The fucking lies we tell ourselves, even after Truth and Reconciliation.
Children were taken as young as four and most did not see their families again until they were 18. Even before entering they got a taste of the loss that would come, having their names stripped from them, their heads shaved, their siblings separated by gender.
There was little actual education to speak of, mostly concerned with scrubbing out existing history and language with religious conversion being the second focus. Classes were on a half day system for the majority of the run not that much changed when more class time was worked in as what passed for “the three R’s” of reading, writing, and arithmetic (am I the only one that gets a headache seeing it described quite consistently and purposefully in a way at direct odds with the claim of learning how to spell?) wouldn’t have made the cut for a backwoods elementary school for whites of the same era. I don’t know if it’s worse or if I should consider it typical that the majority of all reading was simply to facilitate Bible study and the end result at the age of 18 wasn’t fully functional literacy. Days began with an extended sermon about what filthy, godless, creatures they and their ancestors were and then the majority of the day rather than being classwork so they could learn writing and arithmetic don’t start with the letter R was spent either doing chores to maintain the property or “vocational education” which was also just doing chores to maintain the property as a cost cutting measure and being rented out as cut rate child labour treated badly even by the standards of child labour. Not enough to actually consider any of the boys tradesmen or even reliable handymen, mind, just enough carpentry and farm work to take care of in-house needs to a standard best described as “good enough for the heathens” without having to pay anyone.
The girls did laundry and sewing as their version of vocational education. So clean clothes are about as much truth as can be wrung from what you said and it wasn’t “given” to them, that’s something they had to do themselves. On an “or else” basis, no less.
More soap was fed to children as punishment for speaking or writing in their native tongue than allocated for hygienic purposes and many were “bathed” in chemicals meant to bleach their skin that were quite toxic. A gesture that stands out for wasteful cost as the general policy of these schools was to cut every financial corner and ration every crumb with great prejudice.
Students were verifiably malnourished and ironically subjected without knowledge or consent to nutritional experiments that often made that undernourishment deliberate for control groups. You might think experiments in nutrition would involve an improvement in diet at least for some subjects. You would not fit in with the people running these experiments, making sense and having logical reasons to do things. Better records were kept of what kids ate than what they died from being a very closely managed expense.
Their beds, the roof over their heads, and the quality of their clothes were often only as good as the student’s ability to maintain such things themselves and their instruction in how to do so was like all other facets of their “education” lacking. Even better maintained uniforms and blankets were far too thin for winters. As a result of their poor living conditions deaths from disease or exposure to the elements were frequent. At least monthly, according to firsthand accounts. And that’s just the deaths that were recorded rather than written off as runaways and deliberately hidden until a few hundred skeletons started popping up.
And then of course there’s the brutal physical punishment and outright torture, constant psychological degradation, and rampant sexual abuse. You think what a priest gets up to with white kids and near total shielding by the church is bad? Having absolute control over the lives and communication of kids the government barely acknowledged as human and quickly accepted any half-assed shrug offered as an explanation for a disappearance was a license to explore the darkest reaches of human evil. And even when caught? The most they lost was typically their job. At that specific school.
Thousands never came home. Those who did return came back less than they were when they left to family they were strangers to. "Home” to a community they were relentlessly conditioned by their “education” to see as degenerate and dangerous while being no closer to integration with the white majority who were more than happy to continue keeping them at arm’s length and acting like doing so - permitting them to exist in “our” land at all - was an undeserved kindness. And then their own kids were taken from them to repeat this. Generations bearing compounding trauma and learning only to perpetuate a cycle of abuse that was presented to them as “civilized” conduct. The dead might have been the fortunate ones. They don’t have to hear themselves vilified, slandered, and their memory denied. They don’t have to see us cast ourselves as their benefactors and the survivors as parasites who only know how to gnaw at a hand feeding them. They don’t have to watch us continue to deny who we are and what we do to them even today.