Canada’s Apology To The Indian People
evawhite on June 17th, 2008
This article I read in the Washington Post about the apology tendered by the Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper to its indigenous people shocked me. The reason it shocked me is because I did not know that Canada, a country I perceived to a benign, egalitarian and welcoming democracy has actually been guilty of a kind of abuse of human rights that Tibet is accusing China of doing today!
The Prime Minister tendered an apology to tens of thousands of native Canadians, mainly of the Inuit and Métis communities who as children were torn from their families and sent to boarding schools, where many were abused as part of official government policy to “kill the Indian in the child.” This almost barbaric attempt to ‘assimilate’ or ‘integrate’ the aboriginal people of North America into the ‘main stream’ (read European, Caucasian way of life) I found to be most repugnant.
The aim of the government in the early part of the 20th century was, to quote Duncan Campbell Scott, Canada’s deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs “I want to get rid of the Indian problem. . . . Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic.” Scott is said to have coined the phrase “kill the Indian in the child”.
We are now living in more enlightened times when European Imperialistic policies and colonization of the past have no place. Earlier, might was right and there were no agencies in the world to redress the balance in favor of invaded and colonized peoples. In the last 500 years Europeans conquered and colonized Africa, Asia, America and Australia, often wiping out or at any rate perilously marginalizing ethnic cultures and endangering their way of life.
The tide has turned in the other direction today there is an attempt to preserve tribal customs and social structures, to preserve rather than wipe out aboriginal cultures and native communities. Tribal cultures of Africa are sought to be preserved, there are certain aboriginal tribes on the Andaman and Nicobar islands of India whose islands people are not even allowed to set foot on lest they disturb their fragile social structure and way of life.
For, if centuries old cultures and ethnicities are permitted to be wiped out, they are lost for ever and we as citizens of the world are much the poorer for it. Your thoughts?
I remember going to Dharamshala and Mcleodganj some years ago (the Namgyal monastery, where the Dalai Lama is based, is there). At the time, China had just won the contract to host the Olympics and even then the Tibetians were circulating flyers telling everyone to boycott those Olympics and other Chinese products etc. I remember thinking at the time, that this is not much of a protest or struggle, ensconced safely in India hundreds of kilometers from their actual homeland. Ever since India offered the Tibetians and their spiritual leader the Dalai Lama a safe haven in Dharamshala, Tibetians moved to India in their thousands and settled here, continuing to wage their agitation against Chinese oppression from afar. I had thought to myself they are living a comfortable enough life here in India, not really putting them in the line of fire, so do they really deserve support?
The Tibetians have been suppressed and denied basic rights such as religious freedom under Chinese occupation and these factors are only now coming to the fore with the Tibetian call to the world to boycott the Olympics and to support their struggle against Chinese oppression. Tibetians who have been able to escape continue to live in India or elsewhere, unable to return to their homeland because of this. In this article the Dalai Lama appealed to the world community to “please help” resolve the crisis in his homeland. He was so disturbed by some of the protesters turning violent that threatened to resign as the religious and spiritual head of the Tibetian people.
