Residential Schools [The Report]
by Dr. Roland Chrisjohn

Published: Dark Night field notes #17

On May 24, 2000; St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick hosted a conference called Residential Schools: The Past is Present. It brought together residential school survivors and speakers addressing the system and its effects. Two participants were Jim Craven, who has served as a judge in an Inter-Tribal Tribunal and prosecutor in a Blackfoot Tribunal on the roles of certain churches and the government of Canada in the Indian Residential School system, and Roland Chrisjohn, rapporteur to the Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Justice for the psychosocial effects of residential schools. Dark night field notes here presents excerpts from talks and interviews related to the conference.

Roland Chrisjohn speaks:

I started writing my book on residential schooling, The Circle Game, in 1991, originally for Canada’s Royal Commission on Aboriginal Justice. I had done some work with the Williams Lake First Nations, seven or eight First Nations in and around British Columbia. And from that the Royal Commission approached me to write the psychosocial part of a three-pronged attack. Somebody was going to write about the legal aspects of residential schools, another person was going to write about the historical aspects and they were going to get a psychologist to write about the sociology and psychology of the residential schools.

At that point I was distancing myself quite drastically from psychology, so I asked “How could you be asking me to do this if you’d read anything I wrote on the residential schools?” “Well no, but we’ve heard good things.” I don’t know anyone who could have said anything complimentary about what I’d written before 1994, because I was taking to task a lot of what I call the standard account of the residential schools. But in 1994, I finished it. The Circle Game is essentially the 1994 report with appendices that answer questions arising from our presentation. The Royal Commission didn’t do anything with it. If you go through the volumes that came out later, you won’t find more than an occasional reference that this report ever existed.

The day after I delivered it to the Royal Commission, I got a call: “This is a marvelous report. Brilliant! We’re going to give this a big send-off.” They had done a report on suicide and another on native justice and the third was to be my take on the residential schools. Two days later, I get a second telephone call; “There’s been some problems with your paper. We’re wondering if you’ll summarize it in one page for us?” “No, it took me a hundred pages to say what I had to say. I never contracted to give you one page. If you don’t want to go with it, that’s your business.”
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