One little two little three thousand little dead Indians.
And very little done for them when they were alive.
The recent noise about the discovery of children’s bones on the grounds of aboriginal residential schools in Canada has set my typing fingers a’twitching. I have already blogged something about the pulling down of Ryerson’s statue. Now I will address the actual crimes behind all this.
The question to ask is, why have they suddenly found these bones now? I suppose the availability of some new technologies is part of it. But archeologists have had ways of locating disturbed ground for a long time.
We have known for a long time that the graves were there. People have been standing in front of government buildings screeching “where are our children buried?” for a long time. In 1989 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation made a good TV drama, by its standards, about a residential school in the 1930’s; “Where the Spirit Lives”.
Some good books and documentary films have been made on this subject over the years. The best I have seen was “Unrepentant” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4451330/, made in 2006. What was striking about it is that it was not just about surface effects; it went into why all this was done and most significantly, how power works in Canada and what happens when you seriously inconvenience it.
Probably the biggest reason the graves are now being found is that it no longer matters to keep these secrets. Those culpable are safely in their own marble head stoned graves. Maybe there are some statues and headstones to be knocked over by the usual kinds of attention seekers.
I have little patience for theatrics over crimes and atrocities which are long ago done and irreversible. This especially when the victimization has never ended, just changed its form and methods. The object is still to suppress the concept of aboriginal land title and the heirs to it.
This has been going on since the 1867 confederation of Canada, if not before. It really got going when Mother Britain handed jurisdiction over her aboriginal subjects to the new dominion government. This removed the protections said aboriginals had enjoyed.
To some extent, the “settlers” of those times had a point. No people are going to be allowed indefinitely to sit on resources which other people could use much more efficiently. Despite how they are usually portrayed, there were in many aboriginal nations of the time a kind of aristocracy whose power rested on its ability to allocate resources to their clansmen.
The chiefs did not want to end the old tribal systems. They demanded to continue to control vast territories and the resources within them. This is why the operators of the residential schools and reservations took such special pains to eliminate these old ruling families.
The ruling families among the white settlers had been through a long fight to gain self rule for themselves and eliminate the British colonial system which had tried to set up its own landed aristocracy in Canada. They had little patience with the aboriginals, who they saw as another privileged group set up by the land grant system to buttress imperial control. The new Canadian government had justification for dismantling the previous system but not for the vicious way it went about it.
Canada has long been run by the churches, secret orders, and business corporations with a contempt for democracy and justice. They have power to do things outside nominal legal and political processes because it owns the courts and the legislatures. If it wants to do something it does it and people can protest all they want; it is largely beyond public control.
The campaign of the Canadian elite against aboriginal people has been known, exposed and protested from confederation up until now. It just keeps rolling on. There are periodic scandals about it which the Canadian deep state has mostly ignored.
Sir John A. MacDonald’s policies regarding the “final solution to our Indian problem” were fiercely attacked and caricatured at the time. In the 1920s Doctor Bryce demonstrated that the residential schools were actually designed to propagate disease among their inmates. This created a wave of public concern but the governments of the time just told him to shut up and go away, and it all blew over.
During the 1930s the Nazis sent delegations to Canada to admire and study our system of reserves and residential schools. They put this knowledge to use in their subsequent activities. Later, the South African Nationalists were advised by exiled Nazis on how to set up their apartheid system.
The Israelis improved on this to control their Palestinian population. Gaza is now the worlds biggest reservation. I would ask if many of the dramatists for aboriginal rights even know where Gaza is, except that it too has become a cause of the moment.
The system of residential schools only began to close down when they became too inconvenient; especially too expensive to operate. The system of confining people on reservations also finally became unfeasible. However, the purpose of the Canadian oligarchy remains constant, to suppress aboriginals and their culture as much as possible without being too obvious about it.
These days, instead of requiring passports to leave “The Rez”, they are trying to push people out of them by making them unliveable. The “Indigenous Affairs” bureaucracy still does all it can to frustrate indigenous self government. The streets of major Canadian cities are a more efficient means of either killing off inconvenient Indians or assimilating those who can be.
The situation for Canadian aboriginals/indigenous is not universally dismal. Some groups, tribes, bands have successfully gained control of their situations and can negotiate their way into the modern world. Much depends on having a reasonably good land base and some capable leaders.
However, on many reservations conditions are as bad as some of the world’s poorest countries. People are puzzled at the inability of the Canadian government to fix the water supply crisis on reserves, asking why this goes on for decades. The actual problem is that the reserves were often deliberately located in uninhabitable places, where there is no source of good water.
Our beloved Prime Minister will stand straight faced before the cameras and express surprise and horror that such things as residential schools could have gone on in dear old Canada. This while reserves remain uninhabitable, indigenous people practicing their legal rights are bullied by police and white goons with connivance of government, and the Government of Canada still flatly refuses to negotiate a reasonable “solution to the Indian problem” with the indigenous.
It would not be hard to resolve these issues given good faith on the part of the Canadian government. The flat refusal to consider the idea of aboriginal title and unextinguished sovereignty is a problem of the Canadian oligarchy. Ordinary Canadians, except the usual racist idiots, have no problem with these ideas.
Aboriginal/Indigenous people in Canada would like some sort of relationship with Canada that lets them live in the modern world without giving up their identity and rights. They need justice, which is not retribution because the children are long dead and so are their murderers. Part of it is to make some restitution to families who were effected.
The bigger part of it is to open the window wider to the way aboriginal people have been treated by Canada and to the need for a sane and reasonable settlement with them. However, the government merely engages in theatrics, allocating money for skeleton hunts and even making demands on the Pope to issue apologies for the Catholic run schools. This gives no assurance that we will see any change by government in its underlying policy or its willingness to deal with the real problem.
So we see that the condition of indigenous people in Canada is another problem which will have no solution until there is a thorough change in the social order in Canada. The study of how this system developed and was run can help build consciousness of the need for such a change.
However, there is one other important point to be made here. Being righteously indignant about atrocities committed long ago is cheap. Taking on perpetrators of atrocities going on it the present can be costly.
We would not want to see inordinate time and resources devoted to the big bone hunt in Canada, rather than in preventing children from becoming bones in places like Gaza, Yemen, and Central African Republic. Extra points to anyone who knowns anything about the latter. Being too interested in these can get your Twitter account frozen. Or worse.