Indigenous Insecurity

It is unspeakably sad and tragic that Canada's aboriginal peoples suffered historically in their own country by a succeeding wave of first settlers, their political representatives, and colonialist sentiments that hardly regarded their human rights when their traditional lands were encouraged to be signed away in the faith that justice and fairness would prevail, because the British Crown promised it.

It is no less sad and tragic that time has not made their situation any more palatable.

Canada's million-strong aboriginal peoples still suffer discrimination, lack of opportunity, an unwillingness on the part of authorities to finally settle their legitimate grievances dating back to the agreements that have never been finalized giving them full authority over their own lands. The residential schools that sought to 'civilize' young children to appreciate the white man's way of life created further divisions and anguish.

Not that there was malice behind the plan; rather it was an attempt to teach young aboriginals life skills in the new world it was thought they would be entering through assimilation. Skills that were absent in their own settlements where traditional lifestyles were then far more common than they are now.

A hundred years of residential schools created a demographic of children who did become skilled in areas that would benefit them in later years.

But it also created a wider group of adults who recall those years with bitterness because of the enforced separation from their families and their clans. And those were perhaps not those among the population who suffered the abuse of neglect, the debasement of their own culture, sexual abuse and violence.

It was long the social culture of the British Isles that wealthy families would send their children to boarding schools. And in those schools the scions of great wealth would learn formally social skills and academic performance that would prepare them to take the reigns of the family fortune and social standing, representing the British elite.

Many of those schoolchildren suffered the abuse of loneliness and neglect, physical violence, and sexual abuse, and many lives were traumatized by those encounters; they have been well written about. Perhaps aboriginal children were not as flexible in their ability to spring back while taking advantage of their schooling; their pain may have exceeded that suffered by British children.

The British could blame their very own social structure for all the ills that traditionally were imposed upon them. The children of First Nations peoples could look with aggravated scorn and blame on the values of an entirely different culture and society that were imposed upon them, values that they preferred in the final analysis to reject and embrace their own.

To learn now that out of the 150,000 aboriginal children that filtered through the Indian residential schools from 1910 to the 1970s with all the tribulations that they suffered, along with the advances that were represented to some, that an estimated 3,000 children were documented to have died while in the care and custody of the agencies, religious and governmental that operated those schools, adds to the tragedy.

But those deaths must also be taken in proportion to what they represent. Aboriginals were especially vulnerable to diseases that everyone suffered from; where white people often recovered, aboriginals succumbed; the impact on them was far more lethal; their exposure was new and morbid. Tuberculosis was a killing disease, partly due to ignorance over spread and treatment.

Some children died, incredibly, of malnutrition, others through accidents, and yet others as a result of fires burning through schools killing both students and staff. Exposure to the environment and drowning have been listed as other causes of death. During that time frame it is highly likely that children from white backgrounds suffered at least like fates through misadventure.

While history records tragedies of many dimensions, all regrettable, there is no way of altering what happened. We live in the present, while deploring incidents of the past that shed no enlightenment on what we truly represent. Most Canadians would far prefer the country's first and original inhabitants to find themselves comfort and opportunity equal to that of any other Canadians.