Victims of Benevolence: The Dark Legacy of the Williams Lake Residential School

The books under review are quite different even though their topics are similar. They are historical and documentary rather than ethnographic, and both are quite short. Furniss documents the history of the Williams Lake Residential School (St. Joseph's or "the Mission" school) from 1891 to the 1990s (pp. 48-50). The institution was closed in 1981, but it has been reappearing in British Columbia courts since the late 1980s due to the disclosure of serious sexual abuse of pupils and workers in the Mission school (pp. 114-115). The Bartelses' book covers a similar time period, but it focusses on a much larger picture, the history of Russian (erstwhile Soviet and now, again, Russian) influence on the indigenous peoples of Siberia--emphasizing the development of schooling for the offspring of these peoples. The difference between the books is this difference in focus, one residential school versus a half of a continent, and the concomitant difference in closeness to the subject matter. Furniss was working with and for the Cariboo Tribal Council on her story. The Bartelses were separated from theirs by several languages, Cold War ideological defences and an ocean and another half a continent. Much of Furniss's book is devoted to the discussion and documentation of the deaths of two Indian boys, one in 1902 (p. 62) and another in 1920 (p. 92). These discussions frame the larger discussion of the abuse of students in the Mission school and its failure(s).