Maple Leaf (Gardens) forever: Sex, Canadian historians, and national history, The

Miller discovered the historical "record revealed that sexual abuse of children in these institutions was widespread and long-standing" (329). Given the widespread extent of the sexual abuse he uncovered, one is struck by his stress on the individual: "The pattern of widespread sexual abuse arose from particular individuals in positions of authority in individual schools" (334, emphasis added). It is a curious emphasis, one that risks obscuring the more systemic nature of sexual coercion with the residential school system. Equally problematic is how Miller labels some of these individuals and/or their abusive acts. Most often, Miller refers to the perpetrators of sexual coercion as "violent predators," "sexual predators" and "sadists." He describes their acts as "sexual abuse," "sexual exploitation" and "sexual victimization." And, most often, Miller's explanation for abuse is made, as it should be, with reference to the white, adult male supervisors and their positions of power over First Nations children. But at other points Miller's predators and their acts become associated with particular sexual identities: predators become "homosexuals." Miller cites the case of the Oblate missionary Jean L'Heureux, "a recruiter of boys for St. Joseph's school" in High River, Alberta, who was dismissed for what Miller describes as "allegations of homosexual paedophilia in the 1880s" (320). Discussing the case again at another point, Miller writes that "during the very earliest years of the Oblates' St. Joseph school at High River, Alberta, a homosexual who worked as a recruiter for the school that had a difficult time attracting Blackfoot students was detected in sexual exploitation of schoolboys" (329, emphasis added). To give another example, Miller examines a 1935 case at the Roman Catholic school on the Blood reserve involving a 16-year-old student and what he labels, in two different places in his text, a "homosexual assault" (335 and 337). Finally, in one of the very few cases involving female staff, Miller discusses the matron and another woman staff member of the Anglican St. Michael's school at Alert Bay in 1957 who, according to the testimony of a former student, "were quite open about their lesbian orientation and practices." It is unclear here whether the term "lesbian" is the student's or Miller's, but Miller does go on to describe one of the two women as being implicated in a "lesbian assault" (332).

There are at least two different problems here. The first is the ahistorical attribution of homosexual and pedophilic identities. I am highly doubtful that anyone on the Prairies in the 1880s referred to himself or anyone else as a "homosexual pedophile" or even as "a homosexual." This is not to say that in some cases there may not have been a "homosexual" dimension; the problem is one of evidence. Miller offers no historical evidence of homosexual self-understanding among the men he discusses. The "lesbian" case may be an exception - certainly lesbian identities existed by the 1950s - but here, too, the evidence presented is ambiguous and far from conclusive. The second problem flows from the first, and it concerns the unfortunate homosexualizing of coercive sexual relations. Once men who start out as "violent predators" become "homosexuals" and "homosexual pedophiles," a link between child sexual abusers and homosexuality is made. Put another way, Miller discusses numerous cases in which white, adult men supervisors sexually exploited Native girls and young women yet there are no heterosexual pedophiles or heterosexual assaults in Miller's history. If work in the field of the history of sexuality has taught us anything, it is the need to make careful, historically accurate distinctions between sexual acts and sexual identities. In historical instances of abusive sexual relations, the need to differentiate between coercive sexual acts and (homo)sexual identities is all the more imperative. To fail to do so in a culture all too willing to make the link between homosexuality and child abuse is to make historical writing complicit in perpetuating homophobic myths of gay men as child molesters.