Image: Kent Monkman, “The Scream.” Etching copper plate, 2017. Courtesy Kent Monkman Studio.
To read more of Sean Carleton's article, please click here.
On May 23, 2023 the Royal Canadian Mounted Police celebrated its 150th anniversary and kicked off a series of #RCMP150 initiatives. To counter the uncritical mythologizing of the Mounties we are seeing—from the prime minister to the RCMP itself—the National RCMP Research Council has created a new website to share truths about the force. It features a series of articles by experts looking at various aspects of the RCMP’s contested past and present, including the following article on the RCMP’s role in residential schooling.
Over the past three decades, and sparked by survivors coming forward and sharing truths about their IRS experiences, historians have published a number of studies about Canada’s Indian residential school system. Peer-reviewed books and articles by scholars have documented how church and state officials collaborated to devise, deploy, and defend a genocidal school system for over one hundred years (between the 1880s and 1990s). The intent was to attack, undermine, and delegitimize Indigenous lifeways to facilitate assimilation and support settler capitalist development and Canadian nation-building.
Missing from the historical literature, though, is a detailed examination of the role of police in enforcing the IRS system, though newer scholarship by myself and other scholars is starting to investigate such connections.
The most in-depth account of the RCMP’s role in residential schooling actually comes from a 2011 report written by Marcel-Eugène LeBeuf, a civilian member of the RCMP, “on behalf of the RCMP.”
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