Helpful hint: Everything Paul Bunner wrote about Residential Schools is 100% correct.
What Bunner wrote:
Cardinal’s narrative contained all the elements that inform debates over Aboriginal policy today except the one that is the most powerful driver of guilt, grievance, power and money: the “holocaust” that was allegedly perpetrated against Aboriginal children through the Indian Residential Schools system.
It is odd that he overlooked it. In 1951, at age 6, Cardinal entered the Joussard Catholic residential school in Northern Alberta. He spent 10 years there before moving to a regular Catholic high school in Edmonton, where he graduated as class president. The Unjust Society devoted a chapter titled “The Little Red Schoolhouse” to excoriating residential schools for imposing Christian and European values on Aboriginal children. Cardinal even used the term “cultural genocide,” in what may have been its first coinage. However, he was strangely silent on the litany of horrors we now associate with the schools, including ghastly physical and sexual abuse, mass graves of unnamed children, tyrannical teachers and diabolical nutritional experiments. The worst abuse Cardinal recounted was “a misfit, has-been or never-was” teacher in Grade 8 who was so incompetent “I found myself taking over the class.”
he best that can be said of Harper’s apology is that it was a strategic attempt to kill the story and move on to a better relationship between Natives and non-Natives. Unfortunately, it only appears to have deepened the conviction that Church and State conspired not only to “kill the Indian in the child” but also to physically exterminate the whole race. The Aboriginal grievance and entitlement narrative continues to gather momentum, as evidenced by last year’s prolific Idle No More protests. And the $60-million Truth and Reconciliation Commission, far from working toward its stated objective of getting the whole story and then getting over it, appears wholly dedicated to the permanent entrenchment of a one-dimensional caricature of the history of residential schools.
The dangers in this ought to be obvious and can hardly be overstated. Already, vast swathes of the public education system are uncritically regurgitating the genocide story as if it were fact, thereby adding to the legions of Canadian voters who will be suckers for future Phil Fontaines and Harold Cardinals and their never-ending demands for more tax dollars and greater political autonomy. It will slow any progress on integration, democratic reform and financial transparency on reserves and do nothing to reduce the terrible social pathologies afflicting Indians on and off the reserves. Worse, if future generations of young Aboriginal people are indoctrinated in the belief that Canada wilfully tried to annihilate their ancestors, some of them, at least, will be ripe recruits for radical segregationist movements, perhaps even violent insurgencies as imagined in Douglas Bland’s frighteningly plausible 2010 novel Uprising, about Aboriginal terrorism in near-future Canada.
Context is also needed to refute the “intergenerational legacy” of residential schools. The idea that victimization of one generation automatically passes to their descendants defies human experience. If it were true, the survivors and descendants of the Nazi Holocaust would be humanity’s basket cases instead of a people who have prospered like few others. In the case of residential school students and their descendants, stories of the latter plundering the former suggest that the compensation payouts themselves may be a source of corrosive intergenerational strife.
Finally, we all need to acknowledge that what Prime Minister Harper said in a 2006 speech in London, England, about the history of Aboriginal relations in Canada was far truer than most of what he said in his 2008 apology. Invoking the colonial era, when Europeans of various stripes relentlessly butchered and oppressed aboriginal people elsewhere in the Americas, Africa and Asia, Harper noted, “[I]n the Canadian context, the actions of the British Empire were largely benign and occasionally brilliant ….The treaties negotiated with the Aboriginal inhabitants of our country, while far from perfect, were some of the fairest and most generous of the period.”
This was absolutely and unequivocally true. The British treated Natives in this country more benevolently than they did any other indigenous peoples within their empire. Canada inherited that legacy and maintained it, even as our neighbours south of the border continued to lynch blacks and slaughter Indians. The bogus genocide story of the Canadian Aboriginal residential schools system is an insult to all of us, Native and non-Native, dead or alive, who are justifiably proud of the peaceful, tolerant, pluralistic history and values of our great country. We should fight like hell to defend it from those who would corrupt it.
