Indian residential school’s impact on aboriginal economics in Canada Essay An essay consists either of a well-developed topic on aboriginal economics with

Indian residential school’s impact on aboriginal economics in Canada Essay An essay consists either of a well-developed topic on aboriginal economics with using of data and econometrics or a literature review on a selected topic. Students have to discuss the topic of essay and bibliographies with the professor before they start working. The page range is between 18 and 30 pages. The long-term effects of forcible assimilation
policy: The case of Indian boarding schools
Donna L. Feir Department of Economics, University of Victoria
Abstract. For decades in North America and Australia, Indigenous children were forcibly
removed from their homes and placed in boarding schools. These schools had the stated
goal of cultural assimilation and are perceived as educational failures. I offer the ?rst
causal evidence on the long-run effects of these schools. I identify these effects using the
interaction of changes in Canadian national policy and regional variation in the power
of the Catholic Church. I ?nd that the average boarding school had substantial effects on
both cultural and economic assimilation. However, I ?nd suggestive evidence this is not
true for highly abusive schools.
Re?sume?. Les effets a? long terme de la politique d’assimilation force?e : le cas des e?coles
re?sidentielles indiennes. Pendant des de?cennies en Ame?rique du Nord et en Australie, des enfants indige?nes furent retire?s de force de leurs foyers et place?s dans des e?coles re?sidentielles.
Ces e?coles avaient le but avoue? d’une assimilation culturelle, et sont conside?re?es comme
des faillites e?ducationnelles. L’auteur pre?sente les premiers re?sultats sur les effets a? long
terme de ces e?coles. On identi?e ces impacts en examinant l’interaction entre les changements dans la politique nationale et la variation re?gionale dans le pouvoir de l’E?glise
catholique. On de?couvre qu’en moyenne l’e?cole re?sidentielle a eu des effets substantiels
sur l’assimilation culturelle et e?conomique. Cependant, on peut sugge?rer que ce ne fut pas
le cas pour les e?coles ou? on a observe? des abus importants.
JEL classi?cation: I20, I24, I25, I28, I38, J01, J15, J18, Z00
1. Introduction
There are 370 million Indigenous people throughout the world (United Nations
2009), and despite their diversity they often live in more dif?cult economic and
social circumstances than average people in their countries. In the United States,
for example, American Indians on reservation earn 39% less than the average
American (Cornell and Kalt 2010), while in Canada registered Indians earn 45%
I thank David Green, Nicole Fortin, Siwan Anderson, Kevin Milligan, Morley Gunderson,
Gordon Dahl, Nathan Nunn, Christian Dippel, Randall Akee, Anji Redish, Craig Riddell,
Vadim Marmer and Nancy Gallini for their insightful comments and valuable discussions. The
usual caveat applies. This work was formally circulated as the 2012 paper “The long term effect
of Indian residential schools on human and cultural capital.”
Corresponding author: Donna Feir, dfeir@uvic.ca
Canadian Journal of Economics / Revue canadienne d’e?conomique, Vol. 49, No. 2
May 2016. Printed in Canada / Mai 2016. Imprime? au Canada
0008–4085 / 16 / 433–480 /
©
Canadian Economics Association
434 D. L. Feir
less than the average Canadian (Wilson and Macdonald 2010).1 Similar disparities exist in Australia (Altman et al. 2008), New Zealand (Maani 2004), Latin
America (Hall and Patrinos 2006), the Arctic and Northern Europe (Andersen
et al. 2002), Asia and Africa (Hall and Patrinos 2012). This paper is the ?rst
to examine the long run consequences of a policy often attributed with devastating consequences for Indigenous people throughout the world: the forcible
removal of children from their homes and their placement in boarding (residential) schools. This policy aimed not only to educate Indigenous children but also to
immerse them in a European way of life.2 These institutions are now illegal under
international law (United Nations General Assembly 2007) and have captured
international attention (The Economist 2000, Smith 2009, Shenker 2008).
