Written with a combination of scholarly prowess and Swiftian irony, "The Circle Game" makes the case that Canadian residential schools were not just an unfortunate accident

"The Circle Game": a review

The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience in Canada

Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young, with Michael Maraun

Theytus Books Ltd., Penticton, BC, Canada; 1997

ISBN 0-919441-85-8

327 pages, C$ 16.95

Combining scholarly prowess and Swiftian irony, "The Circle Game" makes the case that Canadian residential schools were not just an unfortunate accident. Rather they were elements of a calculated policy of cultural and physical genocide. To destroy the Indians as a people was a precondition to gaining control of their land.

Since the authors have solid academic credentials, they are in a position to recognize and refute apologies for genocide sprouting from the academy as well as the church. Roland Chrisjohn, a Haudenausaunee, received a doctorate in Personality and Measurement from the University of Western Ontario in 1981. Co-author Sherri Young and contributor Michael Maraun are specialists in the fields of Applied Social Psychology and Statistics respectively. Dispensing with the "value-free" stance found in academia, the authors join a long tradition of advocacy made proud by scholars such as Noam Chomsky, Edward Said and Ward Churchill.

Canada has a reputation of being more civilized than the United States. Images of smallpox blankets, forced marches to Oklahoma and outright massacre are as prominent a part of the US's historical memory as gas chambers are of Germany's. So is the term genocide appropriate to bland, polite Canada?

Keeping in mind that United Nations Genocide Convention--to which Canada became a signatory on November 28, 1949--defines "Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group" as constituting a form of genocide, there can be no doubt that Canadian residential schools fall into this category. Canadian leaders like Duncan Scott spoke openly about the "Indian problem" in terms similar to Hitler's "Jewish problem":

"I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that this country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone. That is my whole point. Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic, and there is no Indian question..."

Whether or not violence was used "to get rid of the Indian problem" is immaterial. As the authors state, "We repeat: the Nazis could have carried out the Holocaust politely; their crime wasn't simply that they implemented it in a cruel and disagreeable fashion".

That being said, there was plenty of violence. The authors recount some of the findings of the First National Conference on Residential Schools in Vancouver, June 1991:

--Sticking needles through the tongues of children, often leaving them in place for extended periods of time;

--Inserting needles into other regions of children’s anatomy;

--Burning or scalding children;

--Beating children into unconsciousness;

--Beating children to the point of drawing blood;

--Beating children to the point of inflicting serious permanent or semi-permanent injuries, including broken arms, broken legs, broken ribs, fractured skulls, shattered eardrums, and the like;

--Using electrical shock devices on physically restrained children;

--Forcing sick children to eat their own vomit.

The response of the Canadian government and churches has been one of damage control. That is why "The Circle Game" is so important. It demolishes the foundation of lies upon which the Canadian establishment and its stolen land rests.

Canadian apologists for genocide, especially those in academic circles, have a defense that sounds a bit like that of hate radio personality Rush Limbaugh, who is tired of complaints about what happened to African slaves or American Indians one hundreds years ago or more. The more sophisticated version says that actions in the past should only be judged by values and standards that existed 'back then'. Unless the actions were judged as evil in the past, they can be forgiven. This is the same kind of forgive and forget attitude that was on display when Reagan put flowers on the graves of Nazi officers at Bitburg.

The authors slash this defense to ribbons by pointing out that the people being wronged, whether slaves or Indians, had no way of providing input into the marketplace of values and standards. Referring to a study by Michael Parenti on crimes against African-Americans, they write, "That they [the slaves] didn't have access to the forums of debate and policy-making back then doesn't mean that they (and non-slaves sympathetic to them) accepted their lot; it simply means that their oppression precluded any effective means of protest." When dealing with the genocide against the Indian, it is simply impermissible to argue that the malefactors were conforming to social standards of the period. If anything, the only proper behavior would have been that of Huck Finn, who defied conventional values and standards by making common cause with a runaway slave.

