Week 6 discussion
A survivor from residential schools is Carole Dawson. Her parents took her to St. Michael Indian Residential School at the age of 13 years. Carole explains that the experience in that school was so horrible and stressful. She was subjected to physical, emotional, and mental torture. Carol would put more effort into protecting her younger sister and cousins from harassment. Carole narrates that she was sexually harassed by the supervisor in the dormitory, forced to wash the rooms, and whips as a form of punishment. She would try her level best to escape where she ended up being jailed. She spent most of her holidays in jail.
Carole Dawson’s story is one example of harsh treatments that Indian learners faced at the whites’ hands. In this story, the residential schools were available to play their role as a body of imparting skills, knowledge, values, and norms to all learners. Unfortunately, it’s ironic that the institutions turned out to be a place of discrimination, physical torture, which was indicated their failure as a learning institution. Indians had higher expectations of learning whites culture and their own culture, but to some extent, they could not even learn and socialize with their parents since they spent most of their free time in custody. I think that the victim experiences made them understand more of history than the individuals with less experience. This is enough evidence for the Canadian government to compensate the Indians who suffered in these schools.