By the year 2005 the federal government of Canada under the Liberal party had agreed to certain measures to redress the issue. Various financial packages were offered, and it was promised as part of the deal that the government would offer an official apology for the policy.

But now the current administration, the Conservative Party of Canada has reneged on that promise. In fact from comments made by the Indian Affairs Minister, Jim Prentice, lead one to believe that the government is trying to whitewash what exactly the schools did.

The most he will say is that the residential schools involved a difficult time in our history, but - and this is the real killer - "the underlying objective had been to provide aboriginal children with an education". Which means that Jim Prentice is either a professional liar or an ignorant fool who doesn't even read history books.

But then again the Conservative Party already knows that Native Canadians aren't going to vote for them, and neither are people who are sympathetic to their plight. They're playing to their constituents, the people who believe that Native people are welfare drunks who lost the war and are lucky we give them anything.

To say that Native leaders are appalled is to put it mildly. To go from a government which recognised the damage caused by the Residential School System, to one that wants to gloss over the nasty bits of our history and make out that the policy had its heart in the right place, is worse than insulting, and it's obscene. I would like to ask Jim Prentice a question, seeing how he thinks this policy was so benign.

How would he like his children taken away from him and made to change the names he had given them, learn a language that prevented him from talking to them, and be told that all he believed was a lie and evil? Wouldn't he want someone to apologise to him for treating his children like that?

The effects of the Residential Schools are still being felt on reserves today as the children of the people who attended them are now a second generation of lost people. They live out in the middle of nowhere with no running water or electricity much of the time, and with little or no connection to their nation's past, or any connection to the land.

While many countries face a difficult battle these days in trying to preserve their cultural identities in the face of an onslaught of homogenisation, the First Nation people of Canada are dealing with trying to teach two generations of people what was stolen from them by government policy. It's just too bad that our current government doesn't view cultural genocide as something you should apologise for.