Undead Scribe

The Trickle-Down Effects of Abuse: A Literary Analysis of Canadian Residential Schools & Their Intergenerational Reach

While far from being well-addressed or even well-understood, the historical plight of Native Americans in Canada is at least well and widely acknowledged, both by the government and the wider citizenry. An example of this well-acknowledged historical suffering can be seen in the system known as Canadian residential schooling. Throughout this essay, I will be addressing the topic of abuse in these residential schools and the intergenerational effects of this abuse as seen through the lens of certain First Nations-related media.

Specifically, using the novel The Lesser Blessed by Richard Van Camp, as well as the film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, I plan to analyze the effects of child abuse on indigenous people due to the schools they were forced to attend. In order to properly narrow down my topic of choice, I will focus solely on the intergenerational damage that the child abuse accrued through residential schools have caused First Nations people living in Canada, specifically, and to what extent that abuse is still systemized today.

Before the advent of the residential school system in the nineteenth century, First Nations people residing in Canada had their own methods of teaching the children in their individual communities. Simply through everyday life, the children would be taught about their culture, their customs, how to take care of themselves and so on and so forth. This method of instruction allowed the Native people to keep their culture alive amidst the rapid industrial expansion that typified the era. The Canadian government felt that this could not continue and decided that First Nations people needed to be forced to assimilate, believing that their “savage” traditions and culture would only lead to their eventual extinction amid the rapidly modernizing world. Paternalistic as their stance was, the Canadian government felt that they were “responsible for educating and caring for aboriginal people in Canada (CBC News).”

With this in mind, they felt that the best method of abolishing native traditions from the country in the shortest period of time would be to target the children first and mold them into adopting Christianity and Canadian while also learning English, all through a widely-enacted policy known as “aggressive assimilation.” Under this policy, during 1879 to 1996, Native people living in Canada were forced by the government to send their children away so that they would be taught at “church-run, government-funded industrial schools”, more commonly known as residential schools. As seen in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, these schools were administrated by the Department of Indian Affairs and attendance was made mandatory for the great number of communities that didn’t have access to public schools.

Due to the paternalistically racist ideas behind their conception, these schools were contemptuous towards native traditions, religions or languages. It went so far that upon arrival at the residential schools, children had their hair cut and native clothing replaced with unfamiliar Western clothing. (Summary of Final Report 37-39). In fact, they actively discouraged all of the above under the threat of severe punishment towards the students if any were found to be doing so. As brought up in our group assignment, language is important to the maintenance and cohesion of a culture. Without a commonly understood language, said culture will eventually fall apart and be lost. By preventing the children from speaking their language through punishments or even recognizing their culture, the language these children spoke with their family will deteriorate and be lost even if older people attempt to maintain it.

In these residential schools, the children were victim of abuse and the horrible actions inflicted on them had many negative repercussions in the moment and in their futures. During the one hundred and seventeen years of this program’s lifespan, the Canadian government and the Church, respectively mandated to administer and run the residential schools, were abusive, violent and mistreated the children under their responsibility. The abuse heaped upon the children by the nuns and priests in these schools was plentiful, ranging from violence, neglect and sexual abuse.

As usually occurs due to the nature of these situations, such horrendous abuse came not only from residential school staff, but also from other students forced into these actions due to circumstances. Older students were often “punished if their younger charges misbehaved,” and not wanting to face more abuse from their government-appointed caretakers, these older children passed down the abuse to the younger children, likely along with a great deal of anger and resentment they were feeling (The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada).

Both The Lesser Blessed and Rhymes for Young Ghouls, while lacking in direct reference to the residential schools themselves for the most part, do show how the abuse found in this school was overtly harmful simply due to how they're woven into the narrative as a whole. By their very nature, both the text The Lesser Blessed and the film Rhymes for Young Ghouls inherently contain the historical topics of alienation, cultural isolation, forced assimilation, neglect and violence; both physical and sexual, all of these which Native children were forced to deal with due to an oppressive government structure as depicted in the texts. Nowhere are these historical topics captured more intensely than in their underlying message about Canadian residential schools.

Take the main character of The Lesser Blessed, Larry Sole, and his family life as an example. Larry mentions in the text of the story in a posthumous manner that his father, along with various other older male family members, had excessively violent streaks, harmful aspects of their behavior that they used to terrorize their families and force them to live in a state of fear and uncertainty. Larry states as much, saying that his father and uncle would often get drunk and beat their respective wives in a state of alcohol-fueled rage, often engaging in acts of violent rape alongside it, acts that he was not exempt from. As the story in set in the 1990s, it would be expected that the earlier generations of his family were subjected to the treatment of the residential schools. In fact, it is actually mentioned in the text that his father and mother went to the residential schools and further implied that the other men in his family did as well, including his uncle.

Larry often recounts the various sexual abuses that occurred in his family, going over the multiple accounts of sexual violence so often that they become almost part of the background of the story rather than taking center stage in a way that would occur in almost any other Young Adult story of the type. In a casual self-admittance, Larry reveals that his father sodomized him. “I wanted to take it away, the sin and dirt and cum and blood in my mouth. I couldn’t breathe. My eyes were crying. My lips were split... He jammed it so far in I couldn’t. I couldn’t. I couldn’t breathe. I wanted to sew stitches through my lips, so he could never fuck me there again (Camp).”

In another flashback, Larry recalls that when he was locked out of his house in Rae, he peeked through the window and saw his dad in the midst of raping his aunt, who was passed out on the couch (Camp). When she came over to their house the next day and said “’I feel like someone’s been inside me,’” Verna tried to convince her otherwise. This flashback suggest that Verna was complicit in Larry’s father’s abusive conduct (p. 101).

