Challenges to Implementation

Part of the difficulty in facing these challenges is knowing what problem needs to be solved. Even though the residential school system was a catastrophic force in the lives of many Indigenous families, there were deeper motivating forces that led to their construction. Colonialism is a term that is bandied about in many contemporary conversations but people sometimes fail to remember how pervasive it was, and continues to be, in the lives of Indigenous peoples. As Paul Nicolas Cormier states in his paper British Colonialism and Indigenous Peoples: The Law of Resistance-Response-Change:

“Indigenous peoples in British colonial countries like Canada grow up under foreign societal structures and cultural norms. Components of a larger colonial project, these structures have become a normalized aspect of the Canadian fabric and include such well-known systems as the legal system, child welfare system, the education system, religion, health, resource management, and post-secondary education including graduate studies. Canadians often forget that Indigenous peoples "have become part of a political system based not on their own legal traditions but created and defined by Eurocentric traditions." Consequently, the colonization of Indigenous/Aboriginal peoples in Canada and abroad has never ended; assimilation into the State remains the ultimate objective.”[6]

Colonialism began as a commercial enterprise designed to transfer the wealth of the world to Europe but quickly developed into an opportunity to impose hierarchies indiscriminately on whole continents of people. Defining who held power was essential to keeping the whole system running. One of the best descriptions of hierarchies is neither an advocation nor a condemnation from Harold J. Leavitt’s “Why Hierarchies Thrive,” which reveals as much about the structures of global capitalism as it does about colonialism, given that their roots are one in the same. Even though he is speaking in a more general tone, Leavitt could just as well be speaking about colonizers when he states:

“...hierarchies can be very effective at providing some of the psychic nourishment we all need. Of course, many are even more effective at draining that nourishment from our minds and souls. Too often, we come to depend on these structures as a kind of protective parent guarding us against the dangers of the outside world.” [7]

Imposing hierarchical structures on Indigenous people was a way for colonizers to protect themselves against the most dangerous thing in the world—vulnerable contact with human beings who share different ideas about the way the world is organized.