Aboriginal People In The 19th Century

How did the Federal Government Treat Aboriginal Peoples in the 19th Century?

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the Aboriginal Peoples in Canada were poorly mistreated and abused by the Canadian Federal Government. Children as young as four years old and as old as sixteen was taken away from their homes and families to put through years of abuse and neglect due to the Residential School System. Hundreds of thousands of aboriginal youth and children were forced to live a lifestyle that was said to kill the Indian in the child (CBC, 2011). Throughout the years that these children spent in the residential schools, they endured a significant amount of emotional stress, physical abuse and sexual assault on a daily basis, all of

The thought process of the Federal Government was that if these children with such young and impressionable minds were to practice something aside from their Native traditions and beliefs that it would cause those traditions to go extinct. It took over one hundred years for the last residential school to shut down in Canada and an additional twelve years after the previous school had closed for the residential school survivors to receive a formal apology from a representative of the Canadian Government.

Moreover, around the 1880’s the Canadian Federal Government introduced a Residential School System with the intention of exterminating an entire population of people within Canada. As said by Duncan Campbell Scott the Deputy Minister of Indian Affairs, “I want to get rid of the Indian problem… Our objective is to continue [the residential school system] until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department.” (Restoule). All the residential schools are being fully funded by the federal government but were operated by various religious institutions where the nuns and priests were considered the student’s temporary

All of the students that were attending these schools are being addressed by the caregivers by racial slurs and suffered from various types of physical, emotional and sexual abuse from the teachers and administrators who worked in the system. For instance, if a student were to be caught speaking to a caregiver or any of their fellow peers in their native language, more often than not, a needle would be inserted into the child’s tongue as a form of punishment for disobeying the rules. These injections are only one small portion of the reoccurring strategies used by the workers in hopes of ensuring that all the students were to speak in French or English and would also abet them in regards to exterminating all sixty of the Aboriginal languages that were present in Canada at this time. The caregivers actively ignore the children’s state of health, and medical attention is usually withheld, resulting in roughly thirty-two hundred students dying due to being malnourished and suffering from diseases such as tuberculosis and influenza (Miller, 2012). As for the meals, the food provided by the Churches was extraordinarily unhealthy and did not provide all the proper nutrients needed to develop a growing mind and body. According to an interview done on Ian Mosby, in a typical