Honouring the Truth Reconciling for the Future

The legacy • 201Residential schools were a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroyAboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that theyno longer existed as distinct peoples. English and, to a far lesser degree, French werethe only languages permitted to be used in most schools. Students were punished—often severely—for speaking their own languages. Michael Sillett, a former studentat the North West River residential school in Newfoundland and Labrador, told theCommission, “Children at the dorm were not allowed to speak their mother tongue.I remember several times when other children were slapped or had their mouthswashed out for speaking their mother tongue; whether it was Inuktitut or Innu-aimun.Residents were admonished for just being Native.” 78 As late as the 1970s, students atschools in northwestern Ontario were not allowed to speak their language if they werein the presence of a staff member who could not understand that language. 79 ConradBurns, whose father attended the Prince Albert school, named this policy for what itwas: “It was a cultural genocide. People were beaten for their language, people werebeaten because ... they followed their own ways.” 80Rights to culture and language, and the need for remedies for their loss, have longbeen recognized in international law. 81 They are specifically acknowledged in theUnited Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which has recognizedthe critical state of Aboriginal languages. Article 8:1 of the Declaration recognizesthat “Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forcedassimilation or destruction of their culture.” Article 8:2 provides that “states shall provideeffective mechanisms for prevention of and redress for any form of forced assimilationor integration.”The Declaration also includes specific recognition of the right to revitalize andtransmit Aboriginal languages in Article 13:1, which recognizes that “Indigenouspeoples have the right to revitalize, use, develop and transmit to future generationstheir histories, languages, oral traditions, philosophies, writing systems and literatures,and to designate and retain their own names for communities, places and persons.”Article 14 provides for educational language rights of the type that Canadiansalready know and experience, with respect to anglophone and francophone minorities.Article 14:1 provides similarly that “Indigenous peoples have the right to establishand control their educational systems and institutions providing education in theirown languages, in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching andlearning,” and Article 14:3 provides: “States shall, in conjunction with indigenouspeoples, take effective measures, in order for indigenous individuals, particularlychildren, including those living outside their communities, to have access, when possible,to an education in their own culture and provided in their own language.” Article16 provides that Indigenous peoples “have the right to establish their own media intheir own languages and to have access to all forms of non-indigenous media without