Did Canadian missionaries exterminate Indian languages?

In the wake of the Kamloops Residential school scandal of 2021 surrounding supposed mass graves on the premises of the Catholic school for Indian children in British Columbia, I wrote two Facebook posts on the topic of the alleged “cultural genocide”. I would like to offer them here as a commentary of a contemporary event whose sensationalist media coverage and Justin Trudeau's imprudent public comments led to multiple arson attacks on churches across Canada. To this day, no conclusive evidence of any mass graves in Kamloops has been presented.

Introduction to the Wawa shorthand developed by Fr. Lejeune, O.M.I.

Post from 4 July 2021:

“Here goes my take on Indian residential schools in Western Canada run by the Catholic Church, or rather one aspect, which is nonetheless important.

The media often repeat how residential schools run by the Canadian government and staffed by various Christian denominations prohibited the use of Native languages by students. It is hard to come up with any legislation or rules of individual institutes; rather all texts only seem to agree that “Indigenous languages were suppressed, sometimes violently”. If anything, such an approach by Catholic missionaries, especially the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (O.M.I.) was probably rather ill-advised pedagogics rather than a deliberate “cultural genocide”. Fr. Jean Lejeune, O.M.I., who was based in Kamloops, the center of the recent controversy, was one of the most important linguists of Western Canada. From 1894 to 1923, he published the multilingual newspaper “Kamloops Wawa” (Talk of Kamloops), which in addition to English and French, was written in Chinook Jargon using a French shorthand system and occasionally in Nlaka'pamuxtsin, Secwepmectsin and St'at'imcets. It contained religious texts such as liturgical translations as well as community news. Msgr. Émile Grouard, O.M.I. was another talented linguist who published several books in Cree, Chipewyan and the Beaver language, all of which he spoke. He also composed hymns in Inuktitut.

Venerable Vital Grandin, O.M.I. is now considered the disgraced architect of the Catholic residential school system and quoted as writing to Public Works Minister Henri Langevin: “To become civilized they should be taken with the consent of their parents & made to lead a life different from their parents and cause them to forget the customs, habits & language of their ancestors“. At the same time, this saintly missionary bishop admonished all young missionaries who thought they could perform their duties without knowing the Indian languages or without proper dedication to their study (see “Proclaiming the Gospel to the Indians and the Metis” by Raymond Huel). He also recommended that missionaries associate themselves with the children to learn the proper accent and intonation of their language (idem).

Bishop Vital Grandin

If indeed the use of Indian languages was absolutely banned at residential schools, it was wrong of the missionaries to do so. At the same time, it is hard to reconcile how those very missionaries who were the first Whites to systematically analyze Indian languages and put them into written form would deliberately engage in a “cultural genocide” after having dedicated themselves to such an arduous task. It becomes clear from the writings of Msgr. Grandin that he desired his students to find their place in the general Canadian society as tradespeople and housewives rather than following the nomadic lifestyle of their parents and ancestors, a lifestyle which in the long run would have left them at a great disadvantage in the face of a growing European population.” Post from 12 July 2021:

“I would like to revisit the topic of Canadian residential schools, looking more at the question of languages being suppressed as part of a purported "cultural genocide" as the media and Native rights advocacy groups call it.

It is evident that learning English was one of the benchmarks of a successful education for Indian children in residential schools, so the use of Native languages was either discouraged or forbidden. At the same time, one has to consider that many of these languages had a very low number of speakers in geographically isolated areas, often most likely not reaching more than 10,000 speakers in total, so being monolingual in such a language would put anyone in a rapidly changing society that used English as its vehicular language at a serious disadvantage.

The Oblates themselves realized that there were abuses in regard to the severity with which this language policy was enforced, as Volume 1 of the Truth and Reconciliation Report points out when referring to how the missionaries at the end of the 19th century were often fluent in native languages, an ability that decreased in the following decades, also due to the fact that the Indian children were now required to speak English in the schools:

“The degree to which the government policy came to override the missionary practice is perhaps best expressed in the report of Oblate Superior General Théodore Labouré. After an extensive inspection of Oblate missions and schools in 1935, Labouré expressed concern over the number of Oblates who could not speak Aboriginal languages, and the strictness with which prohibitions against speaking Aboriginal languages were enforced. He wrote:

“The ban on children speaking Indian, even during recreation, was so strict in some of our schools that any failure would be severely punished—to the point that children were led to consider the speaking of their native tongue to be a serious offense, and when they returned home they were ashamed to speak it with their parents.”

In what may have been a response to Labouré’s criticism, in 1939, the Oblate Fathers’ Committee on Indian Missions adopted a resolution that First Nations people be taught “to read in their own language and in syllabic characters or Roman characters,” and that nuns and religious teachers “learn to read and understand the languages of those who are in their charge.””

The same report also points out how Msgr. Ovide Charlebois, O.M.I. intended to open a French-only school in northern Saskatchewan, but met with the resistance from Indian Affairs as they would have liked to impose English on the Natives, although many of them spoke French and threatened to withdraw their children from the school if English was imposed. One chief observed that English was of no use to them as they would communicate in French with the people of their region.

We see that the case is far from being clear-cut. We have the missionary tradition of learning native languages, we see that the Oblates recognized that English was enforced too severely, and then there were Indians who wished their children to be taught French instead of English.”