“Indian homes”, the dark history of Catholic boarding schools in Guyana

On French territory, in Guyana to be precise, in the first half of the 20th century, indigenous children were taken from their families and brought up by missionaries in Catholic boarding schools, the “homes”. “The specificity of Guyanese homes is that they were intended for well-identified populations: the Amerindians. The maroon populations were also targeted by the policy of assimilation and evangelization deployed in the homes” says the journalist Helen Ferrarini.

At the beginning of the 1930s, in the French colony of Guyana, Father Du Maine went to meet the indigenous communities who lived along the rivers. Under the pretext of schooling them, the priest begins to gather the children of the Kali’na villages in the presbytery of Mana.

In 1946, Guyana became a French department, other boarding schools opened on the same model, as Hélène Ferrarini reminds us: “CBoarding schools are considered a privileged means of evangelizing these populations that the Catholic Church has sought to convert in Guyana for centuries. They bring together children who are called “pagans”.

Guyana, a land of mission for the Church

As soon as they arrive in these homes, the children are forced to pray, to attend masses, to learn the catechism, under penalty of punishment. They are also forced to learn and speak a single language: French. Hélène Ferrarini enumerates the multiple forms of violence of which these children were victims: “The denigration, the demonization of indigenous cultures, Native American spirituality, the mother tongues that they should no longer speak and which have become impoverished. All of this is violence that can be described as symbolic and cultural. There was also physical violence: corporal punishment, beatings, punishments.”

These homes are partly financed by the French State, the secularism law of 1905 not applying in Guyana. Cults are governed by a royal ordinance of the 19th century.

After this transition to boarding school, many children were destined to become cheap labor as explained by Helen Ferrarini: “One of the objectives of these boarding schools was to swell the ranks of the Guyanese workforce, perceived as too weak. To bring these populations out of their ancestral way of life and push them to engage in logging for men, or to work as servants for young women.”

In 80 years, these homes will welcome more than 2,000 children, including a majority of Amerindians from these communities threatened with extinction, but also Black-Maroons, descendants of slaves.

In 2022, Pope Francis spoke out about similar boarding schools in Canada, also for indigenous children. He then asked for forgiveness on behalf of the Church for what he called “genocide”.