Hundreds of thousands of children in the United States, Canada and Australia were affected by residential schools, and there have been federal government apologies, calls for compensation, scathing public inquiries and evidence
of physical and sexual abuse. In Canada, this resulted in the largest class action
settlement in Canadian history.3 However, despite the widespread nature of these
institutions there does not exist any rigorous statistical research on the schools’
long run consequences.4 I ?ll this gap by studying residential schooling’s longrun consequences for both economic and cultural assimilation using several novel
sources of Canadian data. Studying the Canadian case is inherently interesting
and sheds light on both the Australian and American experiences given their
many similarities (Miller 1996, Milloy 1999, Smith 2009, Glenn 2011). I measure
economic assimilation by the probability of high school graduation, employment
and receiving social assistance. I measure cultural assimilation by the likelihood
of leaving traditional communities, speaking an Aboriginal language at home
and participating in traditional activities.
I overcome the fact that the Canadian federal government systematically
selected children to attend residential schools by leveraging the con?icting objectives of the Catholic Church, the federal government and the Aboriginal people.
Speci?cally, when the federal government started to shut down the residential
schooling system, the politically powerful Catholic Church differentially in?uenced school closures. I take advantage of variation in the churches incentives
1 Several terms for Indigenous people are used through out this paper. The term “Indigenous” is
used when referring to the global population as de?ned by the United Nations. The term
“Aboriginal” is used when referring to either Canadian or Australian Indigenous peoples.
Finally, the term “Indian” is used to refer to Indigenous people in the United States or a group
of Canadian Indigenous people who fall under the legally de?ned category of registered or
“Status” Indian.
2 See Miller (1996), Milloy (1999), Smith (2009), Glenn (2011) and Dawson (2012).
3 See the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP; 1997), Wilson (1997), Gover (2000),
Rudd (2008), Harper (2008), Boarding School Healing Project (2008), Cassidy (2009) and
Reimer (2010) for political rami?cations of residential schools and child removal. A short list of
references regarding abuse in residential schools includes Miller (1996), Milloy (1999), The
Economist (2000), Smith (2009) and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada
(2012).
4 The few statistics that exist are compiled by the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council (1996), the
Cariboo Tribal Council (1991) and Wilson (1997).
The long-run effects of Indian boarding schools 435
for school closure within communities and cohorts by interacting the concentration of non-Indigenous Catholics surrounding an Aboriginal community in
1941 with the national trend in residential school enrollment. Consequently, identi?cation is based on the assumption that the initial regional variation in the
non-Indigenous religious composition is not correlated with changes in average
outcomes within Aboriginal communities. This is not unlike the strategies used
in the local labour market literature that interacts initial regional variation with
national trends (Blanchard and Katz 1992, Bartik 1993). I also directly exploit
variation in residential school opening, closing and distance in the spirit of Du?o
(2004), Card (1995), Tyler (1994) and Neal (1997).
The long-run impacts of residential schooling is debated by scholars. While
many academics argue that residential schools produced a culturally stranded,
uneducated and impoverished population, others argue that residential schools
generated a culturally-connected and educated elite that spent their careers ?ghting for Indigenous rights.5 Which depiction (if either) is correct has substantial
implications, not only for contextualizing residential schools in history but also
for understanding assimilation more generally.
I ?nd evidence that the reality is far more nuanced and that neither argument is fully supported: I ?nd evidence that attendance at the average residential
school resulted in both economic and cultural assimilation as predicted by economic theories of identity. Once selection into residential school attendance is
accounted for, I ?nd even conditional on reaching high school, residential schooling increased the likelihood of graduation by 12 percentage points. Residential
schooling also reduces the likelihood of relying on government transfers by 16
percentage points and increases the probability of being employed in the labour
market by approximately 15 percentage points. The loss in traditional skills and
cultural connection is also signi?cant: individuals are 16 percentage points more
likely to live outside Aboriginal communities, 10 percentage points less likely to
participate in traditional activities and 13 percentage points less likely to speak
an Aboriginal language in the home. However, I ?nd suggestive evidence that relatively more abusive residential schools had no economically assimilative effects.
I also ?nd suggestive evidence that even though residential schools actively,
and at times aggressively, tried to eliminate cultural connection, the extreme assimilation policy within the schools did not drive cultural loss. Segregating Aboriginal children from non-Aboriginal children in residential schools may have
actually preserved cultural connectedness into adulthood relative to some alternatives. Those children that lived with and went to school with predominately
non-Aboriginal people were, if anything, more economically and culturally assimilated than those who attended residential schools with their Aboriginal peers.
