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Charlie Angus, politician, author and journalist, is a longtime socialist, social justice activist, and Indigenous ally. His book, Children of the Broken Treaty: Canada’s Lost Promise and One Girl’s Dream, arises out of these multiple threads. Angus takes a hard, journalistic view of the way that Canadian society, government and institutions have failed Indigenous children, giving his account a strong centre by focusing on young Cree activist Shannen Koostachin, a member of the Attawapiskat First Nation, and her fight for equal access to education for the students of her community and for all Indigenous youth across Canada. Angus has a personal connection to this story - Attawapiskat is a part of the riding he represents in Parliament, and he knew and supported Shannen Koostachin in her campaign, but he treads carefully in writing this account, avoiding sentimentality and never injecting himself needlessly into the narrative - rare restraint from a politician.
Shannen’s story is short, inspiring and tragic. At 13, she challenged the federal government to build a new school in her community to replace the mould-filled portables sitting on toxic, contaminated land that had been the only educational facility available to the children in her remote community for years. Her drive, her charismatic presence, called out to other youth across the country to support her. Even after her death in a car accident, the fight she started continued until the government finally was forced to recognise the demands she and her supporters made. But as Angus says, Shannen’s story is emblematic of a problem that affects Indigenous communities across Canada.
“And this is where the story of Shannen Koostachin takes on larger political significance. The story of the inequities faced by students in Attawapiskat provides a window into a world that most Canadians never knew existed. It has opened a political and social conversation about how a country as rich and inclusive as Canada can deliberately marginalize children based on their race or, more accurately, marginalize them based on their treaty rights.
What Shannen’s story shows us is that, though the conditions in Attawapiskat might have been extreme, they were by no means an anomaly. All over Canada, First Nations youth have significantly fewer resources for education, health, and community services than those available to non-Indigenous youth. Certainly, there are many reserves with proper school facilities. But other communities make do with substandard schools or condemned schools or, in some cases, no school at all. It is the arbitrary nature of the delivery of education that speaks to its inequity. What all these communities have in common is systemic underfunding for education by the Department of Indian Affairs compared with communities with students in the provincial school systems.”
Angus begins his acount with the signing of Treaty 9 at Fort Hope in .Northern Ontario on July 19, 1905. He recounts the promises - all lies - made to persuade the Cree to sign, the guarantees that their way of life would not be threatened and the offer of education for their children. And he describes what followed - the concerted attempt to destroy Indigenous culture and assimilate Indigenous children through indoctrination, humiliation, violence and terror at the residential schools. He quotes Duncan Scott Campbell, architect of Treaty 9 and head of the Department of Indian Affairs: ““I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”
Angus focuses his narrative on one of the Canadian government’s key strategies for elimination the ‘Indian question’ - the horrifying system of residential schools in which children were taken from their families and communities, forbidden to speak their language or practice any aspects of their traditional culture, and frequently subjected to psychological, sexual and physical abuse. As many as one-third of children in the so-called care of the residential school system did not survive their experience. Far too many of those who did, left the schools with no connection to their culture, traumatised in ways that would mark their communities for generations. And in examining the system of deliberate cultural genocide and attendant abuse that was the hallmark of the residential school system, Angus pays particular attention to St. Anne’s Residential School. This school, run by the Catholic Oblate order, was situated in the region that Angus represents, and was thus, for Shannen Koostachin and the Attawapiskat First Nation community, part of their lived experience. I’ve read other accounts mentioning the situation at St. Anne’s, notably the courageous memoir of Chief Edward Metatwabin, Up Ghost River, which is cited by Angus here. The picture that emerges from the testimony of survivors of St. Anne’s s one of an utter disregard for the health and dignity of the children entrusted to the institution’s care, combined with outright racism, abuse, and violations of the children’s rights as human beings, and the parents’ rights to even so much as be informed of what happened to their children. It is a picture of deliberate, racially motivated genocide.
Even with the closure of the residential schools, the deliberate attempt to forcibly assimilate Canada’s Indigenous people by destroying families and cutting children off from their communities and culture continued - and continues into the present day. Indigenous children were, and still are, placed in white foster homes on the flimsiest of pretexts, away from their parents, their homes, among people who knew nothing about their foster and adopted children’s languages or cultures, and had no interest in allowing the children placed in their care to learn about their Indigenous roots.
