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Originally Posted by Cheese
The residential school system was based on an assumption that European civilization and Christian religions were superior to Aboriginal culture, which was seen as being savage and brutal.
Government officials also were insistent that children be discouraged—and often prohibited—from speaking their own languages. The missionaries who ran the schools played prominent roles in the church-led campaigns to ban Aboriginal spiritual practices such as the Potlatch and the Sun Dance (more properly called the “Thirst Dance”), and to end traditional Aboriginal marriage practices. Although, in most of their official pronouncements, government and church officials took the position that Aboriginal people could be civilized, it is clear that many believed that Aboriginal culture was inherently inferior.
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Of course they thought it was inferior. I hate to break the news to you, but until very recently in human history (as in the last 50-100 years), pretty much every culture thought it was superior to the other cultures it had contact with. And where they had the means, they imposed their culture on the weaker culture through economic dominance, assimilation, or force. This is not peculiar to European or Christian culture, but is true in every corner of globe. The Chinese did not consider the Koreans, the Uighurs, or Âu Việt to be their equals. The Aztecs brutally subjugated neighbours and served up their beating hearts to Huitzilopochtli. The Japanese term for foreigners is synonymous with barbarians.
It's important to know our history regarding natives and the residential school system. But we also need to understand the context.
When the system was first built, Canada had no social welfare system, no social safety net. If people proved unable to earn their own money for food and shelter, they went without. They wore rags. They starved. This was true of white Europeans as well as Natives.
Natives of the time had no skills suitable for employment. The buffalo hunt was over. Even the market for furs (which can only employ a limited number of people in the first place) collapsed. Natives did not know how to farm (which was how about 80 per cent of Canadians made a living), and efforts to teach them had failed. Most were illiterate, at a time when literacy was increasingly important to getting a job and managing your own affairs. It seemed pretty clear to those in authority at the time that leaving natives to be raised in isolated communities could lead only to more generations of abject poverty, illiteracy, and estrangement from wider society.
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Originally Posted by wingmaker
This is part of Canadian history. To not read this is to be a) ignorant or b) in denial of our history. To willingly be this way is to blatantly and knowingly absolve ourselves of what has happened in the making of Canada, to not understand our own past nor understand who we are as a result of that past or how we can move forward. Without reconciliation or reparation, we perpetuate what has been done for another generation. Under its simplest terms, citizenship requires only that you be a citizen through birth or through acceptance. But most concerned citizens, I would wager, would also stipulate that being a citizen also bares a responsibility to endeavour to, as much as we are possible, engage with the historical truths and political processes of this nation. So yes, beyond the most basic terms of citizenship, it is our responsibility as Canadians to educate ourselves about our own history.
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The residential school system did much harm (though nobody these days seems to mention the children who went through the system who became Native leaders, and credited the schools with teaching them how to read, write, and function in wider Canadian society). But it's naive and simplistic to look at history as a morality play with heroes and villains, victims and oppressors. The values we hold in Canada today have been shared by only a tiny fraction of the people who have walked the planet (and most of that fraction are ethnically European and born in the last 100 years). It's unlikely the forebearers of Canada's Natives felt any notions of guilt over the massacre and subjugation of their rivals and neighbours, some of whom they completely wiped out.
There's a point at which an obsession with the past grievances becomes an anchor that prevents you from moving forward. I've lived and worked in Native communities, and it's disheartening to see that the best and brightest end up as politicians and advocates, who apply their talents to extracting money from the government. There has never been a healthy and prosperous society based on a renter economy, where skills and labour are neglected in favour of extracting concessions and rent.
This country is full of people who have moved here from countries with the direst history. Places where bloody civil wars, ethnic strife, and brutal oppression are the norm. Many of them are from former colonies, where the colonizers weren't nearly as restrained as those in Canada. Read up on the history of the Philippines some time. We're not talking cultural genocide here, but actual massacre and violence on a massive scale. Not rounding up kids and taking them to schools where they're given new names, but rounding them up, shooting them, and throwing the carcasses into pits. Same with Latin America, where every country has natives (where they weren't outright exterminated), and where in many countries today to assert that you're a native and deserve autonomy will bring paramilitaries down on your village to put a bullet in your head. And yet here they are, moving to a new country, working at crappy jobs, getting education, and keeping their energies and minds focused on the future.
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Originally Posted by SeeGeeWhy
I can't believe we accept this as ok.
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Who believes it's okay? The question is what to do about it now.