A Cultural Sociology of Anglican Mission and the Indian Residential Schools in Canada: The Long Road to Apology

Editor's preface, Page VII:

"Eric Taylor Woods’ analysis of the radically shifting relationship between Anglo-Canadian core groups and native peoples on the Canadian periphery provides a vigorous, cultural-sociological challenge to conventional postcolonial theorizing. Under the influence of Foucault, Said, and Bourdieu, postcolonial writings instrumentalized the relationship between dominator and dominated, focusing on power and neglecting the independent power of cultural evaluation. Arguing that cultural structures mediate relationships of power, Woods reminds us that Christian missionaries not only othered native peoples but insisted on their shared humanity as well. This solidarizing aspiration stimulated a range of Anglo-Canadian social policies that aimed to foster assimilation. When less nativist, more multicultural orientations emerged in the 1960s, Canada’s core groups began decades of self-criticism, a process that became particularly harsh with the public exposure of predatory sexual practices at the Anglican Church’s widespread missionary schools. Woods interprets this surprising critical turn as an explosion of perpetrator trauma, drawing links to Germans facing their involvement in the Holocaust. While giving the agency and courage of aboriginal activists, intellectuals, and artists full due, Woods sympathetically portrays the emotionally searing remorse of Anglican core groups, illuminating its moral basis in an idealized Canadian civil sphere that, despite its manifest contradictions, aspired to equality and solidarity for all. Anglican Mission and the Indian Residential Schools in Canada speaks to central issues across a wide range of fields, from sociology to political science, from aboriginal studies to postcolonial theory, from theology to Canadian studies, and to core theoretical issues in cultural sociology and trauma theory." (vii).

Excerpt from Chapter 2, Page 8-9:

"The humanitarian impulse of the evangelical Anglicans was most visibly expressed through the work of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS). William Wilberforce, who led the formation of the CMS, and who is now celebrated in the UK for his role in the movement against slavery, also played a key role in the creation of the APS alongside fellow abolitionist Thomas Fowell Buxton. The APS was created out of concern for the treatment of colonized peoples throughout the empire, and vigorously lobbied the UK government and the wider public opinion ostensibly on behalf of indigenous peoples’ well-being. Its proponents saw their role as providing a stabilizing force to communities whose social worlds were in upheaval as a result of the encounter with colonialism. With respect to North America, the APS regularly decried the encroachment of settlers upon indigenous communities’ lands. Perhaps its greatest impact in BNA occurred in 1870, when it went so far as to buy Lennox Island (located near the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island) on behalf of a Mi’kmaq community. As a result of its efforts, the APS often found itself at odds with colonial administrations, who were more interested in the demands of white settlers. Yet, for all its concern for colonized peoples, the APS took a highly paternal position. It was not against colonization per se. On the contrary, its representatives expressed the hope that a more benevolent form of colonization could actually benefit indigenous peoples. In doing so, they added strength to the emergent liberal defence of Empire; that it could be a vehicle for civilizing the non-European world. As such, James Heartfield (2011) refers to the APS as espousing a form of ‘humanitarian imperialism’. More broadly, we might refer to their ideology as that of the civilizing mission.

The reason for this ‘humanitarian imperialism’, or the civilizing mission, seems to derive from the deeply ingrained paradigm that can be traced to the eighteenth century representation of the ‘poor Indian’ in need of salvation—that the life worlds of indigenous people were a baleful and anachronistic hindrance. Within this paradigm, the only conceivable route to improving the well-being of colonized peoples was by adopting the superior culture, not by clinging to their ostensibly inferior culture. For missionaries and humanitarians, this undisputed ‘fact’ made their work all the more pressing in the settler colonies. Without proper inculcation into the beliefs and practices of a superior civilization that was rapidly expanding, it was widely believed that indigenous peoples would be cast into the dustbin of history; as the bearers of an obsolete culture they were seen to be doomed to extinction. The great paradox in this thinking is that the humanitarians presumed the only escape from extinction was by adopting the ‘higher civilization’—replacing one’s culture to avoid extinction...

In the service of mission, CMS missionaries, as with their Protestant and Catholic contemporaries, created ‘mission schools’, where non- European and non-Christian communities were taught the essentials of Christianity and civilization. While the use of institutionalized schooling to proselytize and civilize non-Europeans already had a long history in Christian missionary practice—used by various Roman Catholic and Protestant missionaries at least as far back as the sixteenth century—in the nineteenth century it became the key element of mission...t by the mid-nineteenth century missionaries were the major—often the sole—providers of education to colonized peoples (Jensz 2012a: 294). The type and level of institutionalized schooling varied widely, from infant schools to universities and seminaries, and from day schools to boarding schools (Jensz 2012a: 295)." (8-9).