The Sociology of Canadian Residential Schools 

Submitted on 2018/10/26 for Sociology (SOC) 101 - Introduction to Sociology at the University of Waterloo

As the CBC News (2015) story Stolen Children: Residential School Survivors Speak Out depicts, the Canada’s residential school program to assimilate Indigenous children into mainstream Canadian society was a part of the country’s history that should cause all Canadians shame (CBC News, 2015).

Sociology can help us try to understand why this happened and what caused the Canadian government to treat the Indigenous people this way. I will use the theoretical perspective of conflict theory and the sociological concepts of resocialization, subcultures, and the nurture approach of socialization to try to shed some light on this. 

To be resocialized is to be put under the conditions where one’s entire value and belief system, knowledge of social norms, and ultimately one’s identity is challenged and forced to be changed completely usually in an involuntarily fashion (Cook, Lecture 8). 

Institutions are places whose primary purpose is resocialization in which people are separated from the rest of society and supervised to make sure this resocialization takes place (Cook, Lecture 8).

From the accounts of the residential school survivors in the CBC story, residential schools were a prime example of institutions and were probably the closest there’s been to a total institution in our society in the past century other than prisons (CBC News, 2015). 

One survivor recalled having to wear new clothes and get a new haircut upon arrival, an example of the physical aspect of typical resocialization (CBC News, 2015). A federal cabinet minister also stated the importance of separating children from their families, not only their parents but even siblings who also attended the schools,  to “civilize” them (CBC News, 2015). This is also a crucial part of resocialization as families are arguably the most important agent of initial socialization (Cook, Lecture 8).  

The children at these residential schools were also under such containment and supervision that, there are stories of children walking around the cafeteria in circles after school was done because they were bored and they weren’t allowed to go anywhere else (CBC News, 2015). 

Subcultures are groups of people within a larger society whose culture and ways of living deviate from the common norms, values, and ways of living of the society in general (Cook, Lecture 9). Countercultures are subcultures that not only deviate but eminently oppose the mainstream culture (Cook, Lecture 9).

Indigenous communities are definitely subcultures of the larger Canadian culture as they have vastly different ways of speaking, eating, recreationalizing, interacting with each other, and so on, than the capitalist, individualistic, consumeristic mainstream (CBC News, 2015). 

The problem was the Canadian government chose, consciously or subconsciously to view them as a counterculture. One Indigenous woman who went to residential school pointed out that they didn’t even bother “white people”, or people the Canadian government considered “civilized”, but these “white people” found reason to bother her and her community (CBC News, 2015).

Although there are no explicitly threatening connotations to the words “tribal” or “uncivilized”, when politicians such as Sir John A. MacDonald used these terms as justification to “assimilate the Indian people in all respects”, it seems to be implied that the Indigenous or “Indian” culture is opposing or attacking “Canadian” values (CBC News, 2015).  

As opposed to the nature approach to socialization which theorizes that the way we think, act, and behave is a result of our genetics and the way our mind had been created when we were born, the nurture approach to socialization argues that it is our experiences, and our social interactions that determine who we are (Cook, Lecture 7).

Abusive parenting is often linked to Indigenous people, specifically those who attended residential schools (CBC News, 2015). 

The nurture approach to socialization can be used to explain this and silence those who use this correlation to justify being discriminatory against Indigenous people. 

As mentioned in the video, these people were not “abusive by trait”, they weren’t born that way; there is a pattern with those who attended residential schools and those who abused their children, so their traumatic residential school is a very likely cause for this abusive behaviour later in life (CBC News, 2015). 

Not having loving parents as role models throughout their childhood, and instead being looked after by teachers and superintendents that limited their freedom and beat them when they tried to live out their native culture: it is easy to see why it was natural for so many of them to abuse the children they were responsible for looking after in the same way (CBC News, 2015).

Although the story of residential schools is fairly well known in Canada and there have been formal apologies made by the Canadian government, there are many Indigenous people, who struggle. 

They struggle because of the pressure to resocialize, to be part of “normal” culture, because they’re seen as threatening, because they had family members who went through the experiences of residential schools and take it out their own families, and ultimately because there is a power imbalance in society, and those with the power don’t want to give it up. 

Studying this through sociology shows us these things but what is more important is what we do after concluding our studies. We must to ask: what can we do about this?

[CBC News: The National]. (2015, June 2nd). Stolen children: Residential school survivors

speak out. [Video File]. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdR9HcmiXLA

Cook, K. Lecture 3: Introduction to Sociology. September 16th, 2018

Cook, K. Lecture 7: Introduction to Sociology. October 1st, 2018

Cook, K. Lecture 8: Introduction to Sociology. October 3rd, 2018

Cook, K. Lecture 9: Introduction to Sociology. October 15th, 2018