Even the decent, well\u002Dfunded schools, free of sex offenders and staffed by caring and sympathetic clergy, still had a mission of assimilation
It was the culmination of an effort by local First Nations to bring together the Indigenous and non-Indigenous people of the B.C. interior into a better understanding of the seismic destruction that the nearby St. Joseph’s Indian Residential School had wrought on generations of First Nations families.Start your day with a roundup of B.C.-focused news and opinion delivered straight to your inbox at 7 a.m., Monday to Friday.
Photo by Courtesy the Royal BC Museum/Royal Commission on Indian Affairs for the Province of British Columbia/Handout via Reuters Even the best possible Indian school — one that was well-funded, free of sex offenders and staffed by caring and sympathetic clergy — still had an animating mission of rote assimilation. Young children were to be stripped of their culture and language and indoctrinated into a cold, clinical vision of their proper place in Canadian society.
When asked to relay her experience of residential school before classrooms of Williams Lake students, Webstad said she initially came off as a “disappointment.” “I don’t have the harsh stories that they’re learning about … people dying, people being beat up and people being abused,” sheUnlike her mother and grandmother, Webstad would also be moved to a day school the following year, sparing her from life in the dormitory at St. Joseph’s.
“I chose a bright orange shirt with a shoelace string in the front; it was bright and exciting, just like I felt to be going to school for the first time,” Webstad related in her book Beyond the Orange Shirt Story.Upon arrival at the imposing St. Joseph’s school building, Webstad was stripped down and herded into a group shower filled with crying fellow pupils.
The raw terror felt on the first day of residential school was universal among those who had experienced it. Pupils were stripped of their possessions, herded into institutional surroundings wholly different from anything they had known and in some cases were assigned numbers in lieu of names.
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