In a meeting yesterday, we began discussing the mass grave of more than two hundred indigenous children who died at a residential school in Canada back in the first half of the 1900s. One of the participants, a man with a Ph.D in clinical psychology, immediately jumped to: “If they were murdered, someone has to go to jail.”
I was dumbfounded. It clear from all the documentary evidence that most of those children died of measles and tuberculosis. A few died of suicide, and some died trying to run away from the schools in freezing weather. No one who has looked at the facts believes the mass grave is evidence of mass murder.
But his comment wasn’t merely annoying, it was dangerous for a subtle reason.
We study history so we can learn from it. If we misread history, or as my friend did, are simply ignorant and jump to the wrong conclusions, we can’t learn the right lessons.
What is the lesson we would learn from my friend’s false history? That we shouldn’t murder children. Hey, we already know that. Very few people would endorse murdering children, so no one needs that lesson. True, we still do sometimes kill children, but we know it’s wrong and we call it out when it happens.
The mistakes in the residential schools were many and basic, and every one of them is a lesson in what never to do again.
First, children were forcibly removed from their parents. Not doing that is a lesson that we never seem to learn. Of the many evils of slavery, selling children away from their parents was the most blatant evil and motivated a great many abolitionists. Yet, we’re still doing it today at the border between Mexico and the United States. We have to stop doing it. Just stop it.
Second, the residential schools in Canada were part of an official policy to integrate indigenous people into mainstream culture, which meant erasing their native culture and inclucating them with the Canadian culture which was derived from Western Europe, mainly England and France. Many Canadians sincerely believed that the indigenous peoples would have better lives if they no longer practiced their own culture. Once again, that was our failure to learn from history. England, from the time of Cromwell, spent centuries trying to erase Gaelic culture from Ireland. And the Irish caused them endless grief as a result. It’s time we learned from history, including the history of our mistreatment of indigenous peoples, and stopped trying to erase other people’s cultures.
Third, the residential schools were poorly designed from a public health perspective. Too many children were crowded into dormitories that were too small to accommodate them properly. Disease spread unchecked. If we are going to confine people, be it in schools, military bases, or prisons, we have to design the quarters to minimize the spread of disease and allow healthy lifestyles. Once again, we are failing to learn from history, especially in our design of modern prisons where prisoners are more likely to have infections diseases when they enter the facility and are more likely to spread them because of overcrowding. Compromising public health to save money kills people.
There are other lessons to be learned, for sure, but “don’t murder children” is not one of them. That is a smokescreen that hides the real lessons of the tragedy of the residential schools in Canada. Those were costly lessons, both for the indigenous people and for us, and we must learn from them so that we can say “never again” to everything we did wrong.
Ashley Zacharias' Musings 
I have to admit that my first response wasn’t even any of the above, just the sheer idiocy of thinking you can punish anyone who was an adult responsible for any of those deaths – they have to be at least 90 years old now.
“If we are going to confine people, be it in schools, military bases, or prisons, we have to design the quarters to minimize the spread of disease and allow healthy lifestyles.”
This is a lesson that New York State persistently refuses to learn. Our prison population has dropped dramatically in the past couple of decades (over 25% just in the past ten years), but instead of spreading the population out to relieve crowding and make things safer for both the prisoners and the staff, we just close prisons to keep the overcrowding level the same. (Note that in the decade prior to the present governor taking office there was some reduction — enough to eliminate so-called ‘double-bunking’.)
…and it turns out that even though there was enough of a reduction to eliminate double-bunking, they didn’t. *sigh* Next year in Jerusalem?
Private prisons maximize profits, so that’s no surprise. However, New York has a law that makes private prisons illegal. People who don’t understand government might jump to the conclusion that publicly-owned prisons would be less sensitive to cost. Wrong. The government is acutely sensitive to bad press, and senior civil servants will go to great lengths to ensure that no one can accuse them of wasting taxpayer’s money unnecessarily by treating criminals humanely.
Just a couple of details:
First, building in the past were frequently designed without thought to the health of the people who lived or worked in them. For instance, in the early 19th century, the barracks for the British Guard troops — the most elite & privileged soldiers — contributed to their increased rate of deaths. So First Nations/Native American children, for the time not privileged people, confined to government schools would not be the most healthy environments for them.
Second, I personally spent a couple of weeks in a DIA high school as an exchange student back in the 1970s. The physical conditions weren’t top of the line, but they were equivalent to the average US high school. So if mortality rates in First Nations/Native American school were noticeably higher, I wonder if it was due to the behavior of the adults in charge, treating the children as animals who only understood brutality & force, was the cause of so many inexcusable deaths. In short, even by the standards of the time, the children were treated badly. Worse than even, to use a modern equivalence, the foster care system.