00:24:59.560I think Canadians are strong enough and mature enough to understand the subtleties of a situation.
00:25:05.800One concern that I've always had about the residential schools discussion is that there did seem to be a marked shift in how residential schools, and I'd say how schools in general were in the late 19th century, and how they weren't in the 1960s.
00:25:21.860And, you know, when people talk about how recent some of the residential schools were, I have not heard of any of the things that we heard happening in the, you know, the 1900s, 1910s, and 1920s happening in the 60s and 70s.
00:25:33.600So I'm wondering if you could talk from a historical perspective about the evolution, if there was a conscious evolution within these schools.
00:25:41.020I think you're right, I think they were, they evolved in a similar sort of way that the public schools evolved, and that is from pretty top-down teacher said things, and the children learned those things, to a more egalitarian and empathetic notion towards the culture of the children that you're teaching in.
00:26:04.800And you had to be somewhat empathetic to that culture, that was part of the arguments for the program on cross-cultural education that I was in at the University of Alberta, and it was just started in 1965, so it wasn't, it didn't go back a long ways.
00:26:22.140People started to get the idea that in order to be a good teacher, you had to be able to empathize with the students, and to stand in their place and see the world through their eyes before you could help them achieve the objectives that you and they would share.
00:27:17.320I think assimilation is a better word than integration.
00:27:21.100In the time that I was in Inuvik and in the Blackfoot Reserve, living in Old Sun,
00:27:30.660there were all the kids outside of classrooms would speak their native languages, and nobody did anything about it.
00:27:40.060Many of the white people in Inuvik that were working both in the Roman Catholic residents as well as the Anglican residents had facial expressions and used Inuktitutuk words to communicate with both the kids and with other people, including the white people.
00:28:03.220So it became part of the culture of that school is to use expressions like lifting your eyebrows if you want to say yes and scrunching up your nose if you wanted to say no.
00:28:15.060So people would use those kinds of things because the white people were a minority in a large group of kids that spoke as their native language in Inuktitutuk.
00:28:28.060But the stories, and I mean, all Canadians have been hearing these now going up to and certainly since the Truth and Reconciliation Report that they couldn't retain their own language, their hairstyles were changed, their names were changed.
00:28:40.300So where does that all come from if what you're saying is that, well, you know what, everyone could just use their own language outside the classroom and there was no issue there?
00:28:49.940Where does it come from? It probably was enforced in certain schools.
00:28:54.840It probably was enforced by certain people to a greater degree than other people.
00:28:59.160So people are reading the situation from a specific perspective and then generalizing.
00:29:08.260Now, I am doing the same sort of thing, but what I'm trying to say is that the subtleties between the schools and between the individuals that were running the schools may be quite large.
00:29:21.360And we don't know because we haven't got that evidence.
00:29:23.800The report doesn't report that evidence.
00:29:26.120If you look at the report itself, rather than just looking at the summary volume or the legacy volume, which are particularly biased, you will see a much more nuanced set of facts than if you just read the summary volume and the legacy volume.
00:29:41.680So in and of itself, the report is not a fair representation, the summary and the legacy volumes are not a fair representation of what the report actually says.
00:29:51.440And obviously, the commissioners since that time have gone off on a tangent in which Murray Sinclair said in the report, they report that 4,201 children died in the schools.
00:30:04.260And it's true, some children died in the schools, but some children died because of severe infectious diseases like tuberculosis and smallpox and all kinds of things that affected other people, Aboriginal kids to a greater degree probably, but they affected other kids.
00:30:23.260And Murray Sinclair said there's 15,000 to 25,000 missing kids or murdered kids buried someplace.
00:30:34.640If you go through the report, you don't find any evidence of that and you don't see anything in the recommendations, the calls for action to get the RCMP to search schoolyards for missing children.
00:30:48.820One of the prevailing sentiments here, I mean, children being murdered, we hear that term used.
00:30:56.040Also, children being like just involuntarily pried from their families and placed in these schools, never to be seen by their parents again.
00:31:04.260And you talk about in your experience, not knowing and your wife, who, as you mentioned, is someone you met at this place, not knowing anyone who had that happen to them, correct?
00:31:14.780There probably are some cases in which children were taken from their families, but certainly in my experience in the mid-60s, the parents signed forms to have their children come to certain schools or to stay in residence and to go to other schools if they were bused, like the Blackfoot children, bused to other schools.
00:31:40.920They knew what they wanted, and at that time, they all wanted their kids to be educated in the traditional educational system.
00:31:49.900They knew that in order to succeed, they knew that even to communicate with other Aboriginal people, and there's a number of people on the reserve that are mixed Aboriginal heritages, they have to communicate in English because they don't have a common Aboriginal language to communicate with.
00:32:06.680So, whether they liked it or not, they needed to be educated in English and understand English and French as languages as a communication for our country, for other people.
00:32:22.460Now, if you look at the way people are using their Aboriginal names, and you look at the accents on those names, it's impossible for people that are outside of that language to pronounce them properly.
00:32:39.980I mean, because I know you lived in the teacher's wing when you were staying there, and you would have talked to and known a number of the educators there.
00:32:47.420And I don't know if it's possible to generalize, but I'm curious what the prevailing attitude was towards Indigenous people.
00:32:54.920Was it paternalistic? Was it fraternalistic? Was it just, I'm the teacher, they're the students, and race didn't factor in?
00:33:02.700People knew there was differences in race, and there was differences in culture.
00:33:09.760The people that had been teaching on the Blackfoot Reserve for a long period of time, for example, were unbelievably empathetic towards the Blackfoot people.
00:33:19.680They liked these kids. They thought their job was to prepare them for the world that was coming, and to get them prepared both to be members of the Blackfoot community as well as the non-Indigenous community outside, so that they could fit into the Southern Alberta culture outside.
00:33:41.740And now, 50% of the people from the Blackfoot Reserve live off the reserve.
00:33:47.260If they didn't have that preparation, they would have a hard time integrating with other people and taking jobs in Calgary or working in some of the small towns or working on farms that are in the area.
00:34:01.380Well, that's certainly, I think, fascinating account that you've shared, and I would encourage people to, first and foremost, read your piece in, I think, the C2C Journal, which really elaborates on this.
00:34:14.840My life in two Indian residential schools. Professor Rodney Clifton. Good to talk to you, sir. Thanks for coming on today.
00:34:23.580That was my interview with Professor Rodney Clifton, and that does it for us for today here on The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:34:29.660We'll be back in a couple days' time with more of Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. Stay tuned. We'll talk to you then. Thank you. God bless, and good day to you all.