be described by one residential

school principal as “an insult to human dignity” (Miller 1996).

Researchers posit the high mortality rates at the schools—from 30

to 60 percent over the span of five years (Bryce 1922)—are strong

indicators conditions and level of abuse at Canadian residential

schools was far worse than United States’ Native American

boarding schools. Death rates at certain Canadian residential

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schools reached as high as 69 percent (Curry, et al 2007). While

data is almost non-existent, it is estimated anywhere from

hundreds to 50,000 students died during the operation of the

residential schools (Residential School 2012). Officials from the

Missing Children and Unmarked Graves Project are still uncovering

mass graves near residential school grounds, where children’s’

skeletons have been found surrounding schools and even buried

between facility walls.

Figure 3: A letter to parents from Reverend F. O’Grady, O.M.I., principal of the Kamloops Indian Residential School in BC, November 18, 1948. Hundreds of Sewepemc children attended the school (Kamloops

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Museum and Archives).

Spanning approximately eight generations, residential schools

hacked away at aboriginal language and spirituality through

systematic cultural genocide and ethnocide. The Alberni Indian

Residential School during the 1920s is infamous for employing a

particularly grotesque method of preventing students from

speaking their language; children caught “talking Indian” had

sewing needles pushed through their tongues (Churchill 2004).

Adding insult to injury, patronizing letters (written in English)

were sometimes sent home to the family explaining what a

privilege “and a joy also” it would be for the child to return

for Christmas (Fig 3), but that the parents must pay for the

child’s transportation and must return the child back to school

on time, or privilege of a Christmas visit would be revoked.

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Figure 2: Primary boys’ class of the Alberni Indian Residential School(United Church archives).

The horrors of “educating” the children in written and spoken

English are as horrifying as they are endless. Aboriginal

tradition is largely based on a shared set of values passed down

by storytelling, as noted by Floy C. Pepper and William A. White.

First Nations societies may differ in their specific sets of

values, but the primary means of disseminating tribal knowledge

was always through story-telling (Pepper et al 1996). By

attacking language, colonialism usurps everything upon which

language informs. In essence, by preventing native children from

communicating with their families, residential schools created a

diasporic condition through dialect.

“After a lifetime of beatings, going hungry, standing in a corner

on one leg, and walking in the snow with no shoes for speaking 7

Inuvialuktun, and having a stinging paste rubbed on my face,

which they did to stop us from expressing our Eskimo custom of

raising our eyebrows for ‘yes’ and wrinkling our noses for ‘no’,

I soon lost the ability to speak my mother tongue. When a

language dies, the world dies; the world it was generated from

breaks down too” (Carpenter 1974).

Annihilating language and, by extension, the stories and oral

tradition it preserves, in no small feat spelled the death of

numerous Native culture. As ethnoecologist Nancy Turner remarks,

discussing the breakdown of First Peoples’ food security and food

sovereignty: “Even more serious is the loss of the cultural

knowledge relating to the production, harvesting, processing, and

use of the food—the knowledge that has sustained generations of

people in their home territories for thousands of years” (Turner,

et al 2008). Not only were residential school survivors stripped

of their language, their stories, their ability to carry out the

cultural continuity of their people, once returned they could no

longer provide for themselves. The cultural hernia deepens, as

assimilation techniques impressed upon one generation go on to

pollute the next.

The Residential School Syndrome

Like the European colonialism of Africa, colonizers of Canada

operated under the same guise and rationale of bringing “light”

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(Western education and Christianity) to a “dark” continent.

Achieving this outcome through aggressive methods was thought to

show religious resolve in the face of savagery. Kenyan author

N’gugi Wa’Thiongo, in his seminal work Decolonizing the Mind, posits

the greatest weapon imperialism wields is the cultural bomb, “to

annihilate a people’s belief in their names, in their languages,

in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their

unity, in their capacities and ultimately in themselves”

(Wa’Thiongo 1986). More than strip First Nations children from

their families and implant Western notions of deportment and

Christianity, residential schools plunged “students” into a

social wasteland, a barren, desolate limbo. Educated in social

inequity and instructed in self-loathing, children at government-

funded residential schools were taught to undo all that was

native.

