A Cultural Sociology of Anglican Mission and the Indian Residential Schools in Canada ― The Long Road to Apology

This book focuses on the recurring struggle over the meaning of the Anglican Church’s role in the Indian residential schools--a long-running school system designed to assimilate Indigenous children into euro-Canadian culture, in which sexual, psychological, and physical abuse were common. From the end of the nineteenth century until the outset of twenty-first century, the meaning of the Indian residential schools underwent a protracted transformation. Once a symbol of the church’s sacred mission to Christianize and civilize Indigenous children, they are now associated with colonialism and suffering. In bringing this transformation to light, the book addresses why the church was so quick to become involved in the Indian residential schools and why acknowledgement of their deleterious impact was so protracted. In doing so, the book adds to our understanding of the sociological process by which perpetrators come to recognize themselves as such. This book is relevant to several areas of research, including: cultural sociology; cultural trauma; collective memory; colonialism and post-colonialism; Canada; Anglicanism; mission schools; and the Indian residential schools.

Eric Taylor Woods is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of East London, UK. In addition to serving on the editorial boards of several journals, includingCultural Sociology and Studies on National Movements, Woods is a Faculty Fellow of the Center for Cultural Sociology at Yale University, USA and serves as an advisor to the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism at London School of Economics, UK.