Residential School Children

Impact On Residential School Children Children from the ages of six and up were taken from their families forcefully to attend a school nearest them that would assimilate them into settler’s cultures. Often times children would even be taken as little as four years’ old to be assimilated at the schools. These schools were run by churches to “teach” the Indian children religion and to rid the Indian from them. If you did not send your child to the school, you could be jailed. In the very beginning of these schools being open they were not in fact real school where any education happened, they were hard labour schools, making the children farm and work long hard days. However, the schools were eventually made to involve education and schooling
She describes one moment with her grandmother that she remembers of her not speaking her native language “I asked her why she didn’t speak it now and she said angrily “they whipped us when we spoke our language!”(Sellars,2014). This excerpt proves how violent the punishments were for the children from simply speaking their native tongue. Some parents, such as Bev Sellars grandmother, knew her children would have to attend school so she did not teach them her native language, so they did not have to go through what she did while stuck in that schools. Native languages even to this day are still struggling to make a come back in their communities due to the residential schools killing them off. Not were schools back then not inclusive of natives or their languages, even today Canadian schools are not inclusive of their languages. First Nations are being forced to attend schools once again that do not support their cultures or language, which perpetuates that they segregation and assimilation. Canada has two official languages French and English, but why not a First Nations language? Why is there not inclusivity of their cultures and traditions? If we are going to help them of even assist them in rebuilding what they lost in the past due to settlers, assimilations, racism and segregation we need to start being inclusive of them especially in the education system since that is how they began the process of assimilation. As Betty Bastien explains, in her article “Voices Through Time” it all began with the education