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Article Excerpt
Introduction
The colonial geographies of British Columbia (BC) are well considered, by geographers and non-geographers alike, notably with reference to: the creation of reserves (Harris 2002); tensions between colonial and Indigenous cartographic imaginings of the province (Brealey 1995; Sparke 1998); illness and depopulation amongst Indigenous (1) populations as a function of colonization and contact (Harris 1997/98, 1999; Kelm 1998); missionizing processes and competing ecumenical efforts (Neylan 2003); competing land, resource and governance claims between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples (Tennant 1990; D. Harris 2001; Morris and Fondahl 2002) and, more broadly, as outcomes of colonial powers that constructed and maintained Indigenous peoples as 'othered' within the province's landscapes (Blake 1999; Clayton 2000). While there is a growing literature on residential schools in BC (Redford 1979-80; Haig-Brown 1988; Sterling 1992; Raibmon 1996; Woods 1996; Neylan 2000), little geographic notice has been given to colonialism as it was embedded, embodied and enacted through these schools. In this article, I argue that the relatively small and intimate geographies of residential schools offer important insights into colonial projects in BC. I begin with a brief history of the province's residential schools, followed by a discussion of theories of place as a means to conceptualize colonialism. I then explore how both the material and the non-physical geographies of residential schools sought to shape and transform First Nations children while simultaneously acting as sites within which First Nations subjects asserted agency and Indigeneity. First Nations published testimonies (2) provide the primary referent through which experiences of place are explored. Theoretical discussions concerning the 'nested place' (3) nature of BC's residential schools and their occupants allow both to be examined as singular subjects and as places of multiplicity and plurality within the colonial contest. This plurality becomes apparent, in part, when First Nations students' narratives of trauma and victimization within the schools are juxtaposed with narratives of active student resistance and expressions of creative agency within the same locations. Although the testimonies considered in the first section of the article portray residential schooling primarily as a traumatic and disciplining effort imposed upon First Nations students, in the second section of the article I am interested in disrupting, or troubling, the narrative of uncontested colonial imposition. Consequently, I conclude the article with a consideration of how nested place, First Nations' resistances and Euro-colonial concepts of gender are circulating today with reference to a Dakelh woman (and former residential school student) under consideration for beatification in northern BC.
Placing British Columbia's Colonial Education
In considering the geographies of residential schools in BC I draw from and combine a number of theories on place and colonialism, beginning with the premise that a place, site or event is best understood through 'the multiple processes which constitute it' (Foucault 1991, 76). Furthermore, I agree that if we are truly interested in understanding colonialism, particularly as a spatialized set of endeavors, it is crucial we investigate the sites and places where it was practiced (Harris 2004). It is in those places, as Harris argues, where colonialism's effects were displayed and its tactics actualized. To cast further light on the colonial contest in BC, therefore, a discussion both of specific places, and of those places in constitutive context, seems imperative.
BC residential schools, although certainly individual sites with specific bounded parameters, were (and continue to be) located within and constituted by larger narratives and processes of colonialism. Consequently, I also find it useful to understand the colonialism of residential schools and schooling through Kobayashi and Peake's (2000) observation that, when it comes to social processes in place, 'the material and the ideological ... are not separate, nor are they alternative ... but [are] rather two dimensions of human action, ontologically inseparable' (393). Finally, my discussions of colonialism in BC's residential schools are premised on an understanding that colonialism is never a complete nor homogenous project and is always comprised of social and political constructs that exist somewhere between the discursive and the practical (Thomas 1994).
Colonial action aimed at Aboriginal peoples in Canada was centred on structural processes imposed upon Indigenous peoples, including geographic incursion, destruction of socio-cultural structures, and the imposition of external control (Frideres 1988). Colonial action, however, requires an ideological framework of explanation and rationalization. Such ideological frameworks, as many post-colonial theorists have argued, are comprised of nuanced social practices and cultural iterations which insist that (particularly non-white) non-Euro colonial peoples, and all elements of their existences, are flawed and inherently inferior (Bhabha 1994; Said 1994). To think of this in another way, it is helpful to understand colonialism, like racism, as a set of practices and outcomes arising from the cumulative merger of thoughts, discursive iterations and bureaucracies or laws (Razack 2004). In other words, the very possibility of engaging in acts of colonialism, including colonial education in BC, relied on the creation, and the subsequent 'bringing into being', of an 'Other' over which colonialists constructed and reconstructed themselves as dominant and more advanced corporeally, intellectually and culturally (McClintock 1995). These constructions then informed, and manifested into, structural undertakings, including residential schooling and (en)forced colonial education. None of which is to say, and this is relevant with reference to residential schooling in BC, that colonial discourses and practices were uncontested by those whom the discourses and practices were intent on othering and subjugating (Scott 1990; Thomas 1994).
