The children’s graves near Kamloops belie the usual boasts about the founding of Canada

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/06/2021 (1292 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As we draw closer to Canada Day, the thrilling stories about the founding of this vast nation pale when compared with the devastating loss and suffering that Indigenous peoples endured so the rest of us could call Canada home.

And let’s face it, none of what was perpetrated on Canada’s Indigenous peoples and let’s call it what it was — intentional genocide — could have happened without thousands of willing participants.

There is no way that 215 children could have died and been buried at the Kamloops Residential School, for example, without dozens, perhaps hundreds of people knowing about it.

There is no way that between 1890 and 1978, when the so-called school closed down, that thousands of children could have been taken away from their families, confined and severely punished if they even spoke their own language among themselves, without Catholic priests, nuns, lay teachers, cooks, those who delivered supplies, and many others integral to an operation of that size, knowing about it.

Who besides the RCMP, for example, took the kids from their families?

Whatever the rationale for their involvement — superior race theory, British imperialism, economic progress, saving souls, earning money — it’s clear those beliefs weren’t just held by politicians, government bureaucrats, and church authorities but by all sorts of people who deeply believed in those grand ideas or simply took them for granted.

In William Daschuk’s “Clearing the Plains: Disease, Politics of Starvation, and the Loss of Aboriginal Life” it’s evident that Indigenous people in Western Canada were spared no mercy, even when they were dying by the thousands from smallpox and tuberculosis, or starving to death after the extermination of their main food source, the bison.

Instead of working to alleviate the suffering, the rest of the population pushed groups, such as the Cree, Siksika and Assiniboine, closer to extinction.

Note the callousness of the editor of the Saskatchewan Herald as he observed starving Cree on the streets of Battleford in 1881: “The natives of this land are fully up to the buzzards of the south. Few deceased animals escape their rapacious maws. A horse died a few nights ago on the street opposite to our office, and at early dawn we beheld a posse of native beauties cutting up the dead animal a la buffalo mode of past days, and conveying it to camp, where a grand gorge was being prepared.”

This was all happening between about 1870 and 1890 when Canada’s first Prime Minister, John A. Macdonald was determined to build a railway that would link east to west and thereby keep the northern part of the continent under the sway of the British Crown. The railway would bring immigrants from the British Isles and Europe, who would further stake that claim by taking up offers of free land.

To accomplish this, Indigenous peoples had to be subdued, so they were. Treaties were drawn up by which they were confined to small territories. Government authorities promised food and medicine in return but the paltry rations were used as a way to control the starving Indigenous population.

Women were particularly vulnerable to sexual abuse by the local officials, who controlled the flow of food: “the sheer number of dominion officials who contracted sexually transmitted diseases in the early 1880s is astonishing, a sign of the pervasive nature of such contact,” Daschuk writes.

A few missionaries and government bureaucrats tried to raise the alarm about the horrendous conditions but they were usually ignored: true voices in the wilderness.

The residential schools were intended to finish the job: to make sure surviving children would not be a threat to the settler population. But many of those settlers had to have known what was happening in those foreboding brick buildings.

Later generations of settlers and immigrants would claim they didn’t have responsibility for earlier government policies, or the racist behaviour of those who came before them.

But surely the least we can do is acknowledge that many of our founding myths are often colourful and comforting propaganda written by the victors. When in reality, Canada was birthed with the blood and tears of Indigenous peoples.

They paid the price. The rest of us reap the benefits whether our families arrived 200 years ago or last month.

Oh Canada.

Gillian Steward is a Calgary-based writer and freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @GillianSteward