CJ at residential schools

[Henry Kammler]

> I should note that Bill Jacobsen has told me of a Makah elder of his
> acquaintance who picked up very good CJ at residential school in Oregon!

No doubt about it.
Moreover, for many children the only English they ever learned was from their
class mates, not from the teacher. It was only in the 1950s (!) that it became
compulsory for teachers at residential schools in Canada to have gone through
a pedagogical training.
The kids were totally dependent on good or bad will of the principals. If they
happened to have a more liberal one, good luck for them. The lack of
governmental interest in the schools had many principals set up their own
little regimes where they could deliberately punish or "forgive" as they saw
fit.

> It was a breeding ground for CJ knowledge, that environment was.  With so
> many tribes represented, and knowledge of English minimal, CJ was the most
> efficient way for the pupils to communicate amongst themselves.

Pressure was always towards English (not only from evidence but for very
obvious structural reasons, given the political and ideological background of
that school system). The more rebellious children sort of lived an internal
counter culture, speaking native languages and CJ when they felt unobserved.
But having been spanked, strapped or locked in several times for that sole
reason you can imagine that most of them had internalized the authority
structure to an extent that they preferred English as intertribal and
predominant means of communication. It is also a question of the time horizon.
Language suppression was most severely felt in southern BC schools between
1920 and 1945. After that, anglophone children were the majority when entering
school which did not prevent all of them from being abused...
I don't know about schools in Oregon but Adams' "Education for Extinction"
(covers the years up to 1928) leaves me with the impression that the boarding
school environment in most US schools was not less violent or assimilatory
than in Canada.

Henry