In order to decolonize education efforts should be made to properly educate students of all ages on Canada’s history of colonization and residential schools and also avoid alienating students by forcing them to change their hair, language, and other culturally related identifiers. All three of this week’s readings look at some aspect of the Aboriginal experience with residential schools in Canada. Barman’s paper focuses on finding out why residential schools failed and had such “far-reaching consequences.”[1] Barman’s paper further goes into four reasons how and why Aboriginal children were schooled for inequality and failure.[2] Helen Raptis’ paper focuses on the various factors that went into the integration or delayed integration of Aboriginal students into public schools, these reasons included both economic and apparent personal capabilities of the children.[3] Paige Raibmon’s paper is written on George Henry Raley, a residential school principal, and his impact on the school. While many former students praised the principal, he still was known to use “terms such as ‘savage,’ ‘heathen,’ and ‘weird’ to describe Native culture.”[4] These papers show how Aboriginal students were treated and othered by many of the people in authority positions.
References
Barman, Jean. “Schooled for Inequality: The Education of British Columbia Aboriginal Children.” In Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012, 255-276.
Raibmon, Paige. “’A New Understanding of Things Indian’: George Raley’s Negotiation of the Residential School Experience.” BC Studies, 110 (1996), 69-96.
Raptis, Helen. “Implementing Integrated Education for On-Reserve Aboriginal Children in British Columbia, 1951-1981.” Historical Studies in Education, 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008), 118-146.
Citations
[1] Jean Barman, “Schooled for Inequality: The Education of British Columbia Aboriginal Children,” In Sara Burke and Patrice Milewski (Eds.), Schooling in Transition: Readings in the Canadian History of Education, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012, 256.
[2] Barman, “Schooled for Inequality,” 261.
[3] Helen Raptis, “Implementing Integrated Education for On-Reserve Aboriginal Children in British Columbia, 1951-1981,” Historical Studies in Education, 20, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 121, 124-125.
[4] Paige Raibmon, “’A New Understanding of Things Indian’: George Raley’s Negotiation of the Residential School Experience,” BC Studies, 110 (1996), 71.