Cultural genocide 6-13-2015

13, June  2015           Cultural genocide

On June 2, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its report on church-run residential schools.  For over a century this blatantly racist government sanctioned program engaged in snatching native children from their families and robbing them of their cultural heritage under the guise of providing them an education.

In 120 years, more than 150,000 Aboriginal children were dragged, kicking and screaming into the waiting arms of their ‘Christian’ oppressors. What followed was enormous physical, emotional and sexual abuse; mortality rates at some schools reached a staggering 50%. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission was the painstaking effort of a long and arduous class-action law suit and not the result of guilt-ridden action by the Canadian government.

It is doubtful if the Commission’s 94 recommendations will ever see the light of day. It will probably suffer the same fate of an earlier report published in 1907 by Dr. Peter Bryce, chief medical officer for Indian Affairs in Canada in which he called the health conditions at residential schools “a national crime.”