Perspective

 

Perspective

        When I went to school in the sixties in Fernie, B.C., I was taught a little poem by my history teacher:  In fourteen hundred and ninety- two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.        

        My school credited Christopher Columbus with discovering the Americas, and must have skipped the part where Leif Ericsson (eldest son of Eric the Red) crossed the ocean almost five hundred years earlier, or possibly I wasn’t listening?  And the Chinese?  North Americans have always ignored the enormous role the Chinese played in the settlement of this country.  We charged them a head tax at the turn of the 20th C. to come in and slave on the railway and the gold fields.  But I think they were here before Columbus. When I visited the B.C. museum in Victoria, after a short stint in China, I couldn't get over the resemblance between our aboriginal people and the folks in northern China. I bet they have family over there somewhere!

        But regardless, I always thought Columbus must have been a pretty smart guy.   He managed to get Queen Isabella to give him three ships (the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria) and a crew!

        The Reconquest or Reconquista in Spanish was an over 800 yearlong war that finally ended in January of 1492, with the fall of the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada.  Christians and Muslims have always been fighting, but it seems Christianity had finally re-taken the whole Iberian Peninsula (that would be basically Spain and Portugal, although it also included a part of France and what is today the teeny tiny county of Andorra), from the Muslims and wanted to get in on the spice trade commanded by the Arabs and Italians.  With the Muslims still pretty peeved about 800 years of fighting, going overland for spices was not going to be an easy feat.  This is where Christopher came into the picture.

        I was taught that the people of Columbus's time believed that the earth was flat.  I admired Columbus to a great extent because he dared to be different and argued that it was round. However, it seems that a fellow called Eratosthenes measured the diameter of the earth before even Christ was born.  By the time Columbus came along it may have been common knowledge in most circles that the world was a sphere.

        It must have been mainly the amount of actual landmass they argued about, although that also seemed to be pretty well agreed.  While most sea faring people of that time had it right, Columbus was young and inexperienced and apparently believed the incorrect calculations of Marinus of Tyre, which placed Asia just a few thousand nautical miles west of Europe. Columbus believed he could sail around the entire world in a lot less time than it ended up taking him to travel even a third of that distance. 

        Because he so severely underestimated the circumference, when he finally did hit land, a North American Island, he thought he must be in East Asia.  As a result of the miscalculations, he referred to the people he saw there as Indios.  This was our first mistake.

          In 1611 Jesuit missionaries opened the first Aboriginal school on the St. Lawrence River and in 1620 the Franciscans opened a boarding school to help educate the Aboriginal people.  The government was happy to let the church take responsibility for educating the locals; education is expensive.  If the church would do if for free, or next to free, who was the government of the time to complain?

            And then in 1837 the House of Commons Report suggested that: The needs of Aboriginal children would be best served in being prepared for Christianity and British society if they were removed from their families.

            So in 1857 the Government passed the Gradual Civilization Act to assimilate Indians and from 1870 through to 1920 there was no attempt to hide that the objective of both missionaries and government was to assimilate Aboriginal children. 

            Then, the Indian Act was amended in 1920 to require all First Nations children attend a residential school for at least ten months of the year.  School age children were taken from their parents, most had little or no contact with their families for up to ten months at a time, and sadly for some, it was years before they saw a familiar face again. 

        At school, they were prohibited from speaking their native languages in an attempt to have them learn French or English and forget their own language. 

        Compulsory attendance at a residential schools finally ended in 1948, but "baby bonuses", money granted to families with children after World War II and so important to many of these families, were cut off if aboriginal parents did not register their children in a residential school.         

         While these schools received some government funding, it was never enough.  The government relied on the church to keep the schools functioning, while the church often relied on the forced labour of the students in order to keep going.  Hard work severely compromised academic achievements of these students.  In some schools education was not even the central focus, even though they called the work done by the students "vocational training.  It wasn't until 1969 that the government finally took control of the schools from the church.  1969!  I was thirteen years old.        

          The conditions in many of these places had been abysmal.  In 1909 the general medical superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs reported to the department that between 1894 and 1909, mortality rates at residential schools in Western Canada ranged from 35% to 60% over a five-year period. 

         In 1920 and 1922, Dr. F. Corbett reported similar results.  At Ermineskin School in Hobbema Alberta, it was found that 50% of the children had tuberculosis.  This is the reservation that W. P. Kinsella wrote about in his hilarious stories in Dance Me Outside.  The humor in some of these books is rather dark, but they are pretty funny!  The people’s reality, not so much.

         There were times at the Sarcee School near Calgary, all 33 students were sick and weak, and those near death were still made to sit through lessons.

         Although the first public building constructed in Hartley Bay was the church in 1888, and formal schooling began there in 1891 with the minister also playing the role of teacher, because of its remoteness, the school was not residential.  However, many of today's residents were the unfortunate residents of these sorts of schools in other communities.  They too began disclosing sexual and other forms of abuse when incidents began to hit the news across the country.  The fallout continued throughout the First Nations communities while I was there.

        What I felt was the anger, the residual indignation at the injustice of it all.  The pendulum was swinging a little farther in the other direction by the time I arrived at the Hartley Bay Elementary Secondary School for my first day of classes in 2001.