John s milloy biography of mahatma

“I am going to tell you how we are treated.

Church leaders complained of their inability to maintain the buildings, hire qualified teachers, and clothe and feed their students. Conditions in the schools were often brutal: The teaching was poor, the buildings were declared unfit for human occupancy, disease was rampant, and thousands of these children died. Both make substantial contributions to a subject that has remained closed for far too long.

More often, the schools provided an inferior education in an atmosphere of neglect, disease, and often abuse.

Education

John Milloy holds a Doctor of Philosophy degree from Oxford University.

Career

In 1981 John S. Milloy was appointed as a professor in the Native Studies department of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada.

Given the long silence that has shrouded this chapter in Canadian history, we can only be thankful that the story is finally being brought to light. 462 pages, ISBN 0-88755646-9, $24.95 paperback, $55.00 cloth.

For over a century thousands of Aboriginal students were forced to attend government-sponsored, church-run residential schools, where, it was believed, they could be acculturated into the dominant Canadian society.

Both authors are respected Canadian historians who have written extensively on Aboriginal history. He is less concerned than Milloy about appropriation, though he is equally respectful of Aboriginal culture.

John Sheridan Milloy

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John Milloy is a popular Canadian author, historian and educator.

Why then was nothing done? He begins by tracing the ideological roots of the system, and follows the paper trail of internal memoranda, reports from field inspectors, and letters of complaint. Given his objectives, he has done an admirable job of tracing the birth, development and ultimate failure of the residential school system by letting the politicians, bureaucrats, and missionaries tell the story in their own words.

Milloy quotes multiple government reports and correspondence from government and church officials that clearly indicate that the problems were recognized.

Perhaps even more disturbing was the underlying assumption of Euro-Canadians, in the face of overwhelming evidence that residential schools were a failure, that they were a superior people who knew what was best for Aboriginal people. These schools were designed to separate Indian children from their own culture, teach them white ways, and ultimately assimilate them so that their own cultures would disappear.

Winnipeg: University of Manitoba, 1999.