The heart-wrenching and centuries long ethnocide on the Aboriginal Indians finally laid bare in Canada
Author’s note: a significant number of the world population still has a tendency to assume that Canada is, comparatively speaking, a peace-loving/ non-violent/non-hegemonic/good-natured developed country in contrast to its neighbor, Uncle Sam, a country of hegemonic/militaristic/imperial braggarts who run amok with abandon across the globe with a threat of military invasion/across-the-board economic sanction on any sovereign nations that refuse to beg ‘Cry Uncle’ or to genuflect to the Yankee altar.
Contrary to these popular opinion about Canada, the Canadian Government today under the Prime Minister Stephen Harper of the Conservative Party had lost its above-mentioned honorable/glorious reputation and ended up almost being a vassal state under the US Empire, sending a squadron of fighter jets to bomb Syria, a sovereign nation that does no harm to the Canadians and a band of special forces to train the Ukrainian Forces that irritates the Russian bears and arouses the tensions in the volatile region…in other words, Canada has become a poodle sitting on Uncle Sam’s lap barking at anyone when the Emperor sic them.
Recently the Government also enacted a Bill C-51 (Canadian version of the US Patriot Acts) to strengthen the surveillance powers of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (the Canadian CIA) and increased the closest relationship with Israeli Zionist Government of Benjamin Netanyahu making the BDS Movements (Boycott, Divestment and Sanction against Israeli economy) illegal practice in Canada.
In addition Prime Minister Harper did not endorse any of 94 recommendations that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) advised to implement to Canadians and he kept mum about it standing by wayside and left for a European tour for the NATO conference.
Mr. Harper appears to be a carbon copy of John A McDonald, the First Prime Minister of Canada who was determined to eliminate the Native Indians from Canada.
***“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with its parents, who are savages, and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly impressed upon myself, as head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.” John A MacDonald, the first Prime Minister of Canada
***“What took place in residential schools amounts to nothing short of cultural genocide – a systematic and concerted attempt to extinguish the spirit of Aboriginal peoples.”Judge Murray Sinclair, the Chair of Truth and Reconciliation Commission
The “June 2 2015” became the “National Sorry Day” for Canada and Canadians are in need of wholesale rewriting of their hidden history, a skeleton in their collective closet, in the shame-ridden revelation of the Indian Residential School System by the TRC (Truth and Reconciliation Commission)
The TRC in Canada chaired by the Judge Murray Sinclair released its over-the-past- five-year findings how the Canadian Government for centuries from 1880s to 1996 working hand in glove with the Catholic, Anglican, and United Church of Canada corralled the aboriginal Indian children into the Canadian version of concentration camps of the Residential School System in order to kill them in the child…which the Judge Sinclair declared as the cultural genocide replete with over 6,000 deaths and physical/ sexual abuses on the indigenous children in the Residential Schools as defined by the 1948 UN Convention on Genocide.
In essence, the Commission unfolded the true goals of the more than 130 Residential Schools making naked historical records that the Canadian Governments attempted to assimilate and/or eliminate Indian tribes of First Nations, Métis and Innu tradition, languages, and customs from the Canadian aboriginal horizon.
According to the Commission report, the Residential schools had these objectives in common:
- Anything to do with First Nations culture was eliminated including their language, cutting their hair ,alienating traditional clothing, and food;
- Segregation between family members and boys and girls took place;
- Children learned English, celebrated Christian holidays, played European based sports;
- Schooling consisted mostly of religious instruction and training for manual labor. They also learned practical skills like sewing, woodworking, reading, and writing
On December 9 1948 the United Nations had adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide that gives a clear definition of what is a genocide…as the Holocaust is the undisputed genocide of all genocides, modern historians no longer argue over whether it is a genocide or not. Under the convention, the intention to commit genocide is defined itself a crime.
For example, the first Canadian Prime Minister John A MacDonald’s government policy of starving Indians to death in order to make way for the western expansion of European frontiersmen meets the criteria of genocide under the UN Convention.
