Apology Aftermath

At the Calgary Herald, Lorne Gunter argues that the Canadian Government and various religious institutions were only trying to do the right thing by Aboriginal children when they forced them out of their communities and into residential schools.  Sure, some of them died without ever seeing their parents again but, Gunter says, they woulda died anyway.  Huh?  After establishing his government’s beneficent intentions, Gunter goes on to say that the schools might not have been really such a great idea:

Every year, Ottawa spends more than half a billion dollars on native skills training. Many of the residential schools offered an early form of such training. If it is such a magnanimous program now, how could it have been evil 40, 50, 70 years ago?

Yes, many children who attended the schools died never seeing their parents again. But for every one who contracted a disease at the schools, there were a dozen cured of the diseases they arrived with.

But at each, to one degree or another, one of the principal goals was to eradicate “Indianness’ — to “kill the Indian in the child,” as one government policy paper put it more than 80 years ago — to erase aboriginal languages and cultures within a generation or two and assimilate natives into mainstream Canadian society.

It does matter that these efforts were well-intentioned. The people perpetrating them were not Nazis bent on exterminating aboriginals. To the extent they talked about ending Canada’s “Indian problem,” they did not mean by lining them up for wholesale slaughter.

The people behind Ottawa’s residential school policy, both in the government and among the church workers at the schools, were the enlightened minds of their day, the social progressives out to do the right thing.

This was not, as it has been described, a Holocaust or genocide on a par with Hitler’s “final solution.”

But there can be no denying that one of the objectives from the start was to destroy native cultural identity, to encourage aboriginals to cease to see themselves as a people or peoples distinct from non-aboriginals. As well-intentioned as those efforts were, they were wrong. And Prime Minster Stephen Harper was right to apologize for them.

Had government agents come to round up your kids and mine, I doubt we would have kept quiet about it for 80 years or more. The schools, whether they were meant to be or not, are a stain on our history, and Harper’s apology is a first step to remove it.

I think the members of government could have imagined how having their kids forcibly rounded up and removed to schools outside their control would feel 80 years ago.  It appears to me that Gunter is justifying this action.  Doesn’t work for me.  Further, it is not simply the residential schools policy that people are talking about when they refer to genocide, but a web of policies and practices that cleansed valuable land of Indigenous presence and banished people to reserves where they were unable to survive through traditional hunting, fishing and agriculture and also unable to participate in the nation’s growing economy.  And where they were without medical, social and educational resources whilst at the same time being robbed of the hope and vitality provided by  several generations of children.  Possibly this doesn’t meet the legal definition of a genocide, but legal definitions aren’t persuasive sometimes.  Call it ethnic cleansing, call it mass murder, torture, cruelty and inhumanity.  It requires an apology and much, much more.

The Quebec Native Women’s Association has some ideas about how much more:

In order for this apology to be considered genuine, more efforts must be undertaken to correct current oppressive measures under the Indian Act that prevent Indigenous peoples from prospering socially, culturally, politically and economically.

The actions of the Canadian Government in opposing the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples makes the apology feel hollow. Their opposition to the UNDRIP perpetuates the insidious, archaic Indian Act that continues to discriminate and deny Aboriginal nations their rights. The facts and arguments reflecting the manner in which the Canadian Government continues to undermine the rights of Indigenous peoples, can be found in Amnesty International’s 2008 Annual Report.

Gunter article via A Creative Revolution