(J.R. Miller, "Shingwauk's Vision," pp. 184-188): Writing about the 'Basic Concepts and Objectives' of Canada's Indian policy in 1945, an official of the U.S. Bureau of Indian Affairs put his finger squarely on the motivation behind residential schools. Noting Ottawa's desire to promote self-sufficiency among the indigenous population, and rightly zeroing in on Canada's systematic attack on traditional Indian religion and cultural practices, the observer concluded that the dominion's purpose was assimilation. As important as the push for self-support and Christianization among the Indians was in its own right, it was 'also means to another end: full citizenship and absorption into the body politic.' Clearly, Canada chose to eliminate Indians by assimilating them, unlike the Americans, who had long sought to exterminate them physically. 'In other words, the extinction of the Indians as Indians is the ultimate end' of Canadian Indian policy, noted the American official. The peaceful elimination of Indians' sense of identity as Aboriginal people and their integration into the general citizenry would eventually end any need for Indian agents, farm instructors, financial assistance, residential schools, and other programs. By the cultural assimilation it would bring about, education residential schools would prove 'the means of wiping out the whole Indian establishment.' Assumptions of racial superiority by Euro-Canadians were not unique the area of Native/non-Native relations. In fact, by the late nineteenth century white-skinned Canadians were very much inclined to look down on people of different hues for several reasons. New strains of scientific racism such as Social Darwinism, the influence of British imperialist attitudes, and the spillover from the institutionalized racism that survived the Civil War and emancipation in the neighbouring United States combined to influence Euro-Canadian society strongly in a racist manner. The consequences of these attitudes included legislation and informal policies that restricted Blacks to segregated schools Nova Scotia and Ontario, discouragement of Black immigration the western plains, and aggressive campaigns to keep Asian and Indian immigrants out of British Columbia. From the middle of nineteenth century onward, Canadians who identified with the Caucasian race usually held condescending attitudes towards non-white peoples. Similarly racist assumptions, now applied specifically to Indians, underlay policy towards Natives in the decades after the making of the treaties. Indian Affairs officials and missionaries recognized that aboriginal peoples often held to different values, even if those values were usually decried rather than celebrated. And both officials and missionaries generally recognized that Native peoples organized their lives differently from Euro-Canadians. The problem was that bureaucrats and educators tended to assess Indian ways against the standard of their own society: Indian culture was defective because it was different. The deputy minister of Indian affairs expressed this view early in century when commenting on the difficulty that Ottawa and the churches were experiencing in changing Indians' behaviour. 'It must not be forgotten,' wrote Frank Pedley, 'that we are working in a material that is stubborn in itself; that the Indian constitutionally dislikes work and does not feel the need of laying up stores or amassing wealth. The idea which is ingrained in our civilization appears to be at a race must be thrifty and must surround itself with all manner of wealth and comforts before it is entitled to be considered civilized. The Indian has not yet reached that stage, and it is doubtful if he will -were such desirable.' Officialdom, which thought of Aboriginal peoples as financial burdens, assessed Indian identity in terms of self-sufficiency, and in doing so its standard was a Euro-Canadian one of economic competition and individuality. >From the 1880s onward these attitudes manifested themselves in what is sometimes referred to as Canada's 'policy of the Bible and the plough.' This complex of legislation and programs embraced the missions and schools of which residential schools were a subset, campaigns to control and reshape Aboriginal political behaviour, efforts on the western plains to coerce Native hunters to become sedentary subsistence farmers, and attacks on traditional Aboriginal customs such as the potlatch on the Pacific and the Sun Dance and Thirst Dance on the prairies. Every one of these government programs had a justification and a legitimate objective, at least in the eyes of the bureaucrats who planned them and the missionaries and Indian agents who were charged with the responsibility of carrying them out. However, they were also based on an assumption that Native people were morally inferior to Caucasians, principally because of racial factors. Missionary teachers, who subscribed to the pervasive racism of EuroCanadian society, focused on specific features of Indian life when it came time to discuss what sort of person they were trying to fashion in the residential schools. And because principals, teachers, and child-care workers had much more exposure to Native society than did Ottawa bureaucrats, their analysis tended to be more complex, more oriented to non-material aspects of Aboriginal life, and more detailed. However, they shared with Indian Affairs staff a tendency to judge Native society by a Euro-Canadian standard. Although their judgments were more mixed than those of officials, church people also held negative opinions about the worth of Native society. The essence of the missionary indictment was that Natives were morally and intellectually degenerate, either as a result of post-contact debasement or from an innately infantile moral nature. Officials in both the churches and the government operated on the basis that their Indian 'wards' were incapable of looking after themselves. Frequently, the missionary doctrine of Aboriginal infantilism was based on a theory of social development that located Indians invidiously in relation to Euro-Canadian society or 'civilization.' The Anglicans' Canadian Churchman, for example, contended that North American Aboriginal society had gone through three stages since the coming of the European, and had benefited from 'close and intimate touch with a conquering white race.' At the time of contact, Indian society had been in a 'condition of savagery pure and simple, wherein some primitive and virile virtues flourish and the race preserves its vigor and vitality.' After contact comes 'that most trying and critical transitional period, in which the native having acquired certain of the characteristics of the white man and unlearned his own, is in danger of degenerating into a sort of non-descript, possessed of the weaknesses and vices of both races without any of the counterbalancing virtues.' Now, thanks in no small part to the churches and Ottawa, they were on their way to recovery. 'Indians have turned the corner, and are no longer a "dying race." They have successfully endured the ordeal of contact with the stronger and superior race and are now on the high road to complete civilization.' What made the effort to 'civilize' the indigenous people a congenial task for church people was their belief that Indians, though harder to assimilate than some other groups, produced a better product once assimilated. 'There is a certain innate dignity about the Indian,' ought the Anglican journal, 'that marks him off from the negro, who in adaptability his superior, is his inferior in those qualities, which, en cultivated and developed place him on a level of acknowledged with civilized peoples.' The Indian had the potential to take 'place among white men and become their natural equal.' Indians innate virtues that others lacked, qualities that made the task initially more daunting than it was with some others. 'Of tougher fibre an most of the other coloured races, he is slow to respond to his new environment, but when he does the results are nearly always highly satisfactory. As a rule the civilized Indian remains civilized. His civilization not a veneer, but a radical transformation.' As a prominent Methodist missionary argued, Aboriginal peoples' response to Euro-Canadian dominance showed that they were capable of moral development. 'If a century ago an absolutely alien people like the Chinese had waded our shores and driven the white colonists before them to distant and more isolated territories, destroying the institutions on which had always subsisted, and crowned all by disarming them and penning them on various tracts of land, where they could be partially clothed, fed and cared for at no cost to themselves, to what conditions the white Canadians of to-day have been reduced in spite of their vigorous ancestry?' Native resilience in the face of another dominant race was impressive. 'That our red brethren have not been wholly ruined by it is the best proof we could ask of the sturdy traits of character inherent in them.' If Indians were at present in their moral infancy, they had the potential for an admirable adulthood. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
