CANADA
Indian Country Today Media Network
ICTMN Staff
6/1/15
What happened to Indigenous Peoples in Canada was nothing short of “cultural genocide,” Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin said in a recent speech.
She may be the highest-ranking federal official ever to use the term, according to The Globe and Mail.
“The most glaring blemish on the Canadian historic record relates to our treatment of the First Nations that lived here at the time of colonization,” McLachlin said in the annual Pluralism Lecture of the Global Centre for Pluralism. “An initial period of cooperative inter-reliance grounded in norms of equality and mutual dependence, was supplanted in the nineteenth century by the ethos of exclusion and cultural annihilation. Early laws forbade treaty Indians from leaving allocated reservations. Starvation and disease were rampant. Indians were denied the right to vote. Religious and social traditions, like the Potlach and the Sun Dance, were outlawed. Children were taken from their parents and sent away to residential schools, where they were forbidden to speak their native languages, forced to wear white-man’s clothing, forced to observe Christian religious practices, and not infrequently subjected to sexual abuse.”
The well-known objective, she noted, was to “take the Indian out of the child” and eradicate what came to be known as the “Indian problem.”
“ ‘Indianness’ was not to be tolerated; rather it must be eliminated,” McLachlin said of the prevailing attitude during those times. “In the buzzword of the day, assimilation; in the language of the 21st century, cultural genocide.”
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