Horrors of colonialism
After the horrific discovery of 215 unmarked mass graves of Indigenous schoolchildren in Ontario, Canada, in May, the First Nations people have been left struggling to come to terms with the discovery of another 715 unmarked graves. The discovery has again put the spotlight on Canada’s ugly colonial past, where European countries operated under the white man’s burden of ‘educating’ and assimilating ‘uncultured natives’. This was legally done following the Indian Act, which controlled every aspect of Indigenous life, and included residential schools for Indigenous children from the 1870s to 1990s. According to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, 150,000 Indigenous children were forcefully moved here, were rampantly abused, and forced to give up on their identity through force-feeding of non-Indigenous foods, forced worship, and denying them the right to uphold sacred rituals that were connected to their land — much like Denmark’s treatment of Greenland’s Inuit children.
The discovery also points to the Trudeau government’s unwillingness to help the First Nations heal from the inter-generation trauma. Despite being the democratic world’s sweetheart by issuing overly-simplistic and apparently apologetic statements, Trudeau has done little to make amends. His government continues to appeal against the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling whereby the Canadian state is liable to pay $40,000 each in compensation to 50,000 Indigenous children for being unnecessarily taken to residential schools. It is also fighting the Jordan Principle’s applicability which states that if governments disagree about who’s responsible for providing services to First Nations children, they must help a child in need first. And while he has asked the Pope to apologise on behalf of the Roman Catholic Church, he must also question the policies his own father tried to implement while in government, which would have taken away the special rights to First Nations people in the name of assimilation, rather than hypothetically questioning how Canada got to this point.
Published in The Express Tribune, June 28th, 2021.
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