This result speaks to the broader notion that individuals are most naturally
assimilated when they are removed from their traditional reference group. This
assumption is embedded in the research on identity and assimilation and inherent
5 Those that argue the former include Adams (1995), Milloy (1999) and Miller (2000). Those that
argue the latter include Gresko (1979), Reyhner and Eder (2004), Szaz (2006) and Glenn (2011).
436 D. L. Feir
in government policies that attempt to break up ethnic communities or restrict
the locations of immigrant settlement.6 To the best of my knowledge, my paper
is the ?rst to provide empirical evidence regarding the importance of culturally
knowledgeable reference groups for economic and cultural assimilation.
By helping to contextualize residential schooling in history, this work ?ts in
with the broader literature on the long term effects of historical trauma, such as
the slave trade (Nunn 2008) and the Holocaust (Acemoglu et al. 2011). Residential
schooling forcibly removed children from their families and communities in an
explicit attempt to commit what many have called cultural genocide. The impacts
of these events are of natural interest.
Following Feir (2012), Jones (2013) investigates the health and cultural impacts of residential schooling. Jones provides some evidence on negative health
consequences of residential schooling but provides more mixed evidence on
assimilation. This difference from my results is in part due to the different identi?cation strategies but also due to differences in the time period examined. She
looks at the impact of residential schooling including a period after the 1970s
when many Indigenous band councils started to play an active role in residential
school operations. I gain a clearer notion of the impacts of forcible assimilation
by focusing on schools that closed before the late 1960s. In addition, I investigate
the mechanisms through which residential schooling may have affected outcomes
and use data on abuse rates to examine heterogeneity in the effects of residential
schooling.
In section 2, I give a brief description of the residential schooling system in
order to put the results and the identi?cation strategy in context. In section 3, I
lay out my empirical strategy, and in section 4, I discuss the main data sources
used and the basic patterns in the data. In section 5, I present the main results
and extensions.
2. Brief background
From the early 1800s until the end of the last century, a total of 139 residential
schools operated in nearly every province and territory in Canada. Approximately
150,000 registered Indian children attended these schools and more than half of
these former students are still living today (Truth and Reconciliation Commission
of Canada 2012).
The residential schooling system involved three main actors. The ?rst actors
were the church organizations that were the primary providers and operators of
6 The literature on the economic assimilation of immigrants is extensive and includes, but is not
limited to, work by Chiswick (1978), Borjas (1985), Beggs and Chapman (1988), LaLonde and
Topel (1992), Chiswick and Miller (1992), Baker and Benjamin (1994), Borjas (1995), Patacchini
and Zenou (2006), Bisin et al. (2010), Bleakley et al. (2010) and Hatton and Leigh (2011). Kuhn
and Sweetman (2002) discuss Indigenous peoples as “unwilling immigrants” and argue
performance in the labour market is correlated with cultural assimilation. For a discussion of
the economics of identity, see Akerlof and Kranton (2010).
The long-run effects of Indian boarding schools 437
the residential schools over the time period I investigate. The “battle for souls”
between various religious denominations often led to the quick establishment
of residential schools and played a pivotal role in the operation of the system
(Miller 1992).7 Of the total denominational residential schools, approximately
60% were Catholic, 30% Anglican and the remainder divided between various
other Protestant groups.8
The second actor in the residential school system was the federal government, which provided funding, developed regulations and enforced attendance.
The federal government’s formal involvement began shortly after Confederation
in 1867 and was inspired by the Indian boarding schools in the United States
(Davin 1879). For most of the system’s history, the federal government had very
little direct involvement in the operation of the residential schools and relied on
Church participation. The federal government provided per capita grants and
funds to establish schools, but the religious organizations were the ones that
proposed the construction of the schools and their location (Milloy 1999). The
religious involvement with residential schooling would continue until 1969, when
the government took over operation of the schools (Milloy 1999).
The third actors in the residential schooling system were the Aboriginal families whose children could be compelled to attend the schools. Parents are frequently described as resistant to the residential schooling system and attempted
to prevent their children from attending these schools both directly and indirectly
(Haig-Brown 1988, Furniss 1995, Milloy 1999). The lack of involvement and control of Aboriginal people and the explicit requests for day schools during treaty
negotiations (Carr-Stewart 2001) suggest that the existence of residential schools
was due to Church supply and government demand, rather than Aboriginal
demand.