Similarly, it was an act of genocide when the Department of Indian Affairs willfully ignored the recommendation of the Chief Medical Officer who gave a medical advice on the spread of tuberculosis in the Indian residential schools…an act of official disregard for the basic principles of public health issues.
As recently as in the 60s, also known as “Sixties Scoop”, there was a heart-wrenching memory of forced removal of Indian children from their families into the involuntary adoption (thousands of Indian Kids were arbitrarily removed to the European foster parents) or on the bunk beds at the Residential Schools.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that almost all the past Canadian Government policies on the aboriginal Indians fell under the definition of genocide by the UN Convention, far from rectifying their wrongs on the Indigenous people but perpetuating the systemic discrimination and eventual elimination of Indian tribes that the residential schools endeavored so hard to accomplish in cahoots with Christian Churches…contrary to the misconception that the TRC was set up by the kind heart of our Prime Minister Stephen Harper, it was sued into setting up by way of the class action on behalf of 80,000 surviving former students that remains the biggest suit in Canadian history and the TRC runs on money taken from the overall settlement on behalf of those living former students.
In other words, the relationship between the Canadian Government and the TRC has always been tense and antagonistic… as the Chair, Murray Sinclair put it that “They say the truth will set you free. Well, first it’s going to piss you off.”, by 2009, all three commissioners stepped down citing an unjustified meddling from the Canadian Government, the TRC had to remove its HQ office from Ottawa to Winnipeg, and had to take the Federal Government to court twice in order to gain access to the archival documents.
In current time, I believe people could easily come to grips with history by visiting the era the first Prime Minister of Canada, John A MacDonald reigned…that the Canadian Government’s policies on the Native Indians have been rather a “genocidal/ethnocidal” intention than a “cultural” one that the TRC named to furnish (embellish) a genocide(ethnocide) with a mitigating/decorative/deductive/civilized adjective word, “cultural”…the TRC suggests that the Indian Residential School System was designed to destroy cultures not people(ethnicity), far from the truthful/historical records of the Canadian Governments policies on the aboriginal people.
The Indian Acts in Canada first passed in 1876 still in force with Amendments is a primary document which governs how Canadian State interacts with aboriginal people in Canada…1884 Amendment to the Acts endorsed by John A MacDonald mandated the compulsory education for Indian children under 16-year-old in the Residential School System to read/write only in English in which policies sever family ties, denounce the traditional Indian cultures, and eventually resulted in forcing Indians off from their ancestral lands…the intention was “to Kill the Indian, but Save the Man (Slave)”.
In total, 150,000 Indian Kids were removed and taken from families sometimes at gunpoint and forced to attend the labor-intensive school system under the supervision of Christian Churches where most of the kids were abused/suffered/tortured/died/buried in an unmarked cemetery with no name on tombs (more than 6,000 Indian Kids died while attending the school.)
One of the most disturbing practices rendered by Catholic monks, nuns and school administrators was the electrical torture…an Indian kid was forced to sit on a wooden chair with both arms strapped on the metal armrest and a monk cranks up the motor gear to pass the electric waves through the kid’s body that jolts kid’s legs fly high in the air…and observing nuns/monks giggle with joy and satisfaction.
When these Indian kids return from the Residential School to their land, they are in a fog how to raise his/her own kids since their ties to the aboriginal cultures have already left them in toto and their identity is in a limbo…they became neither Indians nor White Canadians but a lost tribe with no culture, heritage, ancestry, economy, infra-structure, history, nothing, zero, nada.
John A MacDonald also engaged the Western Indian Tribes with starvation tactic in order to expand the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and to build the White Settlement Towns (Canada as well as United State and Israel are the Settler Nations where land is the key resource in Settle Colonies and Setters take over the land left vacant by the previous residents, Indians or Palestinian Arabs) … he ordered the Department of Indian Affairs official to withhold food rationings to Indians until they gather at the designated reserve areas.
