Systemic racism exists in Canada a lot more than Canadians would ever want to admit and its embedded in our system. We have a whole thread discussing it last year. Part of that systemic racism exists from the outright refusal to teach our children about the atrocities that occurred in Canada that we choose to hide to keep our self-righteous image.
On the native residential school issue, I never even heard of them until maybe about 10 years ago in passing? And it's not like if I am uninformed, can't know of something if you never heard it existed and it was not taught to you. Canada kept a lid on it for decades.
I'm not sure on how history is taught nowadays, but history in school deliberately avoided speaking of anything which would put Canada in a bad light. Luckily I did have some great high school teachers who took it upon themselves to show some, like my teacher who showed a concentration camp video in an English class, and a geography teacher who showed us the Louis Riel movie.
It's great that I had some teachers who took their opportunity to teach parts of history that wants to be left buried by Canadian school curriculum. But I still never heard of the residential schools there. Heck both world wars and the Korean War were completely omitted as well, the railroad was talked about but not the details on how it was built by mostly chinese labourers (who were pretty much slaves).
The fact that Ethan Bear had to make a statement due to vile racists shows we are still far from anywhere close to equality and making amends.
One minute a person comments about how horrifying a mass grave is, the next minute they shout racist insults at a hockey player for making a bad play.
We as a collective hid the residential school system and dismissed it since we were not the ones impacted, everything about it needs to be revealed, so that we can truly make amends and treat it for what it was.
It's time to teach people, and to learn from our past, otherwise we are doomed to continue to repeat it.
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