Colonialism, the Indian Act and residential schools

Kyle Beaudry's file contains a line that Desjardins asks the class to read aloud. It comes from the bail hearing in January, where Kyle's lawyer told the court that his grandmother, Ruth Beaudry, attended a residential school for eight years, and that his mother had been taken into care at the age of four and raised by a non-Indigenous family in another part of Ontario. Priya Sandhu asks what any of that has to do with a fight outside a bar in 2026. Desjardins says that by the end of the course she will be able to answer the question herself, and that the answer starts with history.

Elder Marion Shawanda returns for this class. She tells the students that history is not an abstract subject in her community. 'Every family I know has someone who went to those schools,' she says. 'My mother went. My uncles went. Some of them came home and some of them didn't. When you talk about this, you are talking about people's grandparents.' She asks the students to listen to the history in that spirit, and to remember that the communities she comes from survived it, kept their languages and ceremonies alive where they could, and are rebuilding.

Before the newcomers

Long before Europeans arrived, the lands that became Canada were home to hundreds of nations with their own governments, laws, economies and diplomatic systems. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy united several nations under the Great Law of Peace, with councils, clan mothers and procedures for choosing and removing leaders. Anishinaabe nations, including the Ojibwe, Odawa and Potawatomi, organized society through clans with responsibilities for leadership, protection, healing and teaching. Nations made treaties with each other, recorded agreements in wampum belts and oral histories, and resolved disputes through processes that emphasized restoring relationships. These systems of law and order are part of the reason that, as Lesson 8 shows, restorative and community-based approaches are not new ideas for Indigenous communities.

Alliances, the Royal Proclamation and the treaties

In the early colonial period, France and Britain depended on Indigenous nations as trading partners and military allies. After Britain's victory in the Seven Years' War, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 declared that Indigenous lands could be acquired only by the Crown, through public agreements with the nations themselves. At the Treaty of Niagara in 1764, about two thousand representatives of two dozen nations met Sir William Johnson, and the agreement was recorded in wampum, including the Two Row belt tradition of two peoples travelling side by side without interfering in each other's affairs. Many First Nations regard the Proclamation and Niagara together as the foundation of their relationship with the Crown.

In what is now Ontario, a series of land surrender treaties was signed in the late 1700s and early 1800s, followed by the Robinson-Huron and Robinson-Superior Treaties of 1850. After Confederation, Canada negotiated the eleven numbered treaties between 1871 and 1921, covering most of the Prairies and the North. The treaties promised reserves, annual payments, schools, farming tools and, in Treaty 6, a 'medicine chest'. Written texts in English described a surrender of land, but many First Nations understood the treaties as agreements to share the land in peace, and their oral histories record promises that do not appear in the written texts. Courts today read treaties generously, resolve ambiguities in favour of the First Nations, and consider the oral history. Nimkii Bay First Nation is a treaty community; its members' rights to hunt and fish in their traditional territory, which Lesson 4 discusses, come from that history.

The Indian Act

In 1876, the federal government consolidated earlier colonial laws into the Indian Act, which still governs many aspects of First Nations life. The Act defined who was an 'Indian', created the system of reserves and band councils, and placed reserve lands and band money under federal control. Indian agents, federal officials posted to reserves, had sweeping power over daily life. The Act's purpose was assimilation: the government's goal, as officials repeatedly said, was that First Nations would eventually disappear as distinct peoples through enfranchisement, the process by which a person gave up status and became an ordinary British subject. Status could be lost involuntarily, by earning a university degree, serving in the armed forces or, for women, marrying a man without status.

Over the following decades, the Indian Act was amended to suppress Indigenous life further. An 1884 amendment banned the potlatch and other ceremonies; the ban lasted until 1951. From 1885, after the North-West Resistance, the government introduced a pass system that required First Nations people on the Prairies to get written permission from the Indian agent to leave their reserves; it had no basis in law, but it was enforced for decades, often by the police. From 1927 to 1951, the Act made it an offence to raise money or hire a lawyer to pursue land claims without government permission. Women who married men without status lost their own status and could not pass it to their children until Bill C-31 changed the law in 1985, and later amendments in 2010 and 2017 addressed remaining discrimination. The Act remains in force, and many First Nations describe living under it as living under a colonial law that their own people did not write.

