Genocide

I listened to discussion of the mass burial of children at a Kamloops residential school on CBC Radio's The Current yesterday and it really hit home. The pivotal moment for me was when one speaker said that they weren't really schools they were detention centres; children were held there until they were broken in or had died in the process. The schooling they received did not do them any favours or prepare them for the world they were to be released into. They lost their parents, they lost their communities, their language, their native skills, their culture. And it goes without saying that their parents lost their kids and their own futures. I can't imagine the pain they felt.

The residential school system was started by our dear founding father, Sir John A, to "assimilate" the native peoples of our new country into colonial culture. It destroyed them. The Americans had the Indian Wars, we had the residential schools. It was a kind of genocide that we politely refer to as cultural genocide. The word "cultural" makes it seem less violent, less murderous than the real thing, but it's not. Nowadays we decry the separation of children from their parents at the southern American border, this was far more horrific in that it went on for generations. It started soon after Confederation (1867) and the last school was closed in 1996. Those children were really never released, the ones that made it back to their home communities were forever cut off from them by virtue of their lost abilities to communicate with their families or even support themselves. Not to mention the emotional trauma they survived but never resolved.

Until relatively recently we all approved of violence toward children in the name of education, I was lucky enough to go to an elementary school where the principal at the time was the first in Toronto to ban corporal punishment of pupils, just the year before I started there. So it would not have been unusual to use violence to "educate" the children of residential schools. But those kids did not get to go home at the end of the day, they lived day in and day out in the school with the perpetrators of the violence. When those children died, they simply disappeared from their family's lives, very few were even informed of the death of their child. CBC has published the names of all the children known to have died at those schools, but those names are many fewer than the number who actually died and were buried there.

The schools were run mostly by religious groups, predominantly Roman Catholic monks, priests and nuns, but some Protestant religious groups were involved also. The Roman Catholic Church has consistently refused to release the written records of those schools to anyone, not the families of the children, not the First Nations communities, not even the Canadian government. No one knows the true extent of the horror. First Nations are determined to use ground-penetrating radar at all residential school sites, whether publicly or privately owned, to find the bodies of their lost children.

My mind just boggles at the damage done in the name of Canadian civilization. This is a horror that First Nations have known all along but the rest of us have not taken seriously. The result of the residential school system decimation of First Nation culture is right up there with the Jewish Holocaust of World War II, in  my opinion. Maybe worse. I remember that when I was a teenager a representative of the South African government told a group of us that we were in no position to criticize his government's treatment of the Black peoples of his country, after all apartheid was based on the Indian reservation system of Canada. And China has admonished our government for criticizing the Chinese government treatment of the Uighurs, after all we did the same to our First Nations.

Presently over a hundred First Nations are suing the Canadian government for reparations. This is an action that has been in the works for awhile, but in light of what was discovered in Kamloops has suddenly gained some traction. My grandson goes to a university named for the man who essentially designed the residential school system, my grandson and many of his peers now refer to that school as X University. Commemoration of the founders of our great nation and the enablers of "cultural" genocide is hard to stomach.