Upon their release to their families, residential school

survivors recount a deep sense of shame—the effects of the

cultural hernia on their societal role made all too clear. The

Commission of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Interim Report

states, “Survivors described what happened after they left the

schools. People no longer felt connected to their parents or

their families. In some cases, they said they felt ashamed of

themselves, their parents, and their culture. The Commission

heard from children who found it difficult to forgive their

parents for sending them to residential school. Parents told the

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Commission of the heartbreak of having to send their children

away, and of the difficulties that emerged while they were away

and when they returned” (Interim Report 1996).

Compounding the anguish and emotional trauma experienced in the

schools is the post-traumatic stress disorder affecting

survivors. The “residential school syndrome” accounts for high

incidences of alcoholism, suicide, depression and other

psychological issues. “Some said they felt useless in their

community. Still others compared themselves to lost souls, unable

to go forward, unable to go back. Many people lost years of their

lives to alcohol, to drugs, or to the streets as they sought a

way to dull the pain of not belonging anywhere. Deprived of their

own sense of self-worth, people told us, they had spent decades

wandering in despair. People spoke of the former students who met

violent ends: in accidents, at the hands of others, or, all too

often, at their own hands” (Interim Report 1996).

Restoration and Reconciliation

Traditional systems have been both fed and filtered by First

Peoples for tens of thousands of years. Moreover, these subtle

ecologies (Wyndham 2009) are so inexorable with humanistic

ecologies that the unraveling of the latter is inevitably the

undoing of the former. Society must continue addressing the

persistent marginalization and de facto segregation of being

native before anyone can fully explore restoring traditional

systems of land and resource management. Author William Cronon 10

proposes the only real way in which to fully realize a

functioning traditional system of management requires the

impossible collapse of linear time: “From such a starting place,

it is hard not to reach the conclusion that the only way human

beings can hope to live naturally on earth is to follow the

hunter-gatherers back into a wilderness Eden and abandon

virtually everything that civilization has given us” (Cronon

1995). To tap into traditional ecological knowledge and wisdom

without addressing modern social inequity is not only

disingenuous, it is wallowing in the social and class privileges

that accompany the academic sphere. It is demanding a

“wilderness Eden”, as Cronon puts it, without addressing

civilization.

Healing the cultural herniation brought on by Anglo-European

colonialism and the driving force of manifest destiny requires a

concert of proactive efforts to decolonize knowledge. And

healing the land through restoration efforts absolutely cannot

begin without cultural restoration being addressed. The wounds of

racialized assimilation are not so shallow the memory of primal

violence can be remedied through federal purchase nor absolved by

a prime minister’s apology (Bomberry and Porter 2010).

References

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Bessie, W.C., Johnson, E.A. 1995. The relative importance of fuels and weather on fire behaviour in subalpine forests. Ecology76, 747-762.

Bomberry, Elaine, and Murray Porter. "Is Sorry Enough?" Rec. 2010. Songs Lived and Life Played. Murray Porter. Independent, 2010.

Bryce, P. H. The Story of a National Crime: Being an Appeal for Justice to the Indians of Canada; the Wards of the Nation, Our Allies in the Revolutionary War, Our Brothers-in-arms in the Great War. Ottawa: J. Hope, 1922. 

Carpenter, Mary. Recollections and Comments: No More Denials Please (1974). Inuktitut 74 (1991), 56-6.

Churchill, Ward. Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools. San Francisco: City Lights, 2004.

Cronon, William, ed., Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995, 69-90.

Curry, Bill, and Karen Howlett. “Natives Died in Droves as OttawaIgnored Warnings.” Globe and Mail. Ottawa: 24 Apr. 2007.

Miller, J. R. Shingwauk's Vision: A History of Native Residential Schools. Toronto: University of Toronto, 1996.

Pepper, Floy C. and William A. White. “First Nations Traditional Values.” Victoria: Aboriginal Liaison Office, University of Victoria, 1996.

Turner, N.J. and K.L. Turner. “Where our women used to get the food”: cumulative effectsand loss of ethnobotanical knowledge and practice; case study from coastal British Columbia.Botany 86.2 (2008): 103‐115.

Wa Thiong'o, Ngugi. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature. London: J. Currey, 1986.

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Wyndham, Felice S. Spheres of relations, lines of interaction: subtle ecologies of the Rarámuri landscape in northern Mexico. Journal of Ethnobiology 29.2 (2009): 271-295.

“Interim Report.” Truth and Reconciliation of Canada. 1996. Web. 2012. 

“Residential School: Canada's Shame.” www.shannonthunderbird.com.Web. 20 Mar. 2012.

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