CANADA
Medicine Hat News
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission recently delivered its final report about Canada’s residential schools. Briefly in the news, it was quickly shoved so far in the back of the bus as to almost be on another bus entirely.
Justice Murray Sinclair, the TRC chair, and SCOC Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, acknowledged the true nature of the crime against aboriginal people in Canada, calling it “cultural genocide.”.
For the sake of informing the argument, it’s helpful to review what happened.
Little kids were kidnapped by the state and packed off to boarding schools — sometimes hundreds of miles away — where they were routinely beaten, starved, exploited, sexually abused, experimented on, psychologically tortured and, in the case of at least 6,000 little kids, killed — by disease, neglect and, even though no one wants to say the words out loud, by design.
Their parents were powerless to prevent the abductions. And when their little kids never came home, they had no recourse. They didn’t speak the language, they didn’t know how to negotiate the endless bureaucracy, and they were prohibited by law from having any money of their own to hire a lawyer to do it for them.
Most of the non-aboriginal people alive today had little to do with any decisions about residential schools. The mentality that invented the scheme to assassinate Indian society, culture, heritage and hope for the future was a product of bigoted 19th century savages, imbued with European imperial superiority, and bolstered by the absolute conviction that they were entitled to rid the world of all influences but their own. Modern Canadians can hardly assume responsibility for those guys. And we shouldn’t feel guilty about it.
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