What explains the cruelty of Canada's colonists? As is so often the case, greed is a sufficient explanation. In order to gain access to grazing land, timber and mineral riches, it was necessary to get rid of the native population. Legal indigenous ownership of the land was undeniable. The only way to break their control was through war, treaty or termination of the legal line of descendants. In Canada, due to the peculiarities of established British policy, it became necessary to end Indian control without violating British laws through outright warfare.

Genocide by cultural obliteration was geared to this need. As a program, it consisted of four elements:

1. Reduce the number of indigenous people who could make a legal claim as descendants of a tribe or nation. Through forced assimilation, residential schools would reduce the number of people who would be thinking of themselves as Indians and consequently demanding ownership of what belongs to them. In effect, the goal was to lobotomize an entire people.

2. Eliminate the economic and social relations that constitute the basis of Indian life. By turning a hunter or a fisher into a shoemaker or a seamstress, it would make it more difficult to defend traditional social organizations.

3. Make life as difficult as possible for those who assert Aboriginal identity. If you are beaten at a residential school for speaking an Indian tongue or wearing your hair long, you will get the lesson soon. Stop being an Indian. When you are no longer an Indian, then you might forget about the land that legally belongs to you.

4. Make integration into white society as easy and safe as possible. The residential schools prepare the Indian for a meager existence in the cities of Canada. Also, by pumping ideas of an Afterlife into the heads of pupils in church-run institutions, suffering in this world might become tolerable.

The authors define the residential schools in terms of Erving Goffman's 'total institutions'. Goffman, a Canadian himself, developed this analysis in the 1961 "Asylums". Even though Goffman's study does not include residential schools, it is clear that they fall within his purview, which includes institutions such as homes for the aged, asylums, monasteries, prisons and concentration camps. The authors write:

"He called such places total institutions, defined (in 'family resemblance' terms) as social institutions which were 'walled off' in some way from the world at large; which 'broke down' the barriers that existed in greater society between places of work, sleep, and play; and which enforced and maintained an extreme power disparity between a large inmate population and a smaller supervisory staff (which continued to be integrated with the outside world.)"

The goal of such institutions is to 'unmake' the people over they gain control. More importantly, the goal is not to create a new self, but no self at all. For this goal to be realized, it is often necessary to intern people at an early age, when the true self has not had a chance to assert itself. This is why Indian children were taken from their parents at the earliest possible age.

Such a process could not fail to produce deeply traumatized individuals with problems such as alcoholism or sexual dysfunction. The Canadian political and religious establishment has tried to address the human consequences of their genocidal operations as a 'therapeutic' problem. Victims of these 'total institutions' are supposed to receive treatment for 'Residential School Syndrome'.

This proposal receives a bitterly ironic commentary from the authors, who feel that there is a 'Residential School Syndrome', but of a somewhat different character than that defined by their establishment foes. They describe it in part as follows and recommend that it be included in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders-IV:

301.82 Residential School Syndrome

Diagnostic Features

Residential School Syndrome is a personality disorder manifested in an individual’s specific behavioral action of (1) obliterating another people’s way of life by taking the children of the group away from their parents and having them raised in ignorance of, and/or with contempt for, their heritage; while (2) helping himself/herself to the property of the target group. The behaviors are closely related, and indeed, some theorists have suggested that the "theft" of the target group’s children should be seen as merely another manifestation of the overwhelming urge to steal everything belonging to the target group. People with this disorder have a grandiose sense of self-importance and unjustified feelings of moral superiority, and, while they seldom bother to actually respond to protests of the aggrieved group, they are sometimes heard repeatedly to mutter empty platitudes like "It’s for your own good," or "I’m the expert, I know what I’m doing."

"The Circle Game" includes seven appendices revolving around legal and psychological issues related to residential schools that make an already essential book that much more worth owning. Portions of it can be read online at: http://www.treaty7.org/document/document.htm. The print version may be ordered from U. of Toronto Press at 1-800-565-9523.

(Louis Proyect is the moderator of an Internet mailing list at www.marxmail.org. He has written on indigenous issues for "Organization and Environment", "Canadian Dimensions" and "Review of Radical Political Economy".)