A shared racism | Press

When the residential school tragedy resurfaced in 2021, he found himself claiming it was a “federal” affair, an expression of “British” colonialism and racism. And that Quebec had never really taken a full part in this enterprise of cultural genocide.

But a new generation of academics are immersing themselves in our old school books to see the kind of story that has been told in Quebec about Aboriginal people. And what emerges is a view of the “Indians” propagated by the Catholic clergy quite in line with what the British colonial authority thought.

While residential schools were initiated by the federal government, and were more numerous and established earlier elsewhere in Canada, colonial “civilizing” ideology was shared and enthusiastically disseminated by those responsible for the system. schools in Quebec, like those elsewhere in Canada. A book published last fall provides an eloquent demonstration of this.^⁠.

Historian Catherine Larochelle spent years going through 19th century school books.^e century to see what Quebec schoolchildren were taught about “others”: Blacks, Aboriginals, Asians, Arabs …

She expected to find prejudices from that other century, of course. But not at this point. “The violence of school materials surprised me,” she said in an interview.

Another observation: by comparing teaching in English Canada and French Quebec, the historian has found essentially the same content, the same representation of “others”. In short: the same ordinary institutional racism.

The British colonial ideology which presided over the establishment of residential schools for Native people had its authentic Quebec counterpart in the educational institution produced by Catholic clerics.

“It’s very similar,” she notes. The teaching of history in Quebec was no more racist than elsewhere in Canada, but neither was it. “In fact, what we taught here was very representative of what was circulating in the Western world,” observes Professor Larochelle.

The Université de Montréal researcher, who has just published most of her thesis in essay form, quotes several extracts from textbooks of the time.

In 1900, in the first textbook intended for all pupils of 1^D and 2^e year of Quebec, we can read that the first inhabitants of America were “savages who did not know the name of the good Lord.” They were barbarians who lived in the darkness of paganism. They never forgave their enemies ”.

We did not fail to attribute stereotypical virtues to these “wild men”: an indomitable courage, a strength of soul allowing them to live in difficult conditions and to face permanent dangers. But “these few natural virtues were largely offset by odious or ridiculous vices”, wrote in 1902 Father Jean-Roch Magnan in his French graduate reading course.

This is only a tiny sample of what was taught in Quebec, in a school system largely controlled by the Catholic Church.

It is a little by chance, while working on Orientalism in Quebec, that Catherine Larochelle widened her field of research, by reading with amazement the school material. By digging through the archives, she realized that far from being a society isolated from Western intellectual currents, the intellectual and institutional Quebec of the XIX^e century vibrated in tune.

“I had the image of a Quebec closed in on itself in the XIX^e century. I realized that on the contrary, there was a huge intellectual production. We received foreign literature, we took part in Universal Exhibitions, etc. In short, Quebec was already very open to the world of contemporary ideas.

Likewise, geography or history textbooks were not simply imported or translated. They were the fruit of an abundant local production – mainly under the tutelage of religious.

The Catholic educators of the day were aware of the latest fashionable ideas, read trade magazines in English or French and contributed frequently.

“Quebec won prizes for its school system in the 19th^e century in the Universal Exhibitions. ”

Of course, history is not taught in schools for a long time. Things have changed over the XX^e century. The history of residential schools is taught today.

But before we get there, after having promoted the openly contemptuous and hostile view of the “Indian”, he was pitched in the role of ethnographic character, so to speak. We took it out of the books. The Aboriginal really exists in history until the Europeans arrive. Then, it is a question of him according to his alliances with the colonial powers. And once these wars of the 18th century are settled^e century it disappears. He is no longer in history. He is absent.

The Aboriginals no longer have any relevance in the national narrative as long as they do not play a secondary role in the conflicts between English and French. We no longer need them in the story.

For the historian François-Xavier Garneau, for example, the Iroquois “disappeared like the forests which served as their refuge”.

“We didn’t see the Native, that’s not what historians were looking for,” says Catherine Larochelle.

The attention of historians, unsurprisingly, was focused on nation building, whether from the Anglo-Saxon point of view or from the “French-Canadian” point of view. Canadian history taught in the 19th century^e century in French left more room for the native nations, because more emphasis was placed on New France. But in both school languages, the character of the Native was equally despised and contemptible, she observes.

Besides that, when the English spoke of the French, or the French of the English, each group presented the other as equally legitimate representative of the human species – without being sympathetic to it.

This teaching was not the result of ignorance alone. It served a political purpose, writes the author. It served as a moral foundation and justification for the conquest of territories and cultural genocide, which was undertaken with full knowledge and a clear conscience.

The school narrative on Aboriginals is only one portion of the historian’s research, which reviews the representation of all “others” as seen in official Quebec school textbooks. Each “race” is described, its stereotypical physical attributes, its purported character, its worth, and so on. Father Jean Holmes, a Protestant convert to Catholicism, produced a geography textbook which was used in classical colleges throughout the 19th century.^e century, which is in itself a little bible of racism.

The most “dehumanized” group in the textbooks is that of blacks, whether African or Afro-descendant.

When it comes to the cultivation of cotton in the United States, the authors note that it is carried out by “negroes”, but do not mention, or so slip up, the system of slavery. When it comes to slavery, the authors say it is organized in Africa by the Arabs … but almost completely ignore the role of Europeans.

All of this is not to say that Canadian history was written with the same degree of violence as that of the United States – from slavery to the Conquest of the West.

Simply, the “others” all have a deficit of legitimacy, civilization, or downright humanity.

And when we observe what the educational elites of Quebec chose to teach students, when we examine the racist ideas conveyed by these clerics while we were developing the residential school project, we cannot seriously claim that Quebec was ganged up. except in Canada. It is a common history that we are talking about.

The school of racism

Catherine larochelle

The University of Montreal Press

352 pages