They Came for the Children: Truth Commission Sheds Light on Canada’s Genocide Against Indigenous Peo
They Came for the Children: Truth Commission Sheds Light on Canada’s Genocide Against Indigenous Peoples
Written by Alexis Lathem Published: 23 March 2016
Imagine a village with all its children gone. For aboriginal peoples all across Canada, this was their lived reality, not the stuff of imagination. The story of what happened to the children – who were forcibly removed from their families and sent to military-style camps that were euphemistically called “schools” – has at last been told, compiled in the monumental six-volume Truth and Reconciliation Report on residential schools for aboriginal children released in 2015. The accounts of cruelty against generations of children will strain credulity of the moral imagination, but this extraordinary report is about much more than that.
In the testimony given by hundreds of former residents and staff over the six-year long truth-telling process, documented in thousands of pages, survivors tell of being shackled to their beds at night and raped, of being forced to eat their own vomit, of being beaten with rods or whips for having cast a glance or a wave over a crowded mess hall at a sister or brother with whom they were forbidden contact, of having needles pierced through their tongues for speaking their own language.
The story of systemic child abuse and neglect – horrific as it is, is not all there is to tell. To cast a light into what may be the darkest and most shameful part of Canada’s history, is to look into the policies of forced assimilation of aboriginal peoples that were integral to the making of Canada itself. The intent to rupture families in order to prevent the transmission of a culture, in order to end those practices that allow the continued existence of a group as a group, is both the legal definition of cultural genocide and the stated objective of these institutions. Canada’s admission of cultural genocide in these pages is historic not only for Canada: it represents the first official admission of genocide by any nation anywhere in the Americas.[1]
And it does so in a detailed accounting not only of the horrors of the residential schools, but of the federal government’s history of legal trickery, its failure to fulfill its treaty obligations, and its domination of almost every aspect of aboriginal life. In reviewing this history of colonization, the Commission has, piece by piece, deconstructed the Doctrine of Progress, which elevates European civilization above all others, and the Doctrine of Discovery, by which Europeans justified the theft of land from those who were here long before them – those archaic and racist doctrines which nevertheless persist in the national mythologies and prejudices and have been the basis of the EuroCanadian relationship with its aboriginal peoples. To reconcile Canada with its aboriginal people means not just addressing the historic crimes against children; it will mean restoring and dignifying the unique legal status of aboriginals as the original and rightful inhabitants of the land we call Canada.
More:
http://www.towardfreedom.com/31-archives/americas/4213-they-came-for-the-children-truth-commission-sheds-light-on-canada-s-genocide-against-indigenous-peoples
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