Go read this. Please. Now is good.

[commodorified]

If you were taken aback on Tuesday, or even offended, when the long-awaited Final Report on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada accused your country of “cultural genocide,” step back for a moment and try this exercise:

Close your eyes and imagine you are at home with your two children, a boy aged six and a girl aged eight. There’s a knock at the door. It’s a moment you’ve dreaded for weeks. You answer it and there is a man from the government and an RCMP officer who order you to turn your children over to them immediately
[...]
An argument over what to call a wrong that was committed, and how to classify it, is a distraction and a dead end. Focus instead on the stories of the victims. Focus on the facts. Because the facts of what happened to native Canadians in the residential school system, and as a result of the attitudes that led to its creation, are documented in excruciating detail in the report. They speak for themselves.

This country needs to be shaken out of its indifference. It needs to acknowledge a dark history that Canada authored. Canadians must consider how to remedy the harm that we – Canadians – caused.

Comments

[sara]

I saw some very beautiful footage this week of the round dancing done in the lobby while the...pardon me if I get the title wrong, but the minister for aboriginal affairs, while he was speaking. And I thought, if people can survive a great challenge like residential schools and then sing their protest that is tremendous and they are very strong people and they ought to be heard when they talk about how difficult things have been for themselves and their families.

[twistedchick]

Yes. Agreed. In the fullest possible meaning of agreed.

[muccamukk]

I'm honestly baffled as to how anyone is surprised by any of this. The commission wasn't working in secret. Anyone could go to the hearings. While the final numbers may be appalling, they're hardly a shock, and this is not the first time that an official report has used the word genocide, cultural or otherwise.

Like, I only pay casual attention to First Nations rights issues, and I've known all of this since I was ten.

[graydon]

A ... serious and commensurate response, let's call it that, almost has to include an enforcement mechanism that reliably and robustly supports treaty rights (which are federal) over resource extraction (which is provincial).

That's worth doing even in a selfish sense -- going to be required for dealing with climate change -- but it also absolutely and inescapably opens the whole constitutional can of worms.

It also, in those terms, doesn't have anything like enough support; way too much of the economy sits directly on resource extraction.

So there's very much a conspiracy of silence about the whole subject, because it might start to create political support for that serious and commensurate response.

[muccamukk]

I get that. I mean, no one wants to publicly admit all this because the expense is pretty staggering, but at the same time... nothing in this report was a surprise, and yet many people seem surprised, which I find surprising.

Though a certain government started its run in power by cancelling a treaty that it took the previous government ten years to settle on. So...

I should be less surprised.

[graydon]

Yeah. The Canadian political centre is not actively against native extermination and the Canadian political right is actively for it. They can't quite say that out loud, but they want to.

That's a difficult thing to change; not impossible, but very difficult, so it leads to a lot of silence.

[adrian_turtle]

It's not just the economic expense of reparations and treaty enforcement, which is huge. There's also the emotional cost of acknowledging you're not "the good guys." That tends to make people put their fingers in their ears and not listen.