White Canadians often speak of the legacy of White supremacy in America with such self-righteousness, you’d never know they treated Native Canadians the way White Americans treated Native Americans.
Here, for example, is an excerpt from “Delusions on Matters of Race Are Coming Home to Roost in Canada,” October 3, 2006, in which I cited their hypocrisy in this context.
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One could be forgiven the impression that Canada enjoys complete racial harmony – unblemished by the legacy of slavery that still haunts America, or by the challenges of racial assimilation that are now coming home to roost all over Europe.
The reality, of course, is that Canadians have simply managed to quarantine their racial problems more effectively than Americans or Europeans. Because, from the time America’s founding fathers codified racism in their constitution, Canadians have been living with their own racial shame…
Canada’s dealings with native peoples throughout its history have been just as violent and exploitative as America’s.
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To be fair, the Canada belatedly apologized in 2008 for the genocidal treatment of Aborigines there. Never mind that it was merely following the precedent Australia set a few months earlier with a belated apology for the genocidal treatment of Aborigines there.
In any event, I duly commended Canada for doing so in “Canada Apologizes for Religious and Cultural Genocide against Native Indians,” June 13, 2008, complete with the following:
Canada is putting its money where its mouth is; i.e., by setting up a C$2bn ($1.9bn) fund to compensate surviving former schoolchildren.
It has convened a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) to fully address the racial and cultural prejudices that not only led to the establishment of these schools but also kept them functioning well into the late 20th Century.
Well, I now have cause to commend Canada’s TRC for producing a report so confessional, it makes Catholic confessionals seem like a hedonistic ritual:
Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission released a landmark report on Tuesday that extensively details accounts of aboriginal children undergoing forced assimilation and physical and sexual abuse in state-funded, church-run boarding schools.
After conducting six years of research and over 6,000 survivor interviews, the commission’s report found that what happened at the schools, and the broader aboriginal policy that they were a part of, can best be described as ‘cultural genocide.’
(Huffington Post, June 4, 2015)
The TRC made numerous recommendations to help Canada redress these “past wrongs,” including:
… new and revised legislation for education, child welfare and aboriginal languages and the implementation of the UN’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.
(CBC News, June 3, 2015)
At a ceremony on Wednesday, marking the end of the TRC, Governor General David Johnston proclaimed that education is “the only way forward.” But, in light of this report, Canada would do well to add many billions more to that compensation fund.
What price genocide…? Surely a lot more than C$2bn!
NOTE: Only racism, colonialism, and imperialism explain why Australia’s original people were and still are branded “(ab)original” – as in (ab)normal. Surely political correctness, which so many white intellectuals champion, demands correction of this manifest distortion of history. Specifically, we should call the whites who colonized Australia, aborigines, and the “originals” they met there, natives.
Related Articles:
Delusions on matters of race…
Australia apologizes to Aborigines
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