How responsible is Macdonald?

Vincent J. Curtis

16 Nov 2018

Sir John A. Macdonald was Canada’s founding Prime Minister, serving in office from 1867 to 1873 and from 1878 to 1891.  It has become fashionable to morally condemn him for his association with Residential Schools.  Statues to Macdonald are being pulled down all over Canada, and Residential Schools are offered up as akin to concentration camps for cultural genocide.

Macdonald was Prime Minster, not a school inspector.  He had a country to build, and to protect from American encroachment.  With the purchase of Rupert’s Land from the Hudson Bay Company in 1869, Canada acquired the vast Northwest Territory that connected Ontario with the colony of British Columbia on the Pacific coast.  The Canadian Pacific Railway enabled transport across this wide open space, but to protect that space the land needed to be filled up with Europeans loyal to Canada - before America created enough facts on the ground to challenge “British” (as the Americans conceived of Canada at the time.) sovereignty over it.

The life of the Plains Indian, as it had been practiced since the end of the last Ice Age, was rapidly coming to a close.  The plains buffalo was nearly extinct by 1881.  The Dakota Sioux under Sitting Bull sought refuge in Canada from the United States Cavalry seeking revenge for the Little Big Horn, and the Sioux relied on food supplies from the government of Canada to keep from starving.  American whisky traders at Fort Whoop-up, in what is now southern Alberta, were making money by corrupting traditional Indian civilization.  In these conditions, Canada set about to establish peaceful and regular relations with the plains Indians of the Great North West.

The politicians of eastern Canada decided that it would be wrong simply to neglect the Indians and leave them to their fate in the face of the coming European settlement.  They decided that education in the manner of the white man would give the Indian a better chance of survival.  The intent of the government of Canada in establishing residential schools wasn’t to inflict pain on Indian children, but to give them a western education in the hopes that something of the Indian would survive European settlement.

The government of Canada was not in the education business, and so it contracted with entities whose mission was education – the Christian Churches.  The style of residential schools was similar in principle though smaller in scale to residential schools like Eton, Harrow, Upper Canada College, Ridley College, and Hillfield and Strathallen Colleges.   The government of Canada lacked the resources and the expertise to evaluate the quality of the educational experience of the Indian children.

Attendance at residential schools was made compulsory in 1884 by an amendment to the Indian Act of 1876.  Residential schools were funded by the Department of Indian Affairs and run by Christian Churches.  The system started with 69 schools and 1,100 students, peaking in 1931 with 80 schools, and about 9,000 students, before the closure the last one in 1996.  When provincial authorities were established, Indians and their education remained the responsibility of the Federal government.  Ten to one hundred students per school doesn’t draw close public or political supervision, and it wasn’t until 1990 that abuses became public knowledge.

The road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the fact is that the Indians of Canada did not die out though their traditional way of life did.  The aim of Sir John A. Macdonald and Hector Langevin, the survival of the Indian in the face of European settlement, was achieved, however imperfectly.

Macdonald’s great legacy is not summed up by Residential Schools.  He saw their establishment; he did not oversee any abuses.  Schooling was his immediate aim.  It seems extreme to conclude that Macdonald should be held to blame for the evils that occurred after his death in 1891, and after the agencies directly responsible for them have themselves been made accountable.  Is the “cultural genocide” really worse than actual extinction that would have occurred otherwise?

Why Macdonald and Langevin should be sacrificed as acts of atonement for the bad treatment some received at residential schools is an odd case of selective outrage and amnesia.  

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