The intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools (and day school) which upwards of 150,000 Indigenous children attended, is an underline cause of the current high rates of the gender-based violent victimization that Indigenous women experience. While attending residential school, children experienced a multitude of physical, mental and sexual abuses, along with the constant enforcement of their imagined cultural and ethnic inferiority. “Attendance at a residential or day school severely violated the physical, emotional, and social security of residential and day school survivors through a lack of food, harsh living conditions, poor education, and lack of proper clothing, as well as extensive physical, sexual, and emotional abuse. She explained, “There is consistent evidence showing that the children and grandchildren of those affected by residential schools are at risk for various negative mental, physical and social outcomes.” Final Report of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls repeated traumas stayed with many of these children into adulthood and were often consequently infused into family dynamics, and passed down to their children. “It is thought that the negative effects emanating from group trauma experiences are not only transferred across generations, but that these effects accumulate, such that events occurring at different points in history are part of a single traumatic trajectory,” (The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma) part of this traumatic trajectory is the gender-based violence that so many Indigenous women experience.
There is a definite connection between residential school attendance and interpersonal violence. This is illustrated in “The intergenerational effects of Indian Residential Schools: Implications for the concept of historical trauma” by Amy Bombay, which is cyclical and compounding in nature. For instance:
Examining residential school as an underline cause of violence in Indigenous communities and families helps to explain the high rates of gender-based violence that Indigenous women and girls experience within those same families and communities. For example “the widespread sexual abuse suffered by generations of children while attending these schools were implicated as key factors that contributed to high rates of sexual abuse in some communities.” In the Final Report of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls the impact of residential school across many generations was explained through the testimonies of Indigenous survivors. Here are some of their stories:
The experience of abuse and violence as a child, or within family will normalize these behaviours for the individual who experienced or witnessed these events. “The denial and normalization of interpersonal violence in the lives of Indigenous women, girls, and 2SLGBTQQIA people – and the extent to which that denial, as Josie outlined, keeps Indigenous women in danger or removes their security – are another form of colonial control exercised by the state, which, instead of recognizing its complicity in a long history of perpetrating and then denying or hiding violence, simply ignores that violence, or – more commonly than not – blames or further punishes Indigenous women for being victimized.” Many women who testified in the Final Report of the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls outlined how normalized violence in their lives lead to later experiences of abuse from partners, acquaintances and strangers. Here are some of their stories: