Warning: this story contains outdated language and discusses physical and sexual abuse at residential schools.
Thank you for reading this post, don't forget to subscribe!It was March 1965, and Catholic educator Robert J. Carney had gone on CBC Radio to discuss his work as a federal day school principal in the Northwest Territories. Today, it’s an interview some may find jarring.
“Mr. Carney, at the teachers conference not long ago, you told about a program you have working at the Joseph B. Tyrrell (JBT) school in Fort Smith for culturally retarded children,” the host began. “First of all, would you define a culturally retarded child for me?”
The reply was unequivocal and direct.
“A culturally retarded child in the context of the Northwest Territories is a child from a Native background who for various reasons has not been in regular attendance in school,” said Carney.
“He’s from a language background other than English and who is behind in school, say three or four years. In many centres in southern Canada, the subculture groups, say in the working-class area of a large city, you would have children who you would call culturally retarded.”
Sixty years later, Liberal Leader Mark Carney’s father is generating debate among First Nations people. Posts circulating online have incorrectly called him an Indian residential school principal.
While that’s false, it’s true that the Joseph Burr Tyrrell school was officially recognized under a 2019 class-action settlement as a federal Indian day school between 1948 and 1969, when it was transferred to the territory.
And it’s also true Indigenous children from Fort Smith’s Grandin College and Breynat Hall residential schools attended the day school during Carney’s principalship, which began in 1962, according to his thesis and historical records reviewed by CBC Indigenous.
“The school in question was a combined school,” said Crystal Gail Fraser, who is Gwichyà Gwich’in and an associate professor in history and Indigenous studies at the University of Alberta.
“You had this mix of white settler kids and Indigenous kids who lived in Fort Smith, plus all of the children from Breynat Hall, the residential school nearby.”
LISTEN | Robert Carney talks about Indigenous education:
Robert Carney on Indigenous schooling in N.W.T.
In a 1965 interview, the father of Canada’s 24th prime minister discussed a program at Fort Smith’s federal day school.
Along with historians Jackson Pind and Sean Carleton, Fraser co-authored an article in the blog Active History this week about Robert Carney’s legacy. They told CBC Indigenous much remains unknown about day schools — Fort Smith’s federal school records remain restricted at the national archives in Ottawa, for instance — rendering the full truth elusive.
“We’re trying to have these discussions in productive ways that don’t harm survivors as we get to the truth,” said Pind, an assistant professor at Trent University’s Chanie Wenjack School for Indigenous Studies.
“Looking at our legacy as Canadians, we’re all kind of tangled in this web of colonial schooling, both Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people.”
Untangling the web
Carney’s comments in the radio interview reflect assimilationist attitudes common in Canadian society in 1965 generally and among educators specifically, said Pind, who has mixed settler-Anishinaabe ancestry from Alderville First Nation.
“That’s obviously a very harmful comment,” he said, noting teachers then also commonly described their Indigenous pupils as “backwards.”
In the 2019 settlement, Ottawa acknowledged the Indian day school system divided children from their families, denied them their heritage and subjected many to physical, emotional and sexual abuse.
Later in the radio interview, Carney says, “We want them to not forget their origins, or not to forget their backgrounds and to instill in them a sense of pride and a sense of belonging: that the culture from which they come is a good culture.”
Robert Carney may indeed have left a complicated legacy, the historians said. As a divisive election heats up, they were quick to argue the father’s sin should not be laid on the son — but they also said Mark Carney should still speak out and address his father’s legacy.
A Liberal spokesperson did not do that directly in a provided statement.
“The residential and day school systems are an undeniably painful chapter in our country’s history, with real harms that last to this day. In his first weeks as prime minister, Mark Carney has taken important steps to ensure that advancing reconciliation is a foundational commitment of our new government,” wrote Jenna Ghassabeh.
A Carney government would be informed by Indigenous perspective to understand these deep and lasting injustices and commit to the important work outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, she added.
From principal to scholar
Robert Carney became chief superintendent of schools in N.W.T. from 1969 to 1971. From 1973 to 1975, he was executive director of the Northern Development Council of Alberta. He was acting director general for Indian Affairs in Alberta in 1976.
In a 1991 church-commissioned study, Carney interviewed 240 former residential school students, eventually reporting allegations of extreme physical abuse and 15 alleged instances of sexual abuse at eight Western Arctic residential schools.
“There is no doubt whatsoever that they have been scarred by what was done to them or by what they had witnessed,” the then-professor at the University of Alberta told the Canadian Press.
But after the papers published explosive headlines about priests and rape, Carney clarified that, in his view, it wasn’t just an “abuse report.” He wanted to focus on the good.
“A number of interviewees expressed positive comments about their experiences in residential schools and hostels, while others deplored what they described as the excessive attention given to negative incidents related to these institutions,” he wrote to the Edmonton Journal.
Sean Carleton, a settler historian and associate professor at University of Manitoba, echoed the need to grapple with Robert Carney’s role in and defence of this system without descending into partisanship.
“We can learn about Robert Carney’s complicity in this system. We can challenge his comments defending residential schools as denialism. We can press Mark Carney to do better on truth and reconciliation,” said Carleton.
On early schools and RCAP
After the church study, Robert Carney went on to argue much of what pre-Confederation missionaries did concerning Indigenous schooling “was intended to help Native people to adjust to a changing environment.”
“Those who ‘came to teach’ European values and skills to aboriginal people during the period […] often failed to achieve their objectives,” he wrote in 1995, “but their efforts in this regard cannot be viewed as being wholly destructive or ill-intended.”
The paper is typical of the era, said Mary Jane Logan McCallum, professor at University of Winnipeg and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous People, History and Archives.
She was a student at the time and remembers being assigned articles like Carney’s. It was also time when lawsuits were hitting churches, “which made for more of this kind of apologist backlash,” she said by email.
“We know now and Canadians knew then that the schools were purposely underfunded by churches and by the federal government; we know that due to this there was suffering,” wrote McCallum, a member of the Munsee-Delaware Nation.
“We know that the schools intentionally played a role in cultural destruction and linguicide. We know there is a need for reparations both for the past and in terms of our current relations and so it matters that our prime minister engages with this central question.”
Carney’s scholarship on this topic continued. He criticized the sweeping 1996 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples as one-sided and imbalanced.
“The problem is that the Aboriginal perspective dominates virtually everything that is said,” Carney wrote. Consequently, he added, “Aboriginal residential schools are invariably cast in an unfavourable light.”
“This is clearly a slanted account of these institutions, and therefore should be viewed cautiously because, to cite one of its problems, it tells only part of the story.”
Pind called it frustrating to see a non-Indigenous person criticizing the first major Indigenous-led report examining relations with the state as “slanted” because it comes from an Indigenous perspective.
It remains unclear, the historians said, whether Robert Carney’s views evolved after this, when the Indian residential schools settlement was reached in 2006. He died in 2009 in Nanaimo, B.C.
A national 24-hour Indian Residential School Crisis Line is available at 1-866-925-4419 for emotional and crisis referral services for survivors and those affected.
Mental health counselling and crisis support are also available 24 hours a day, seven days a week through the Hope for Wellness hotline at 1-855-242-3310 or by online chat.