“The huge number of children taken from their parents under this agenda has been named the “Sixties Scoop.” Theresa Stevens, who works in Indigenous child welfare services in Kenora, Ontario, was recently interviewed by the National Post on the devastating impacts of the Sixties Scoop in her community of Wabaseemoong (Whitedog First Nation) in northwestern Ontario. She said that child welfare workers would arrive in the community with a bus that they filled with local children who had been apprehended. The children were then flown to another isolated community and given away to strangers. “When the planes landed at the dock, families there were told they could come down and pick out a kid,” she stated. So many children were taken from her community that teachers at the local school were laid off because there weren’t enough children left to be taught. Stevens said that the process continued until 1990 and was only stopped at her home reserve when the band members openly defied the child welfare authorities. “They stood at the reserve line on tractors with shotguns saying, ‘You aren’t coming into our community and taking any more of our children,’” she stated.”
In 1976, the Attawapiskat First Nation finally got their own school. But there were problems from the beginning. The construction of the facilities, including residences for teachers, failed to take into account the climate conditions in such a northern region. Within a few years, the freeze and thaw cycle cause shallowly buried fuel pipes to buckle and break, resulting in leaks that seriously contaminated the soil on which the school was built. Health problems developed among students and staff. Some attempts were made to remove contaminated soil, but the leaks continued, adding to the load of toxic diesel fuel in the ground and the health risks to the students. The school, which was under the jurisdiction of Indian Affairs, not the provincial educational system, continued to operate. Finally, in 2000, the band declared the school as a condemned building and demanded that a new school be built. One was promised, but no action followed on that promise. Instead, classes were taught in portables set up near the old school - still close to the source of contamination, cold in winter, lacking in facilities to support the basic educational program, and screaming “slapdash solution to a serious problem.”
Angus carefully details the campaign originated and driven by the students of Attawapiskat, and the shameful responses - obfuscations, denials, diversions and outright lies - of the government of the day and the various Indian Affairs ministers, who held the portfolio during the Harper regime.
He also paints a powerful and painful picture of what Indigenous children, particularly those living in remote and isolated communities, deal with. The poverty, lack of resources, lack of housing, schools, community infrastructure, social programs. He speaks about the epidemics of depression, apathy, suicide, that have swept through indigenous communities. The problems faced by Indigenous youth taken from their homes and placed in foster care or in institutions. The endless wasting of talent, potential, and lives that would never be tolerated if these children were white.
The basic truths that Angus speaks are these: that the federal government, regardless of what party currently forms it, has never paid attention to the real needs of Indigenous communities, has never listened to the people it abandoned, has never wanted to spend the money necessary to ensure the most important supports: safe, clean housing; medical care; essential infrastructure; education comparable to that provided by provincial authorities; social programs with a goal of keeping families together, children in their communities, and indigenous cultures strong; economic development to enable communities to be self-supporting. That white settlers stole their land, tried to erase their very existence and gave them nothing but empty promises. That the colonial project of genocide continues to this day. And that the resistance to this project is alive and growing.
Shannen’s story is short, inspiring and tragic. At 13, she challenged the federal government to build a new school in her community to replace the mould-filled portables sitting on toxic, contaminated land that had been the only educational facility available to the children in her remote community for years. Her drive, her charismatic presence, called out to other youth across the country to support her. Even after her death in a car accident, the fight she started continued until the government finally was forced to recognise the demands she and her supporters made. But as Angus says, Shannen’s story is emblematic of a problem that affects Indigenous communities across Canada.
“And this is where the story of Shannen Koostachin takes on larger political significance. The story of the inequities faced by students in Attawapiskat provides a window into a world that most Canadians never knew existed. It has opened a political and social conversation about how a country as rich and inclusive as Canada can deliberately marginalize children based on their race or, more accurately, marginalize them based on their treaty rights.
What Shannen’s story shows us is that, though the conditions in Attawapiskat might have been extreme, they were by no means an anomaly. All over Canada, First Nations youth have significantly fewer resources for education, health, and community services than those available to non-Indigenous youth. Certainly, there are many reserves with proper school facilities. But other communities make do with substandard schools or condemned schools or, in some cases, no school at all. It is the arbitrary nature of the delivery of education that speaks to its inequity. What all these communities have in common is systemic underfunding for education by the Department of Indian Affairs compared with communities with students in the provincial school systems.”
Angus begins his acount with the signing of Treaty 9 at Fort Hope in .Northern Ontario on July 19, 1905. He recounts the promises - all lies - made to persuade the Cree to sign, the guarantees that their way of life would not be threatened and the offer of education for their children. And he describes what followed - the concerted attempt to destroy Indigenous culture and assimilate Indigenous children through indoctrination, humiliation, violence and terror at the residential schools. He quotes Duncan Scott Campbell, architect of Treaty 9 and head of the Department of Indian Affairs: ““I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.”
