CANADA
Ottawa Citizen
BY BERNIE M. FARBER, OTTAWA CITIZEN AUGUST 28, 2013
He was considered one of Canada’s preeminent poets, a writer whose verses sang of Canada’s natural beauty, whose poems painted pictures of Canadian wilderness that brought pride to a nation. He was also a heartless civil servant, the first superintendent of Canadian residential schools and a deputy minister of Indian Affairs in the early part of the 20th century whose policies targeting First Nations, many believe, meet today’s definition of the UN genocide convention.
Duncan Campbell Scott was born in Ottawa in 1862. His desire was to go into medicine, a profession that his family could ill afford. His father, however, Rev. William Scott, did have connections in the nation’s capital and managed to get his son a job within the Indian Affairs sector, then part of the Department of the Interior. Scott spent the rest of his professional career in Indian Affairs, eventually rising to deputy superintendent in 1923. And it is here that he callously enforced laws and regulations that were determined to assimilate Canada’s indigenous population into Canadian society.
Scott believed wholeheartedly in the residential-school plan for young aboriginal children, a policy Canada had adopted even before Confederation. He approached his job with the fervour of a zealot. Scott embraced the idea that removing aboriginal children from the reserve, forcibly if need be, and placing them in residential schools often many hundreds of miles from their homes was the only way, as he ominously stated, to “kill the Indian in the child.”
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