A Question of Scale in the Histories of Indigenous Education

In the work of any historian, decisions about scale are of central importance to the research problem; the selection and use of sources; the intended audiences; and historical description, interpretation, and argumentation. The historian's choices about scale will include a spatial dimension, which can range across the local, national, transnational, and global scales. In this essay I have been asked to review three books, and in doing so I use scale as an interrogative thread for reflection. The three books are as follows: The second edition of John Milloy's A National Crime; Helen May, Baljit Kaur, and Larry Prochner's Empire, Education and Indigenous Childhoods; and Andrew Woolford's This Benevolent Experiment. These monographs examine the history of Indigenous education across various colonial contexts. Milloy's book is the most straightforward spatially, as it is national in focus, from the first page to the last, in its examination of the Canadian residential school system. May and her coauthors draw insight from the local and global scales; case studies of British-controlled India, Upper Canada, and northern Aotearoa/New Zealand are set within a global framework of English colonial education. Woolford's study is the most complex in terms of scale, as he sets out to simultaneously capture the local school experience, the institutions of Indigenous education in the US and Canada, and also the broad North American context of Indigenous relations. After a review of each book in the order I have introduced them, I end with some reflections about scale in residential school research.

Originally published in 1999, A National Crimefocuses on public policy in the residential school system and remains one of the most well-known and often-cited studies in the field of Indigenous education. Drawing on unprecedented access to the depth of archival material produced by Department of Indian Affairs (DIA), Milloy has produced a powerfully evidenced and sweeping narrative of national scope. This is a comprehensive reconstruction of the vision, development, implementation, and evolution of the Indian residential school system through a traditional policy analysis of governmental files. Milloy draws evidence from official policy statements, but more than this he traces the sum of actions undertaken by the DIA and all its machinery in the administration of the system, taking into consideration major policy positions and documents, the work of key bureaucrats in the DIA, intradepartmental operations and communications, and any direct interaction with schools. Cumulatively, Milloy uses the evidence to create a comprehensive reconstruction of the public administration of residential schooling. This enables Milloy, for example, to show how persistent underfunding, systemic issues of inadequate care, and the continuation of debilitating health problems—while not official policy directives of the DIA—were representative of an ongoing framework of action that is now central to our understanding of the residential school system.

Readers of the first edition of A National Crime, along with J. R. Miller's Shingwauk's Vision(1996), witnessed a transition in the literature toward a systemlevel understanding of residential schooling. The literature on residential schools, which consisted until the 1990s of loosely connected local case studies, could now be read as smaller cases within a larger Canadian narrative. Furthermore, Milloy's institutional-level analysis offers connections and insight into other system-level operations of the DIA. For instance, his attention to the function of health and child-welfare systems that overlapped with residential schooling calls attention to patterns of ideological assumptions, mutually reinforcing processes, and Indigenous experiences across these systems. Canadian researchers and the Canadian public alike are in need of some form of readily comprehendible national stories...