Angus focuses his narrative on one of the Canadian government’s key strategies for elimination the ‘Indian question’ - the horrifying system of residential schools in which children were taken from their families and communities, forbidden to speak their language or practice any aspects of their traditional culture, and frequently subjected to psychological, sexual and physical abuse. As many as one-third of children in the so-called care of the residential school system did not survive their experience. Far too many of those who did, left the schools with no connection to their culture, traumatised in ways that would mark their communities for generations. And in examining the system of deliberate cultural genocide and attendant abuse that was the hallmark of the residential school system, Angus pays particular attention to St. Anne’s Residential School. This school, run by the Catholic Oblate order, was situated in the region that Angus represents, and was thus, for Shannen Koostachin and the Attawapiskat First Nation community, part of their lived experience. I’ve read other accounts mentioning the situation at St. Anne’s, notably the courageous memoir of Chief Edward Metatwabin, Up Ghost River, which is cited by Angus here. The picture that emerges from the testimony of survivors of St. Anne’s s one of an utter disregard for the health and dignity of the children entrusted to the institution’s care, combined with outright racism, abuse, and violations of the children’s rights as human beings, and the parents’ rights to even so much as be informed of what happened to their children. It is a picture of deliberate, racially motivated genocide.
Even with the closure of the residential schools, the deliberate attempt to forcibly assimilate Canada’s Indigenous people by destroying families and cutting children off from their communities and culture continued - and continues into the present day. Indigenous children were, and still are, placed in white foster homes on the flimsiest of pretexts, away from their parents, their homes, among people who knew nothing about their foster and adopted children’s languages or cultures, and had no interest in allowing the children placed in their care to learn about their Indigenous roots.
“The huge number of children taken from their parents under this agenda has been named the “Sixties Scoop.” Theresa Stevens, who works in Indigenous child welfare services in Kenora, Ontario, was recently interviewed by the National Post on the devastating impacts of the Sixties Scoop in her community of Wabaseemoong (Whitedog First Nation) in northwestern Ontario. She said that child welfare workers would arrive in the community with a bus that they filled with local children who had been apprehended. The children were then flown to another isolated community and given away to strangers. “When the planes landed at the dock, families there were told they could come down and pick out a kid,” she stated. So many children were taken from her community that teachers at the local school were laid off because there weren’t enough children left to be taught. Stevens said that the process continued until 1990 and was only stopped at her home reserve when the band members openly defied the child welfare authorities. “They stood at the reserve line on tractors with shotguns saying, ‘You aren’t coming into our community and taking any more of our children,’” she stated.”
In 1976, the Attawapiskat First Nation finally got their own school. But there were problems from the beginning. The construction of the facilities, including residences for teachers, failed to take into account the climate conditions in such a northern region. Within a few years, the freeze and thaw cycle cause shallowly buried fuel pipes to buckle and break, resulting in leaks that seriously contaminated the soil on which the school was built. Health problems developed among students and staff. Some attempts were made to remove contaminated soil, but the leaks continued, adding to the load of toxic diesel fuel in the ground and the health risks to the students. The school, which was under the jurisdiction of Indian Affairs, not the provincial educational system, continued to operate. Finally, in 2000, the band declared the school as a condemned building and demanded that a new school be built. One was promised, but no action followed on that promise. Instead, classes were taught in portables set up near the old school - still close to the source of contamination, cold in winter, lacking in facilities to support the basic educational program, and screaming “slapdash solution to a serious problem.”
Angus carefully details the campaign originated and driven by the students of Attawapiskat, and the shameful responses - obfuscations, denials, diversions and outright lies - of the government of the day and the various Indian Affairs ministers, who held the portfolio during the Harper regime.
He also paints a powerful and painful picture of what Indigenous children, particularly those living in remote and isolated communities, deal with. The poverty, lack of resources, lack of housing, schools, community infrastructure, social programs. He speaks about the epidemics of depression, apathy, suicide, that have swept through indigenous communities. The problems faced by Indigenous youth taken from their homes and placed in foster care or in institutions. The endless wasting of talent, potential, and lives that would never be tolerated if these children were white.
The basic truths that Angus speaks are these: that the federal government, regardless of what party currently forms it, has never paid attention to the real needs of Indigenous communities, has never listened to the people it abandoned, has never wanted to spend the money necessary to ensure the most important supports: safe, clean housing; medical care; essential infrastructure; education comparable to that provided by provincial authorities; social programs with a goal of keeping families together, children in their communities, and indigenous cultures strong; economic development to enable communities to be self-supporting. That white settlers stole their land, tried to erase their very existence and gave them nothing but empty promises. That the colonial project of genocide continues to this day. And that the resistance to this project is alive and growing.