With a few rare exceptions, teachers and principals at residential schools were
Euro-Canadian and the students that attended were Status Indians (Barman
1986). On the rare occasion that students who were not Status Indians were
admitted to residential school, the school had to bear the full cost of their admission (RCAP 1997).
Residential schools were located both within Aboriginal communities and as
far as hundreds of kilometres away. No matter the physical distance, the children that attended these schools were kept from their parents for months—or
years—at a time (Barman 1986, Miller 1996, McFarlane 1999, Aboriginal Healing Foundation 2002). Unlike schools attended only during the day (day schools),
the residential schooling system operated on a half day system of?cially until
1951. Half the day was spent in academics and religion and the other half in
7 Note use of the word “churches” is vague and technically not appropriate. For example, the
Catholic Church is composed of 70 dioceses and only 16 of these actually had any role in the
residential schooling system (cccb.ca/site/eng/media-room/?les/2630-apology-on-residentialschools-by-the-catholic-church%20Access%2025%20March%202012). I use the term “church”
here for simplicity.
8 A full list of schools and their denominational associations can be found at aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/
eng/1100100015606/1100100015611.
438 D. L. Feir
manual labour (Gresko 1979, Miller 1996, Milloy 1999). Regimes at these schools
tended to be much more regulated than a student’s life at home and also involved
non-Indigenous cultural learning, such as Euro-Canadian ethics and gender roles
(Gresko 1979, Barman 1986, Miller 1996, Milloy 1999). Children were permitted to speak only English and were punished for speaking their native language.
Some of these punishments were severe, for example, beatings to the point of
permanent scarring (Crey and Fournier 1998) and the insertion of needles into
tongues (Aboriginal Healing Foundation 2002).
Beginning in 1920, all Indian children between the ages of seven and 15 were
required by federal law to attend either a residential or a day school. However,
which type of school an Indian child was required to attend was left up the discretion of the Indian Affairs (Indian Act 1920, Section A10(1)). This discretion
resulted in residential schools being operated for orphan children, isolated or
migratory communities or family environments deemed “unsuitable” from the
perspective of western authorities (Miller 1996, Milloy 1999, Truth and Reconciliation Commission, V1, P2, 159–161, 2015). A series of con?dential reports by
Indian Affairs suggests that from the 1950s to mid-1960s 40% to 75% of children
in residential schools were deemed to be neglected (Milloy 1999). Whether this
of?cial designation was appropriate is contentious (Johnston 1983, Jacobs and
White 1992, Milloy 1999). It is less contentious that families whose children were
selected to attend residential school were often seen by the federal government
as “undesirable” in one way or another (Milloy 1999).
How strictly the attendance decision was enforced came down to the discretion of the government agent on reserve (the Indian Agent). Indian Agents were
responsible for the administration of the Indian Act and its subsequent policies
and regulations on the reserve to which they were assigned (LeBeuf 2011). Thus
Indian Agents had the sole authority to admit and discharge pupils from residential schools (Indian Affairs Branch, Field Manual 1947). If the Indian Agent
desired to enforce the law to its full extent, children could be forcefully removed
from their home by truancy of?cers and their parents subject to ?nes or imprisonment (Indian Act 1920). Variation in the propensity for Indian Agents to
enforce removal was created in part by how ethically comfortable the agent felt
about removing children from their parents and on the agent’s career concerns
(Brownlie 2003, Satzewich 1997). An agent’s career concerns were often tightly intertwined with the desires of the politically powerful Catholic Church (Satzewich
1997, Satzewich and Mahood 1995). For example, one individual who was sent to
northern Alberta to replace the previously ?red Indian Agent was told by his staff
that in all likelihood he would also be ?red: “you’re not Catholic, they didn’t have
a hand in your appointment, you’re not going to last very long,” (Satzewich and
Mahood 1995, p. 55). Complaints to the federal government by the Aboriginal
people regarding their Indian Agent were largely ignored (Brownlie 2003).
Data from the Department of Indian Affairs indicates t…
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