Speaking of his mother, he goes so far as to say, “The tear ducts my father had destroyed would never work again, so even though she made the sounds of crying, nothing came (Camp).” From all that Larry has seen, he cannot remove the image of his mother in his mind from that of a passive victim, still beholden to his father’s actions. In fact, it may even go further than that. While telling one of his stories, Larry describes a mother who is to blame for her son’s death. The story implies that either that his mother was likely complicit in both his father’s abuse of him and the abuse in general, ensuring that it continued. Both Larry’s mother and father pass on the violence of the schools, demonstrating how the schools left psychic scarring not just in the immediate victims but in their descendants as well.

This violence and sexual abuse can be directly traced back to the Canadian residential schools that his father, and likely his uncle as well, were forced to go to. Various Natives, now much older, still recall various stories of being brutally abused and raped by their supposed 'caretakers' in these residential schools created by the Canadian government.

In Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the main character, a teenage girl named Aila, is forced into one of these residential schools near the end of the film and is treated as harshly as one would expect under the instructions of the “Indian Agent” in charge of the school, a man named Popper. Her long hair is roughly shorn bath by a group of nuns and shortly after, she is forcibly stripped and thrown into a bath before being locked inside what could only be described as a prison cell for an indeterminate amount of time. However, the effects of the residential schools do not begin at that point in her life nor that of Popper’s.

Years past, both her father and Popper attended the same residential school, one where Popper, a white student, was often beaten by other First Nations students. Despite his attempts to help Popper, the — at the time — young man could not separate the face of his abusers from that of Aila’s father, Joseph and later on, he would carry that same resentment towards all Native people he found himself in charge of as he held his experiences from youth with him every day. Joseph’s father and mother would leave the residential school with a subpar education, as usual for those schools, and would turn to selling drugs to make enough money while spending a good portion of their time drunk. It is this lifestyle that would lead to Aila’s mother accidentally killing her son in a drunk driving accident and committing suicide while Joseph took the blame for his wife’s actions and getting sent to jail.

Aila would go into follow in her father’s footsteps by engaging in drug dealing in order to make enough money to support herself while also bribing Popper with enough money to keep him from hauling her off to the school that he controls. In this manner, it can be seen that the residential school system rendered Native children vulnerable by both depriving them of both a good education and leaving them with no other choice than resorting to illegal means such as drug trafficking so as to make their living as well as ensure the safety of their families. It cannot be underestimated how damaging this system was to native people in a myriad of ways.

One Sue Caribou, now a fifty-year-old woman, recounts her own vicious treatment while at her residential school that mirrors Aila’s own. “I was thrown into a cold shower every night, sometimes after being raped... We had to stand like soldiers while singing the national anthem, otherwise, we would be beaten up”, she recalled (Paquin). The trauma suffered in these schools have been highlighted in the text of The Lesser Blessed and the film Rhymes for Young Ghouls, the author drawing attention to the intergenerational effects of what a childhood of violence and sexual abuse performed by those who were supposed to be acting as caretakers towards them can create.

In this form, Van Camp chose to explore the interrelated effects of such trauma on the dynamics of Larry's family, serving as a microcosm of what Native communities may be struggling with as a whole. It is this history of violence and abuse that Van Camp and director Jeff Barnaby captures in a painful way as we are forced to engage it through the harrowing experiences of Larry Sole and Aila.

Both Popper and Larry’s father serve a strong role in each story, that of the ever-present specter of the effects of the residential schools on the main character’s lives. Both being abusers, complicit in physical and sexual violence to those at their mercy, they perpetuate the abuse they faced through their malicious actions. Popper tortures the entire Red Crow community, carrying out draconian punishments and beatings as he molests and abuses children while Larry’s father beat, raped and abused his own family. They essentially serve to symbolize the evil of these residential schools by being victims of abuse themselves, a continuing example of intergenerational effects by their very existence.

So much of what they have done clearly has scarred the main characters. Larry often reminisces about his father’s violence with a chilling calmness, thinking of his own rape and sodomy with an air almost too light for the subject matter while Popper’s attempted rape of Aila near the end only serves to confirm the rumors mentioned earlier in the film, the implied idea that Popper molests the young children under his care. The effects on the main characters are apparent on a level past that of the physical as well. As Larry enjoys the violence that he inflicts on others with a sense of pleasure bordering on sadistic, Aila hardens herself and turns to criminal activity in an attempt to cope with the life she’s been forced into.

During the hundred and twenty-years that the Canadian government, nearly two hundred thousand children were ripped from their families and forced into these residential schools. Nearly as many were beaten, sexually abused, starved and neglected at the hands of their caretakers, forced into cultural isolation and left without any linguistic connection to their culture due to the paternalistic beliefs of the Canadian government. The intergenerational effects of these cultural policies are still felt to this day by Native communities and both the discussed text and film exemplify them, acting as a spyglass into the world that many Native children now live in. After all, what else could a program designed to “kill the Indian in the child” ultimately result in, if not cultural genocide and a mountain of child abuse (The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada)?

Works Cited

Camp, Richard Van. The Lesser Blessed. Vancouver: Friesens, 1996. Document.

CBC News. "What is a residential school?" 16 May 2008. CBC. Document. 1 December 2018.

Paquin, Mali Ilse. "Canada confronts its dark history of abuse in residential schools." 6 June 2015. The Guardian. Document. 3 December 2018.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Ontario: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 2015. Document.