Of linguicide and resistance: children and English instruction in nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools in Canada
Of linguicide and resistance: children and English instruction in nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools in Canada
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杀语言与抵抗：加拿大十九世纪印度寄宿学校的儿童与英语教学
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发表时间：
2017
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通讯作者：
Jane Griffith
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作者：
Jane Griffith
印第安人寄宿学校在加拿大存在了近150年，最后一所于1996年关闭。加拿大最近成立的真相与和解委员会证实了土著家庭一直以来所说的话：许多土著儿童遭受虐待，父母与子女长期分离，还有代际遗产。数千名儿童在上学期间死亡。印第安人寄宿学校是加拿大众多殖民策略之一，旨在向学生灌输英国的世界观，并通过诋毁他们的精神、认识论和与土地的关系来同化他们。印度寄宿学校也攻击土著语言，坚持只讲英语。虽然英语教学的历史研究经常忽略了更广泛的殖民主义历史，但本文使用定居者殖民研究分析来阅读19世纪的政府报告和学校报纸，以揭示19世纪印度寄宿学校如何公开构思英语教学；我对19世纪档案文件的阅读是由幸存者的证词和回忆录提供的，这些证词和回忆录有助于戳穿政府和学校文件的宣传。根据华莱士·兰伯特（Wallace Lambert）和露丝·斯帕克（Ruth Spack）的研究，我认为学校文献只代表英语，而不是对英语和土著语言更复杂的理解。这种区别将政府和学校的政策与许多家长和孩子的信念严重分离开来，他们学习英语是出于自己的原因，而不是以牺牲另一种语言为代价。
Abstract Indian residential schools lasted in Canada for nearly 150 years, with the last one closing in 1996. Canada’s recently concluded Truth and Reconciliation Commission has confirmed what Indigenous families have said all along: many Indigenous children endured abuse, prolonged separation between parent and child, and intergenerational legacies. Thousands of children died while attending school. Indian residential schools were one of Canada’s many colonial strategies, which aimed to inculcate students in a British world view and assimilate them by denigrating their spiritualities, epistemologies, and relationships to land. Indian residential schools also attacked Indigenous languages and insisted on English only. While historical studies of teaching English often elide a broader history of colonialism, this paper uses a settler colonial studies analysis to read nineteenth-century government reports as well as school newspapers to uncover how nineteenth-century Indian boarding schools publicly conceived of the teaching of English; my reading of nineteenth-century archival documents is informed by survivor testimony and memoir that help to puncture the propaganda of government and school documentation. Informed by the work of Wallace Lambert and Ruth Spack, I argue that school documentation represented English only rather than the more complicated understanding of English and – English in addition to Indigenous languages. This distinction critically separates the policies of government and school from the beliefs of many parents and children, who learned English for their own reasons but not at the expense of another language.