Kristin Burnett and Shannon Stettner
On Wednesday December 11, 2024, YWCA Canada issued an apology, circulated to its members by way of electronic mail, for the group’s position in supporting the Residential Colleges and Indian Hospital methods in Canada. It was launched underneath the headline “Reflecting on Our Previous, Committing to Reconciliation: YWCA Canada’s Apology to Indigenous Communities | Les excuses de YWCA Canada envers les communautés autochtones.” YWCA Canada launched the apology in response to a report we wrote for them in 2022 as contracted researchers. The apology included a hyperlink to their web site with a content material warning and one other hyperlink to a 4-page abstract report entitled “The Position of YWCA Canada in Canada’s Residential Colleges and the ‘Indian Hospital’ System.” We didn’t write the abstract report that decreased our detailed 85-page analysis report back to little greater than a single web page of findings. Nonetheless, YWCA Canada will make the complete report out there upon request (reconciliation@ywcacanada.ca). We encourage readers to request a replica, bringing it into the general public area.
Whereas we applaud YWCA Canada’s determination to higher perceive the roles they performed in Residential Colleges and Indian Hospitals in Canada, we consider releasing the abstract report as an alternative of our full report serves to obscure the energetic roles performed by YWCAs throughout Canada in Residential Colleges and Indian Hospitals. In a second the place we’re more and more seeing Canadians unwilling and certainly actively “minimizing, distorting, and denying”[1] this historical past and its continued impression within the current, the processes and actions of fact telling have by no means been extra vital.
Archives, YWCA Canada, and the Settler Colonial Mission
Between 1975 and 1992, YWCA Canada donated a few of their data to Library and Archives Canada, together with correspondence between the nationwide YWCA and member associations, stories to numerous authorities departments, convention stories, assembly minutes, funding requests, budgets, and newsletters. Many historians have examined these data to higher perceive the historical past of girls in Canada broadly. Research of those data haven’t included a essential examination of the YWCA’s participation in Canada’s Residential College and Indian Hospital methods, so far. It’s this set of data that we examined throughout the fall of 2021.
In keeping with these data, YWCA Canada and a few of its branches, like many different philanthropic and repair organizations, supported each the perform and objective of the Residential Colleges and Indian Hospital methods. Particularly, the help supplied by the YWCA facilitated the day-to-day operations of those establishments in a number of methods, together with via:
- College curriculums
- Rehabilitation packages
- Social golf equipment and additional curricular actions
- Y-teen extension packages
- Residences and hostels
- Indian placement and relocation packages
Through the post-World Conflict II interval, and particularly in city areas, philanthropic and repair organizations, just like the YWCA, partnered with the state to increase packages to Indigenous peoples. These organizations positioned themselves as “serving to” Indigenous girls and women discover their place (learn: assimilate) in settler-Canadian society.[2] We noticed this sentiment expressed on the June 1961 Nationwide Conference, the place the members handed a decision for “YWCA of Canada [to] prolong its fullest efforts to offer program [sic] for Indian and Eskimo women and girls with a view to encouraging their participation.”[3] This method persevered throughout the last decade such that, in June 1970, members of the Intercultural Activity Group proposed that the nationwide department ought to search for authorities funds for native initiatives and function cultural mediators between native branches and native Indigenous peoples.[4] Certainly, profitable economies of products and repair provision grew and operated inside and alongside Residential Colleges and Indian Hospitals the place service organizations benefited enormously.[5]
These findings are vital as a result of they counter these views deeply held by many Canadians that Residential Colleges and Indian Hospitals have been establishments that operated at a distance from Canadian society.[6] This narrative positions settler colonialism as a “unhappy chapter”[7] in Canadian historical past quite than as an ongoing construction embedded into the social, financial, and political material of Canadian society. The previous characterization fuels the efforts of individuals to “decrease, distort, and deny” the historic and ongoing impacts of Canada’s Residential College and Indian Hospital methods. The latter acknowledgement affords settlers the chance to acknowledge historic and ongoing harms, which is important to determine “a respectful and wholesome relationship [between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples]”[8] and to alter our behaviours shifting ahead.
Persevering with fact telling
Our findings are usually not distinctive to YWCA Canada. We all know that comparable work in Residential Colleges and Indian Hospitals was carried out by service organizations and philanthropic societies throughout Canada. We consider our report joins the vital work of many others who search to maneuver the historical past and ongoing impression of Residentials Colleges and Indian Hospitals past the slender scope allowed by the Indian Residential Colleges Settlement Settlement.
To amplify this work, we suggest a weblog collection that:
- Troubles each the present state of the historic self-discipline and reconciliation;
- Explores the position of historic inquiry in responding to the “minimization, distortion, and denial” of settler colonialism; and
- Interrogates the processes and challenges of doing paid public historical past within the context of ongoing settler colonialism and settler apologies.
Expressions of curiosity ought to be despatched to kburnett@lakeheadu.ca by July 1, 2025. We ask that submissions be despatched by August 1, 2025. Tips for authors could be discovered right here: https://activehistory.ca/about/
Kristin Burnett is a Professor within the Division of Indigenous Studying at Lakehead College.
Shannon Stettner is a communications officer within the federal civil service.
[1] NCTR, “Reconciliation Begins with a Dedication to Fact-Telling,” https://nctr.ca/reconciliation-begins-with-a-commitment-to-truth-telling/ [accessed 18 February 2025].
[2] Mary Jane McCallum, Indigenous Girls, Work, and Historical past, 1940-1980 (Winnipeg: College of Manitoba Press, 2014).
[3] “5 W’s,” The Journal (October 1961), 35-36.
[4] Assembly minutes of the Intercultural Activity Group, 26 June 1970, MG28-I198 Vol. 62 file 5 “Intercultural Committee, 1970-1972,” YWCA, LAC.
[5] Brian Gettler, Colonialism’s Foreign money: Cash, State, and First Nations in Canada, 1820-1950 (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s College Press, 2020); Hugh Shewell, “What Makes the Indian Tick?” The Affect of Social Sciences on Canada’s Indian Coverage, 1947-1964,” Histoire sociale/Social Historical past, 34/67 (Might 2001): 133-67; and Travis Hay, Inventing the Thrifty Gene: The Science of Settler Colonialism (Winnipeg: College of Manitoba Press, 2021).
[6] Survivors of the Assiniboia Indian Residential College, ‘Did You See Us?’: Reunion, Remembrance, and Reclamation at an City Indian Residential College, edited by Andrew Woolford (Winnipeg: College of Manitoba Press, 2021); Sean Carleton, Classes in Legitimacy: Colonialism, Capitalism, and the Rise of State Education in British Columbia (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2022).
[7] “PM Cites ‘unhappy chapter’ in apology for residential faculties,” CBC Information, 11 June 2008. https://www.cbc.ca/information/canada/pm-cites-sad-chapter-in-apology-for-residential-schools-1.699389 [last accessed 9 March 2025].
[8] NCTR, “Reconciliation Begins with a Dedication to Fact-Telling,” https://nctr.ca/reconciliation-begins-with-a-commitment-to-truth-telling/ [accessed 18 February 2025].
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