A Cultural Sociology of Anglican Mission and the Indian Residential Schools in Canada

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 acknowledgment 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.

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, including Cultural Sociology and Nations and Nationalism, 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 the London School of Economics, UK.