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.
Article comments
1 - RJ
Well-written post. And I generally agree with you. One point, however.
You say: "They live out in the middle of nowhere with no running water or electricity much of the time"
That's true. But that would also be true if they had been completely "left alone" to their own devices.
I mean, you can't have it both ways. You cannot decry the intervention of the Canadian government in the lives of indigenous peoples, while at the same time tacitly demanding that they interfere by providing modern infrastructure like electricity and chlorinated water and sewers. Either the indigenous people live their lives as "noble savages" or they live their lives as regular Canadians. They should pick one, and then live with it. If they choose the former, then the run the risk of freezing to death in the Winter, or drinking water from a bucket, or dying of a preventable disease. If they choose the latter, then they run the risk of becoming partially-assimilated into Western culture.
The choice is theirs...
2 - AJ
how can they drink water from a bucket when all the waters have been polluted? the earth is not what it once was... which is really sad!
3 - saga
Good article. Thanks.
I agree with the second comment.
They wouldn't need water systems and government money for food if corporations hadn't been allowed by governments to pollute their water, clearcut the forests, etc.
They would not be living in poverty if they were paid properly for the resources stolen from their land either, and for the land that was also stolen.
One comment re the article - it was not "a" lost generation, it was 6-7 generations of residential school horror. And what is not talked about ... The government's own data indicated that 50% of the students died in the schools.
The deaths are not talked about.
Here is a first sample of a video being made about the Mohawk Institute residential school in Brantford, ON where Six Nations kids went.