Residential schools

The residential school system was at the heart of the policy of assimilation. The first schools were run by churches in the early 1800s; the Mohawk Institute in Brantford, Ontario, opened in 1831 and was one of the longest-running. From the 1880s, the federal government funded and expanded a national system run mainly by the Catholic, Anglican, Methodist, Presbyterian and later United churches. In 1920, attendance became compulsory for First Nations children, and Indian agents and police were given authority to take children from their families. About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children attended. The Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement recognized 139 schools; the last federally run school, Gordon's in Saskatchewan, closed in 1996.

Children were forbidden to speak their languages, separated from siblings, given new names and cut off from their families, sometimes for years. Many were poorly fed and housed, and diseases such as tuberculosis killed many. Physical, emotional and sexual abuse was widespread. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission identified thousands of children who died at the schools, and the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation's memorial register now lists more than 4,000 names; many families were never told what happened to their children. In 2021, the announcement that ground-penetrating radar had detected potential unmarked graves near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia led to searches at former schools across the country. The TRC concluded in 2015 that the system was part of a policy of cultural genocide.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in the House of Commons on June 11, 2008, and the churches that ran the schools have apologized, most recently Pope Francis during his visit to Maskwacis, Alberta, in July 2022. The Settlement Agreement, which took effect in 2007, provided compensation to survivors and created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which heard from more than 6,500 witnesses and issued 94 Calls to Action in 2015. Lesson 11 returns to those Calls to Action, including those addressed to police and the justice system.

The Sixties Scoop and child welfare

As residential schools began to close, child welfare agencies took over much of their role. From the 1950s to the 1980s, in what is now called the Sixties Scoop, provincial child welfare authorities removed thousands of Indigenous children from their families and placed them with non-Indigenous families, often far away and sometimes outside Canada. Many lost their language, culture and connection to their communities. A national settlement for First Nations and Inuit survivors was approved in 2018. The pattern did not end with the Sixties Scoop: in the 2021 census, Indigenous children made up more than half of the children in foster care under the age of 15, though they were less than a tenth of all children. In 2019, Parliament passed An Act respecting First Nations, Inuit and Métis children, youth and families, which affirms Indigenous jurisdiction over child and family services; the Supreme Court of Canada upheld it in February 2024.

Intergenerational trauma

The effects of these policies did not end when the schools closed. Researchers and communities describe intergenerational trauma: harm that passes from one generation to the next. Children who grew up in institutions without their families often did not learn parenting from their own parents. Many survivors carried the effects of abuse into adulthood, sometimes through addiction, depression or violence, and their children grew up with those effects. Communities lost languages, ceremonies and the authority of elders. Researchers have linked these experiences to higher rates of poverty, poor health, suicide, substance use and contact with the justice system in many Indigenous communities.

Desjardins is careful with this point. Intergenerational trauma does not mean that Indigenous people are damaged or destined for trouble; most Indigenous people never come into conflict with the law, and many of the strongest people in any community are survivors and their children. Nor does history excuse harm done to others; the man whose cheekbone Kyle Beaudry broke is a real victim. What history does is explain patterns that are otherwise hard to understand, and it helps officers, prosecutors and judges choose responses that address causes rather than only symptoms. That is the idea behind the Gladue principles, which Lesson 8 covers in detail.

Why police need to know this history

The next lesson looks at the role police played in this history: the North-West Mounted Police enforced the pass system, and Indian agents and RCMP officers took children to residential schools. For many survivors and their families, the uniform is still associated with the day they were taken. Sergeant Keeshig says he has met elders who will not open the door to an officer they do not know, and parents who panic when a police car pulls into the driveway, because the last time that happened in their family a child disappeared. 'You can't fix that on one call,' he says. 'But you can avoid making it worse, and over time you can be the reason it changes.'

Marco DiSanto asks whether it is fair to hold today's officers responsible for things done a century ago. Keeshig says nobody is asking him to apologize for his great-grandfather. 'What I'm asking is that you understand why somebody is afraid of you,' he says. 'If a woman won't talk to you, or a family gets angry the minute you arrive, history might be part of the reason. If you know that, you slow down, you explain yourself, you bring someone they trust. If you don't know it, you think they're being difficult, and you push, and then it goes wrong.'