Let's Make Sure This Never Happens Again

The Courier-Islander
November 6, 2013

http://www.canada.com/make+sure+this+never+happens+again/9130094/story.html

What happened between 1879 and 1986 has been Canada's dirty little secret.

Family priests, Indian agents and police officers forcibly took 150,000 aboriginal children, ages seven to 15 from their homes and they were placed in one of about 132 residential schools across Canada. The intent was to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.

The white culture. To kill the Indian in the child. There are about 80,000 survivors. Only just now is the damage being recognized. Only just now are significant numbers of individuals beginning to talk about their traumatic experiences of physical, sexual, emotional abuse, medical experimentation, starvation, even murder. Only now are many of us hearing about it.

Because what happened was unspeakable.

But now, survivors are speaking.

When your childhood years are snatched away from you and filled with unimaginable abuse and terror, how can you possibly live a normal life when you have no traditions, role models or warm memories to refer to? Survivors tended to parent as they had been "parented" and console themselves with alcohol. So do their children, And so many of us judge the aboriginal population for their poverty, their children being put in foster care, their incarceration.

Their future depends on their children loving themselves and having hope.

It is our responsibility as a nation to never let them lose that.

Canada may have wanted them to disappear, but we don't have to let it happen.

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