The findings from the First National Conference on Residential Schools held in Vancouver in June of 1991 were published in The Circle Game (2002), in which Roland Chrisjohn and his co-authors Sherri Young and Michael Mauran cited punishments that included sticking needles through the tongues of children and other areas of children's anatomy, often for prolonged periods; burning and scalding, beating to unconsciousness; inflicting broken legs, arms, ribs, skulls and eardrums; using electric shock devices and forcing sick children to eat their vomit.

"Residential schools,"; according to Chrisjohn, an Oneida healer, "were one of many attempts at the genocide of the Aboriginal Peoples inhabiting the area now commonly called Canada. Initially, the goal of obliterating these peoples was connected with stealing what they owned (the land, the sky, the waters, and their lives, and all that these encompassed); and although this connection persists, present-day acts and policies of genocide are also connected with the hypocritical, legal and self-delusion needed on the part of the perpetrators to conceal what they did and what they continue to do.";

A Haudenausaunee who received his Ph.D. in Personality and Measurement from the University of Western Ontario in 1981, Chrisjohn has worked for 30 years in First Nations education, 'suicidology' and family services. His co-authors Sherri Young and Michael Maraun are specialists in Applied Social Psychology and Statistics respectively.

BOOKS:

Chrisjohn, Roland & Sherri Young with Michael Maraun: The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential School Experience and in Canada (Theytus, 1997, 2002).

[BCBW 2005]