Canadians are now being forced to face their own Indigenous reckoning
SOME sections of the Canadian press have been calling it the country’s “genocide moment”.
The latest reports that an indigenous nation in Canada has found 751 unmarked graves at the site of a former residential school in Saskatchewan comes in the wake of a previous find a few weeks ago when the remains of 215 children were found at a similar residential school in British Columbia.
It was all done supposedly in the name of solving Canada’s “Indian problem”.
In all, some 130 compulsory boarding schools funded by the Canadian government and run by religious authorities were established during the 19th and 20th centuries, with some still open as recently as 1997. But members of First Nations Indigenous people say the discovery of the unmarked graves are evidence of what generations from within their communities have been saying for years about atrocities that were committed but ignored.
This despite a 2015 Truth and Reconciliation report that detailed how the schools were less about education and more about separating Indigenous children from their families in order to weaken cultural ties and indoctrinate them in what Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A Macdonald, called “the habits and modes of thought of white men”.
This is a story that has shocked Canada and given rise to an announcement by the federal government in neighbouring United States that it will now investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to “uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences” of the institutions, which across the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.
The US move is a welcome development and a call to action that should be heard across the world wherever the lives of Indigenous peoples are under threat and at risk of persecution.
To take but one example, in Brazil, Indigenous chiefs and human rights organisations have long accused Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro of enabling killings through state policies that they say encourage the destruction of the Amazon for profit while failing to protect Indigenous people’s rights.
“Bolsonaro has been campaigning against Indigenous people and their rights since the first day he took office,” observed Marcio Astrini, head of the environmental protection organisation Climate Observatory in a recent interview.
But Brazil is far from the only country where the rights of Indigenous peoples are still being ignored, supressed, and abused.
Canada is now being forced to face its own Indigenous reckoning. It’s long overdue for many other countries to do the same.