JOSE ... José ... Cultural Genocide! "Or
Canada" Committed an accustomed Genocide?
The Latin American community must always be alert, and pay close attention to the noon news, because its newsreel is based on news collected from newspapers and local television channels. Information sources such as CP24, CBC, Toronto Sun, Metro News, etc. are means of communication accomplices of the genocide perpetrated in the first nations, and crimes against humanity that is committed every day in the Canadian civilian population.
https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/2015/06/10/cultural-genocide-no-canada-committed-regular-genocide.html
‘Cultural genocide’? No, Canada committed regular
genocide
The word “cultural” seems to suggest
that the residential school system was designed to destroy cultures but not
people, a fact far from reality.
By Jesse Staniforth
Perhaps the most controversial issue
to follow the conclusion of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) has
been the affirmation that the government of Canada had committed “cultural genocide” against Indigenous people
through the Indian Residential Schools (IRS) system.
The word “cultural” seems to suggest
that the IRS system was designed to destroy cultures but not people, a fact far
from the reality of Residential Schools. “Cultural” is a civilizing adjective:
it says that our policies were not truly evil, just deeply misguided.
Already this strangely diplomatic
term has been a flashpoint among people unwilling to admit that our country
committed any kind of genocide, even one eased by a reductive adjective. Our
history must make these critics uneasy. The IRS system, though its mandate did
not include deliberately killing members of Canada’s Indigenous populations,
was active in the following crimes, each of which constitutes genocide under
the UN’s convention on Genocide (1948)
:
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental
harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the
group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in
whole or in part; and
(e) Forcibly transferring children
of the group to another group.
Canada did not pack Indigenous
people onto train cars and send them to be gassed, or march them into fields
and execute them with machine-gun fire. However, our country committed not
“cultural” genocide, but just regular genocide.
We forcibly took children from
families — sometimes at gunpoint — and flew them to remote locations they could
not escape — sometimes in tiny handcuffs — where they were submitted to a
program of forced labour and “education” designed to destroy their cultures and
civilizations. This desire to destroy cultures seems to be the reasoning for
various public figures’ use of the adjective “cultural” before genocide. The
other reason, I presume, is that some cling tightly — and childishly — to the
idea that Canada has always been on the side of goodness and justice, and they
find it very hard to accept, admit, and announce that we are a country that
committed a program of genocide that lasted for many decades.
Jose:
Thousands of Latin American families have been separated and destroyed under
the simple pretext of domestic violence.
Traitors are more dangerous than
enemies. – Velupillai Prabhakaran
Yet Residential Schools were predicated on the notion that Indigenous
children were less human than other children, so they were worked like animals
in the slave labour many schools mandated. For the same assumption of their
lesser humanity, children in the IRS system were often deliberately
malnourished and kept in cramped, filthy quarters. When they subsequently fell
sick as a result of this racially motivated neglect and mistreatment, they were
not provided adequate medical treatment and died by the thousands.
The Canadian government was happy to leave these children
to die because they were Indigenous. In the early part of the century we
stopped keeping track of how many children died: the commission concluded this
was because it made us look bad as a country. We did not change any of the
conditions — we just changed the habit of keeping track of the children our
system killed. And when Indigenous children died, we often did not consider
them human enough to inform their families, to record their genders or their
ages or the causes of their deaths, or to mark their graves.
Which part of this sounds civilized enough that it
deserves to be mitigated by the adjective “cultural”? I’m not talking about the
sexual violence. That was closely connected but it wasn’t part of our state
policy. The rest was, and it constituted a policy of genocide.
As a Canadian journalist working in Indigenous media, I
have faced the fact that the history of this country is difficult and tragic.
My great-grandfather was decorated for valour at Vimy Ridge at the same time as
Aboriginal children were being taken at gunpoint to have their culture beaten
and starved out of them. National histories are too big and complex to love
simply.
I’m not so attached to my country to contort myself
into defending our history of genocide — and I’d like to ask those who are: how
would admitting that our country was guilty of this crime against humanity
change your relation to this nation, to yourself, and to Indigenous people?
As of the closing of the TRC, the facts of the Canadian
genocide of Indigenous peoples are now a part of the official record of this
country’s history, both for those who wish to face it, and those who wish to
pretend it isn’t there. These facts stand and will not change, because they are
in the past. In the present day, it is only Canadians who can change — and will
have to change — in order to acknowledge the disgraceful but fixed facts of our
history.
Jesse Staniforth is a Montreal-based
freelance journalist and a regular contributor to the Nation magazine, serving
the Cree Nation of Eeyou Istchee and the communities around James Bay.
