OPPOSITION ON THE RESERVES

If there is a villain in the Indian Residential School story, one can do no better than Duncan Campbell Scott, the career bureaucrat who oversaw the enforced expansion of the Indian Residential School system in the early 20th century.

“Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department,” Scott famously told a Canadian Senate hearing.

“The Indians do not, unfortunately, seem to show any great appreciation of what we are trying to do for their children,” reads an 1892 annual report from Shingwauk Residential School, one of the country’s first. Two generations later, in a 1940 letter a principal at Ahousaht Residential School similarly bemoaned the fact that the “progress” they instilled at the school was being diluted by “opposition on the reserves.”