Residential schooling in BC was constituted through a lineage of colonial schooling practices across Canada. This lineage of schooling, founded on a Euro-colonial ideological system premised on the conviction that Aboriginal peoples required transformation, can be traced to Canada's first boarding school for Aboriginal children, opened in New France by the Recollects' in 1620. Although not a great deal has been written about pre-confederation residential schooling in Canada (Carney 1995), it seems clear there is some continuity of purpose between early colonial schooling and the pedagogical values of residential schools after the 1867 British North American Act. Teaching strategies and purposes differed between early schools, primarily as a result of the ecumenical goals held by institutions operating schools and the individualized endeavors undertaken by teachers staffing them (Carney 1995). Boarding schools across the territory, however, focused to varying degrees on Christianization of Aboriginal students, basic fluency in English or French, the instilment of European values and morals on students, and the practice of labouring activities in accordance with beliefs not only that Aboriginal peoples were best served with training in trades, agriculture and the domestic arts (Barmen et al. 1986) but also that Aboriginal peoples would likely never surpass a place of the labouring or second class in Canada.
Schooling as an agent for Indigenous social engineering and cultural transformation became well entrenched in Canada with the establishment of the 1876 Indian Act, a set of policy parameters which for the first rime solidified Canada's commitment to enforced education of Aboriginal children. The Indian Act was predicated on the shifting historical policy goals of protecting, civilizing and, finally, assimilating Aboriginal peoples (Canada 1996, Chapter 9). These goals, according to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), were perhaps most succinctly embodied in education, a practice 'obviously a creature of Canada's paternalism toward Aboriginal people, its civilizing strategy and its stern assimilative determination' (RCAP 1996, Chapter 10: 1). A1though the foundations of a national colonial education process for Aboriginal children were set by the Indian Act, the policy was in many ways not fully actualized until 1879, the year Nicolas Flood Davin tabled his Report on Industrial Schools for Indians and Half-Breeds (Canada 1879).
The report, completed by Davin after an investigation of boarding schools for Aboriginal children in the United States, concluded that assimilation of Indigenous peoples in Canada would succeed only if the new nation adopted assertive educational practices predicated on boarding (residential) schools. Residential schooling was preferred to day or industrial schools which, according to Davin, allowed too much contact between Aboriginal children, their families and their cultures, thereby encouraging students' recidivism to savagery. Residential schools, argued Davin, would be 'the principle feature' of the policy known as 'aggressive civilization' which would guarantee Aboriginal children were 'kept constantly within the circle of civilized conditions' where they would receive the 'care of a mother' and an education that would prepare them for a life in modernizing Canada (Canada 1879--'Davin Report'). It was with the tabling of Davin's report that place became explicitly paramount in the colonial contest. Confined and specific sites were vital in the transmission and enactment of colonial ideologies.
Place, as geographers have long observed, is a complex and contested concept. Nevertheless, broad agreement holds that place has an intimacy and 'known-ness' that the concept of space can lack. Furthermore, ongoing discussions concerning place have expanded the concept far beyond that of a small, contained, site within a more encompassing or universal space. Although place certainly carries with it the resonance of 'locale', it is incorrect to assume a material neutrality to the concept (Massey 1994). Indeed, as Agnew (1887) insists, place is precisely where 'social relations are constituted' (26) and as Keith and Pile (1993) have argued, place must be theorized as 'no longer passive, no longer fixed, no longer unidialectical ... but, still, in a very real sense about location and locatedness' (5). Furthermore, social and political ideologies are made to function, are put into practice and are understood, in part through their emplacement (Cresswell 1996). As Casey (1997) suggests, place can be a generative event and may be understood as 'an active source of presencing [where] within its close embrace, things get located and begin to happen' (63).
Place no longer suggests rigid containment or boundary but rather, taking its lead from the permeability of the organic body, 'extends to the world without end ... ingresses into the world in its entirety and draws that world back into itself. Thanks to this power, place is to be recognized as an un-delimited, de-totalized expansiveness, resonating regionally throughout the unknown as well as the known universe' (336). That conceptualizations of place might take direction from considerations of the body, or indeed that the body is a politicized place unto itself, is a concept not overlooked by feminist geographers. McDowell (1999), for instance, argues that the body is the most intimate of places while simultaneously embodying crucial sites of political, economic, and cultural struggles. The body, as Smith (1993) argues, is the place where one subject joins or separates from another and where 'the culturally dominant and the culturally marginalized are assigned their 'proper' places' (10).
BC's residential schools, and the bodies of both the First Nations children and colonial subjects who occupied them, might thus be theorized as places within broader colonial narratives where the material and the ideological are inextricably linked. The enfolded combination of these places might be further understood as simultaneously supporting and defying the larger colonial contest in which all were situated. In other words, the relatively small places of BC's residential schools (and the smaller body-places within the schools) may be understood as multidirectional and permeable sites nested within, yet crucial to, larger spatial colonial projects. Theorizing the nestedness of residential schools, and of those who occupied them, resonates with Malpas's (1999) philosophy that subjectivity is embedded, or nested, within place and that place is narrated both by those subjects who occupy and make sense of it and by events and social interactions which also construct it. It is through this conceptualization of...
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