The Indians were starving at the time because the loss of bison and they were entitled to get help from Ottawa according to 1876 treaty. And the food was held so long from the starving Indians, most of food supply was rotten and thrown away when the Indians gathered to receive the aid, resulting in decades of malnutrition, diseases, sickness especially of tuberculosis, resulting in thousands of deaths.
Newly arrived Native Indian kids at the Residential School were greeted by Catholic missionaries who used hunger, physical/sexual abuses, and torture as a tool to discipline the children.
The First Prime Minister of Canada went beyond the realm of the Indigenous People in regard to his racist policy of “Aryan Nation” supremacy… While debating the 1885 Electoral Franchise Act in the House of Commons, John A MacDonald proposed that “Chinamen” should not have the right to vote on the grounds that they were “foreigner.”
He declared: “The Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics,” and “the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful.” Once the CPR was complete, John A. imposed a “head tax” or fee on each Chinese head entering Canada to curb future immigration.
Above all, there is no dispute on the past Canadian Governments treating the Native Indians/ Chinamen as less human beings and subjecting them to eventual elimination from the European Settler Nation, Canada. Of course, John the Hangman did not use the train boxcars/send the Indian Kids to the gas chambers, but his policies on the aboriginal people were clearly an undisputable/transparent implementation of a genocidal schemata, no matter whether modern day Canadians are not ready to accept the historical reality by decorating a genocide with a civilized word as a “cultural” genocide. 
Here we could not neglect to find another element of co-conspirator, the religion of Christianity… mainly the Catholic Churches played a decisive role of administrator-in-charge in executing Government instructions of occupying the minds, piercing hearts, and remolding souls of the Residential School kids…aboriginal language, music, clothing, customs, heritages, and beliefs were banned on pain of hunger, floggings, tortures, and deaths.
By the time they have finished the school, the survived Kids have no eyes to weep, no tongues to scream, or no hearts to sense that they were neither a Native Indian nor a half-baked white man, but a lost tribe of industrial slaves .
Since culture is the collection of symbols and identity is a manifestation of culture, it is normal/automatic to lose your identity when you lose your own culture and become a half-baked other… and most of time, these Indian tribes end up later a versatile pariah class…getting drunk habitually/becoming drug-addicted and homeless/getting caught and serve times in a pen/drop dead in alleyways or get beaten up by white gangsters/ne’er-do-wells and burned to death.
The statistic shows that aboriginal women represent 4 per cent of all female Canadians, but one-third of the female prison population, and there were thousands of these women missing without any trace (presumed dead) and the Harper Government even did not bother to search/count/keep record their disappearances , because they are not a full Canadians but a subhuman not worth to count.
The Pope in the Vatican City put Canadian nun/monk’s foots in his mouth mumbling a simple sorrow/prayerful solidarity/tepid sympathy on the poor Indians …he seems to be pissed off and has got no more stamina left after so many cases of missionaries sexual escapes/moral depravity to endure the charges of torture on the Indian residential school kids strapped on the homemade electric chair…it was an obvious repetition of a la Spanish Inquisition per se.
And the Pope turned the blind on the poor Native Indians nothing worth to convert indigent/powerless drunkards. The Pope is no better/more accommodating the TRC recommendation in regard to the reconciliation and redresses the past criminal wrongdoings than the Harper Government that don’t give a damn about the TRC findings which is non-binding resolution…that is, chances are a tough crime-fighting/gung-ho Prime Minister Harper may copy and follow the path where John A MacDonald walked in 1876. He’d rather love to throw bombs on the heads of Arab sand-niggers wasting millions of taxpayers’ dollars than saving a pack of destitute/inebriated/ useless Indian tribes his forefathers committed to kill them all.
Dale Han is a Toronto-based free lance journalist and a regular contributor to www.4thmedia.org and www.peacemaking.kr/english He can be reached at pepesojourner@hotmail.com