Chapter 10: Residential Schools and Hannah Arendt’s banality of Evil

Chapter Overview

This chapter is emotionally challenging. Looking back through our present lens of human rights, it seems incomprehensible that children, their families, and communities would have been treated the way they were during the residential school era. The task is not to try and figure out the mindset of the Government of Canada at that time, but rather to accept that this happened and to come to terms with what this reality means for all of us today. The Elder Teaching on the significance placed on the gifts children are to community adds to the weight of this part of our history. Reflective questions and activities based on the four quadrants of the Medicine Wheel are provided, along with further recommended material for viewing, listening, and reading.
A section about Hannah Arendt and the banality of Evil has been added to allow philosophy try to explain why something like the residential schools happened.