Alex Reid Speaks on Residential Schools, Capitalism and Colonialism, and the Ongoing Separation of Indigenous Families

By Alex Reid, a YCLer in Vancouver.

This speech was delivered by Alex at an anti-racist event hosted by the Fraser Valley Peace Council in July 2021. A video of the speech can be accessed here.

“I have been asked by a good friend to speak about residential schools here today.

This has been a really heavy few months for Indigenous people.

My grandfather and much of my family went to residential school. Residential school was full-time until Grade 3, then half work, half school. The majority of my grandpa’s friends had committed suicide within 2 years of graduation.

My papa hated washing carrots because throughout the winters your hands would freeze. Grandpa was hungry for 10 years. One of the wardens on the farm beat students with a flashlight everyday.

Uncle’s friend’s friend was a chronic bed-wetter and he was whipped and beaten every time he wet the bed. They locked the bathrooms after midnight so children couldn’t use the toilets.

Papa’s good friend built a raft, raided the staff room for food, then left with 2 friends. They were discovered a few days later, and his friend was whipped in front of the whole school. He committed suicide right after graduation.

The Feds confirmed that 6000+ students died in the schools. As of 2021, 3200 of their identities have been confirmed. Today there are estimates that as many as 30,000 of the 150,000 students did not make it home.

Now, heinously violent people are saying, ‘Lots of these children died from tuberculosis.’ This reveals their ignorance and is nothing more than a racist excuse. It wasn’t a bullet that killed Anne Frank; it wasn’t a gas chamber: it was typhus. It is a characteristic tactic of fascism to subject their victims to conditions which are antithetical to life.

This tactic of systemically placing people in conditions where disease flourishes is used today by the United States. The ICE facilities are using this tactic as we speak.

Based on the recommendations of the Davin Report, that British devil John A. Macdonald authorized the creation of the residential school system in 1880, designed to isolate Indigenous children from their families and cut all ties to their culture. It was the express intention of the residential schools to ‘kill the Indian in the child.’

After visiting 35 residential schools, Dr. Peter Henderson Bryce, chief medical officer for Canada’s Department of the Interior and Indian Affairs from 1904 to 1921, revealed that Indigenous children were dying at alarming rates – with the mortality rate of enrolled students as high as 25%. This number climbed to 69% after students left school.

Now, it is important to note that while residential schools were created in 1880, the concept has been here longer. For more than 200 years, from the early 1600s to the 1800s, religious orders ran mission schools for Indigenous children — the precursors to the Government of Canada’s residential school system. This is important to know because we can see that institutionalized violence towards Indigenous children is older than this country as it exists today. It is important to know because it helps us understand conditions today, and the continuity of the residential school system with so-called ‘child and family services’.

This colonial violence has continued uninterrupted. Indigenous kids are 7.7% of the population yet they comprise 52% of the kids in foster care. The Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) has taken more kids than residential schools have. Colonialism has never ended here, and Canada upholds it very tenaciously everywhere else.

Canada has inflicted colonial violence, resource robbery, and regime change against Bolivia, Haiti, the Congo, the Dominican Republic, Greece, huge chunks of southern Macedonia, Venezuela, Eritrea, Papua New Guinea, Guatemala, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Ecuador, Chile and so forth. For Indigenous people, fascism has been here for a long time. Most Canadian people have been able to avoid it, but that is becoming less and less the case, and things continue to get worse.

Che Guevara said that, “it isn’t my fault that reality is Marxist.” This means that material conditions matter. Corporations can spend billions of dollars to drown the population in lies, but there comes a time when material conditions contradict the propaganda too hard for people to keep believing in it. In 2021, they can no longer beat you over the head with the American dream.

Right now, the empire of white supremacy is a sinking luxury cruise ship. Hundreds of millions of people are stuck punching the clock and trying to keep above water while the capitalist class sits on the top deck in the sun, drinking champagne and smoking cigars in stolen opulence.

Another thing to think about is language. In my language, there is a term for someone who speaks so much that it is offensive. Even if they aren’t saying anything wrong, it is wrong to be a windbag. This concept is sorely needed in English. In anthropology, there is a huge debate on whether culture, or the language used to articulate that culture, came first.

In North America, there is a huge number of terms used to hate people on welfare and poor people — I’m sure you can think of many of them. But there isn’t an equal or greater number of terms to hate the rich and the exploiters of our labour, our bodies, and our minds. This is a glaring reflection of the way we have been taught to think. The holes in this patchwork language are lapses in our perception. The ruling class has given us a lot of poisonous words and ideas to perpetuate, and not the words to heal, to foster solidarity, and to build.

We need to take a hard look at where these colonial tongues are spoken. How far we see English, French and Spanish spoken across the world is a testament to fascism. Today there are 29 countries in Africa that speak French and 15 of those countries’ economies are controlled by France. Virtually all of Latin and South America speaks Spanish and has had their governments overthrown by US imperialism; something that we benefit from because we get cheaper products. Fascism is here for Indigenous people and it has been exported across continents for decades.

People praise the Scandinavian countries for their policies, but they are neoliberal hellholes who only sound good because they receive blood money from the exploitative relationship of the so-called Third World. Without that exploitation, each of these nations would crumble like a house of cards in a hurricane. As of 2019, there are 197 Canadian mining corporations plundering Latin and South America and 94 Canadian mining corporations plundering Africa. This country is an imperialist nation. Fascism is here and it landed in 1492. Since then they have enslaved, extorted, and committed genocide against Indigenous peoples, and inflicted all types of violence to pursue power and profits at our direct expense.

Natives like to joke that Canada is 3 corporations in a trench coat, and I wish it were that simple… but it isn’t. Since the Hudson’s Bay Company, their mercenaries, the Anglos, and the Francos declared this country in 1867, they have pillaged left and right. They have stolen the furs, the oil, the copper, the diamonds, the grain, the wheat, the salmon, the bison, the water, the timber, the land from beneath our feet, and the very ecosphere that we use to breathe.

A few weeks ago we saw Lytton burn to the ground. A few years ago we watched Fort McMurray burn to the ground. Three summers ago we watched the sky turn yellow. There are actual companies selling Canadian air. We must put a stop to the commodification of our resources. We must put a stop to the commodification of these pieces of our lives. We must put a stop to the commodification of our safety, our time, our health, our environment, our education, and the bonds that we have as humans. We must understand that settler colonialism, fascism, capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy are part of one beast. We must drive a stake through the heart of this beast of relentless and genocidal capitalist expansionism. Without a reorientation of our society towards Indigenous-led socialism, we will watch in terror as more and more of the working class suffocates. Day in and day out, you will watch people driven to the edge of desperation.

I want to end this on a happy note. The ruling class has billions in infrastructure, it has the solidarity of other ruling classes internationally, it has the police, it has the militaries, it has the training and it has all the funding it could ever need. But what do we have that it doesn’t have? We the people have love. We have solidarity. We have the understanding of each other’s struggles. Those lab coat eggheads in ivory towers for decades thought it was opposable thumbs that put humanity at the top of the food chain, but they were wrong. It is our empathy that has made humanity so powerful.

When asked what constituted the beginnings of civilization, the anthropologist Margaret Mead said ‘a healed femur.’ The time and effort required to heal each other, she said, demonstrated the first sign of civilization, of compassion. It is our ability to read how another is doing through nothing more than a look, a pained sigh, a glance, a tone of voice. These are incredibly small things, but they let us read each other clear as day, and they allow us to care for each other. This is where we differ.

The ruling class, the paper-signing murderers, are motivated by numbers and concepts; we are motivated by love and by our humanity.

In Lakota, their term for ‘I love you’ translates to ‘I would suffer for you’. It is a term that cannot be thrown around the way it is in this colonial tongue.

As long as we remember that all we have is each other and we stand shoulder to shoulder, we will be victorious. All my relations.”

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Author’s note: “To be gentle to the audience, I did not mention the worst stories and I did not mention the sexual violence that was used in residential schools. Over 5000 perpetrators of the violence in residential schools have been identified, yet not a single one has gone to jail, not even the nun using the electric chair on students. Sexual violence is a tactic of war and psychological devastation. It was used in these fascist institutions as it is used in Chile today by the police. These problems are not in the past.

To put it in perspective, when I was drinking with some friends last week, we talked to a random Native guy. He was playing guitar with a friend on a bench near a park in Vancouver. We talked to him and I gave him $20 to play guitar for us. He played a few songs and I hung back to chat with them. He quickly told me he was taken by the foster system when he was 2 and he that he started getting molested by that “family” when he was 2. This completely random Native person and his friend, as we walked to buy Gatorade and smokes, was one of the victims of the settler state’s violence. His friend gave me a Budweiser for chatting with them. It is also important to know that residential schools were used to crush the egalitarian development of Indigenous societies. The girls in the schools were too resilient, but the boys were more vulnerable. The preachers and ‘teachers’ taught the boys misogyny and laid the foundation for sexism, misogyny, and the colonial patriarchal devastation that slashed and burned the equitable and matriarchal balances that previously maintained harmony.

That the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) provides more than triple the money to foster parents than to [birth] parents is a state-sanctioned pipeline of separating families. When 52% of the kids taken are Indigenous, we can see that MCFD is the latest tactic in Canada’s deliberate and costly long-term strategy — and its 300 year tradition of separating Indigenous families — to prevent Indigenous independence and strength.”