Six Nations Public library - Digital Archive

"Searching for Ways to Heal", p. 3

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/>-!3 ineffective, because it was taught without reflecting any compassion or love. This was one of the reasons why the students didn't like the word Christianity, because the staff didn't reflect a lot of trust." In any case, Affleck's attempt to improve conditions was unacceptable. A few weeks later she was called to the principal. "The church demands the immediate dismissal of anyone disloyal to the staff," he said. "You may take either a morning or an after- noon train." The full results of the schools didn't become clear until a whole generation of children had gone through them. Bull notes how some elders in her community were "so dictatorial," while others, the ones who hadn't gone to residential school, were gentle with their children. The schools had provided only negative parenting skills for children who "became an extension of that institution when they became parents." This was understandable. "What do you do when you are cut off from your way of being socialized, your belief system, your language, your culture?" Removing children from their par- ents at an early age, and subjecting them to the rigid discipline favored at the time, was disastrous. Bernard Lee, for one, began to realize that "the institution was a poor place to raise kids. They didn't live in homes where they could see parental modelling; I read books on child care, and got reports from England about the results of maternal deprivation." He began to push for the schools' closure, writing letters to the director of education in Ottawa. In an echo of Bull's words, he says clearly and sadly "children were not learning the arts of parenting." Still, for those from remote reserves, whose families would be on the trap lines all winter, or with no day school where they lived, it had been a way of achieving literacy. "I doubt whether it was worth it. But what would the alterna- tive have been for, say, an Elijah Harper? He came from Red Sucker Lake because of inadequate schooling on his home reserve." The expressed purpose of the schools was to equip the children to take their place in "mainstream•• Canadian society. That meant training

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