CANADA
Lankaweb
Posted on April 28th, 2013
Herold Leelawardena
A Canadian Indian Michael Cachagee did spent 12 years in three different schools from 1944, Associated Press said as he said: “I was beaten. I was put in tubs of hot water. I suffered great pains of hunger. I was force-fed rotten food.” Michael Cachagee added: “The intent was to destroy the Indian.” It is also a known fact that some of the students in residential schools were sexually abused. Such was the cruelty and ill-treatment inflicted on The First Nation of Canada in the so-called ‘residential schools’.
Lifting children from native Indian families and planting them in residential schools began in the 19th century and continued until the 1970s. At those schools, children were forbidden to use their own languages and they were discouraged from learning about their own cultures. It is obvious that the aim was to “kill the Indian in the child” until “there is not a single American Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed”. Today, the native population makes up about 4% of the population of Canada though it remains among the poorest. In the then Ceylon, Christian missionaries have done the same in their boarding schools except induction may have been deception and bribe, but the purpose remained the same.
In 1998, the Canadian government issued a general apology for hundred and fifty thousand students that were forcibly taken from their homes for enforced assimilation and destroying their culture. But mentality of the descendants remains the same as that of their ancestors. So, when the Canadian Prime Minister, Stephen Harper’s made a formal apology on June 11th in 2008 to former students of Indian Residential Schools and sought forgiveness for the students’ suffering and for the damaging impact the schools had on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language is indeed a surprise. He did not do so out of love for Indians but because the Australian prime minister at the time, Kevin Rudd, had issued a similar apology to his country’s aborigines taken from their families as part of a similar assimilation programme there.
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