Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake Residential School (review)

Reviews NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 182 EVAN J. HABKIRK Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake Residential School by Elizabeth Furniss Arsenal Pulp Press, 1995 (reprint 2011) SINCE THE ANNOUNCEMENT of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, there has been a boom in publishing related to Canada’s residential schools. In 2011, Arsenal Pulp Press released its third printing of Elizabeth Furniss’s Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake Residential School. Although it is a concise primer on the impact residential schools had on Native communities, problematic sourcing and evidence and a lack of updating between its 1995 and 2011 printings plague the book, raising the question of why this book was released without revisions. The message of this book is simple: although resisted by Native populations , the Williams Lake Residential School experience, for children and parents , was a harrowing tale of abuse and neglect. Furniss chronicles this experience through the escape and subsequent deaths of two students, Duncan Sticks in 1902 and Augustine Allan in 1920. Framing the book around resistance , Furniss tries to create a narrative that gives Native peoples agency in the face of colonialism. A discourse of colonization and victimization, however , subverts this resistance narrative. After explaining the ways the Williams Lake community resisted the Oblate missionaries and their school, Furniss points to the uneven power dynamic between Native communities and administrators of the school, stating that “the church and government maintained their control over Native people not only through legal and bureaucratic power, but by being able to control the meaning of events and protests .” Enveloped by colonization and assimilation, the Native community is left at the mercy of the school authorities. Furniss ends her book with an address by Chief Bev Sellars at the First National Conference on Residential Schools in 1991, in which Chief Sellars states that many Native communities “know that all suicides, the alcoholism, the very low self-esteem of our people , the sexual abuse, the loss of language and culture, the family breakdown, the dependency on others, the loss of pride, the loss of parental skills, and other social problems that have plagued our people can be traced directly to residential schools.” Although this overstatement may have been intended to raise awareness about residential schools and the problems they caused, Sellars’s statement creates a discourse where all problems facing Native communities begin and NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Reviews 183 end with the residential schools. Although many of these long-term intergenerational problems can be linked to the residential school experience, never­ theless, due to differences of school staff and programming, students, and communities the schools were supposed to serve, the true meaning of the residential school experience is composed of many stories. Pinning all social problems on residential schools, while negating other acts of colonization, leaves the federal government and Canadian society able to claim that once the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s mandate is finished, all the problems of colonialism are no longer a governmental issue. The biggest problem with the book’s 2011 printing is the lack of updating since its 1995 release. Although authors and publishers are not required to update books between printings, many important developments regarding residential schools have occurred during this time, including court cases, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People, and the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Most of Furniss’s research ends in 1992, leaving many areas where the book could be expanded, especially the 1991 criminal proceedings against Bishop Hubert O’Connor for sexual misconduct. By 1994, the trial was renewed and in 1996, O’Conner was found guilty of the charges. Considering that this is one of the most prominent legal cases regarding the Williams Lake School, and considering that Furniss wanted to provide her readers with a current understanding of residential school issues, this information would have been an important addition to the book. Although writing about residential schools is a hard road to navigate in Canada’s current political climate, some updating should have been done for the reader. Following the success of J. R. Miller’s Shingwauk’s Vision and John S. Milloy’s A...

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