Day: June 8, 2015

The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

I yield to no one in my fervour to make amends to the native people for violations of treaty rights and other mistreatment, but the phrase “cultural genocide,” as I wrote here last week in reference to the Chief Justice of Canada’s use of it in a speech given in honour of the Aga Khan, is deliberately provocative and sensational.

We might as well accuse Canada and the United States and all countries built on immigration (ultimately almost all countries) of cultural genocide, of the natives or the arrivals, though of course immigration is voluntary. All words bearing the suffix “cide” refer to physical extermination: suicide, homicide, genocide, regicide, etc.

The native people, or First Nations, were here first, but there were not more than a few hundred thousand of them in what is now Canada in the 17th century. They had a Stone Age culture that had not invented the wheel, and which graduated, however brusquely, to more sophisticated levels of civilization, but the culture was not exterminated.

Apart from a few mid-western farming tribes and Pacific and Great Lakes inhabitants of log dwellings, the First Nations did not have permanent buildings or agriculture, metal tools, or knitted fabrics.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

The first thing worth knowing, in understanding the specific nature of the crime Canada stands accused of, is how recent it all really was.

Keep in mind that, until 1960, no First Nations were permitted to vote in a Canadian election. In other words, they had a legal status not of citizens but much more like that of wildlife. They could not, for much of the 20th century, leave the confines of a reserve without permission from a government agent. Indigenous Canadians often could not run businesses, borrow money, own property, or, in the case of Inuit from the 1940s to the 1970s, even have a name.

And at the centre of all this, the practice of seizing aboriginal children permanently and usually unwillingly from their parents, placing them in state custody, and subjecting them to the forced labour and isolation of residential “schools” – the subject of this week’s monumental Truth and Reconciliation Commission report – reached its peak at the very end of the 1950s and continued in significant numbers through the 1970s (the last residential school didn’t close until 1996).

Almost a third of aboriginal Canadians – 150,000 people – were raised, without access to their families, in these institutions (which were by any normal definition not educational but penal).

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