Residential Schools, Colonization, Decolonizing Approaches, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

Residential Schools: A Legacy of Trauma and Resilience Student Name Institution Professor Name Course Date Residential Schools: A Legacy of Trauma and Resilience The residential schools’ blot in Canadian history is a bleak episode that continues to mar the lives of native children, families, and communities. Numerous Canadian government-run bands belonged to various religious denominations. They influenced first-generation Indigenous (Aboriginal) children to leave their villages with their language and traditions and adopt European customs, habits, and ways of life (Jacobs, 2022). Indeed, the aftermath of the policy has serious implications for Indigenous mental health and that of generations after that. Indigenous communities have particularly suffered from cultural disruption due to intergenerational trauma, systemic marginalization, and other mental illnesses. According to Jacobs (2022), as early as 1883, the residential school system committed atrocities like the forced assimilation of indigenous kids, as many as 150,000, which ended only in the late ‘90s. The policy’s announcement began the “Kill the Indian in the Child” campaign, which held that all Indigenous cultures and customs were inferior to European ones and had to be removed (Jacobs, 2022). These institutions represented the time when children experienced various types of abuse, including physical, emotional, and sexual neglect, as well as malnutrition. While the effect of this abuse was evident in the children’s psyche, it would not be easy to have a clear link up (Sierra, 2023). Residential schools led to severe trauma for the survivors, which resulted in the end of cultural links, irregular parenting styles, and the passage of abuse in families and communities as an inadvertent norm. The legacy of transgenerational impact dating back to colonial times has turned up in different ways, such as mental health problems, hard drug addiction, domestic violence, and suicidal cases among native people (Sierra, 2023). Along with acknowledging the past of the residential schools and their immeasurable consequences on Indigenous mental health and well-being, it is of extreme importance to continue this line. Colonial History and Context The rationale for the residential schools in Canada first emerged in the early 1600s when Catholic missionaries set up the first residential schools with the bright idea of assimilating Native children into European Christian society. According to Glover (2020), it was not until 1883 that the government legally started issuing funding and paying for the school system based on the residential schools. Between 1831 and 1996, a total number of 130 residential schools were operative throughout the country. According to Glover (2020), records show that the highest number of such facilities, as many as 80, were solicitous in 1931. Over 150,000 Indian, Metis, and Inuit children were taken from their families and homes to attend these schools, where children were schooled by the staff, who were members of churches and the government in charge of the funding. This process of assimilation was a great indispensable factor in the design of the residential school system that aimed to make Indigenous children become white and Christian Canadians. To this end, the schools mobilized the policies that ramped up the language, culture, spirituality, and self-identity suppression of the Indigenous people (Glover, 2020). In cultural genocide, children were forbidden to speak their native languages or follow their traditions; instead, they received European names and numbers. At the majority of residential schools, the conditions were very harsh, and abuse was irrational. Physical, emotional, and sexual assaults resulted from this complex abuse (Sierra, 2023). Clothes all had yellow stripes on the sides with the number insignias so people would know the inmate’s identity. Official documentation shows that more than 6 thousand children died while they were in residential schools, which is highly probable, as there is the possibility that the actual number is hidden among incomplete records. The mandate of the residential school system was that students had to perform heavy jobs, like carpentry and farming, in the schools to make the schools self-sufficient. The curriculum was rudimentary and unstructured and was mostly taught by people not properly trained to be instructors. Hence, most students were not wise about how to match school output with labor market demands (Menzies, 2020). While the residential school system persisted, Indigenous families fought, confronted, and eventually escaped, but it endured until 1996, when the final government-run school closed (Menzies, 2020). The residential schools destroyed traditional cultural continuity, corrupted parenting standards, and normalized violence, causing intergenerational trauma that led to high rates of psychological disorders, substance abuse, violent domestic cases, and suicides among First Nation people. The Present Scenario, the Mental Health Disturbance Residential schools continue to have a significant impact on the mental health and way of life of Indigenous children and youth. As the evidence demonstrates, the burden of historical trauma and unrelenting racism creates a cycle of poverty and social exclusion, which increases the chance of mental disorders more strongly than among other recent communities (Marsh et al., 2021). One significant consequence is that a substantial proportion of individuals who spend their life in residential schools experience sadness, agitation, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), often along with their offspring (Marsh et al., 2021). Surviving that utter cultural, identity, and mental breakdown is never an easy journey for an individual. A condition of loss of total well-being is passed down from the new generations, causing a persistent disconnect and a great sense of belonging. Lots of people survivors feel they have unresolved grief and anger that they are not able to let go of guilt. Attaching and forming relationships with people is also sometimes hard to do (Marsh et al., 2021). These traumas are passed on to the children and grandchildren of the survivors. Addiction to substances and drugs is at a high in the indigenous communities as it serves the function of handling unsettled issues of trauma and mental health (Marsh et al., 2021). People who do not have an addiction are taught to feel that they have a choice, whereas people with an addiction have no option and pass it on to the next generations via family and the community. Young Indigenous people are particularly susceptible to intergenerational trauma effects, with higher rates of suicide, self-harm, and mental well-being issues in comparison to youth from other ethnic groups. Many indigenous youth feel bleak due to the breakdown or elimination of traditional intergenerational support structures, cultural identification and bonding, and systemic discrimination and marginalization (Bombay et al., 2020). The youths are exposed to the risk of depression and anxiety disorders nearly twice or thrice as the non-indigenous youth. They are confronted with more problems like increasing the rate of leukemia, post-traumatic stress, and suicide, whereby the number of dependents is greater than from non-Indigenous peers by ...