A Blood Libel and a Public Lynching

 

The freshly-minted leader of the Canadian Conservative Party, Erin O’Toole, is suddenly in serious trouble. People are calling for his resignation. Unfortunately, he came dangerously close to semi-publicly telling the truth about Indian residential schools.

Of course, once found out, he quickly walked it back and denied everything. But in such cases, repentance is not enough. There can be no forgiveness or reconciliation. Ever. 

The now-exposed racist actually said that the schools were intended to educate the Indians.

Imagine that—schools intended to educate. Who could have imagined such a lie?

No, in Canada, on pain of losing your job or even imprisonment, one must believe an elaborate conspiracy theory: that the Indian schools were actually always and solely, if secretly, intended for genocide—the term used repeatedly and insistently by one panelist in reaction to O’Toole’s blasphemy.

An odd sort of genocide, of course, considering that there are far more Indians in Canada now than there have ever been. They are the fastest-growing segment of the Canadian population.

And the founding document O’Toole was referring to, written by Egerton Ryerson, explicitly states that the students in the proposed residential schools were to be taught reading, arithmetic, geometry, history, chemistry, writing, drawing, music, bookkeeping, religion, and morals. That does sound rather like an education.

The “genocide” is supposedly “cultural genocide.” Nobody dies in this sort of genocide; a seeming contradiction in terms. That is, the schools were supposedly an effort to destroy Indian culture. To support this claim, the old quote was wheeled out by a panelist, that they were intended by “some politician” to “kill the Indian in the man.” 

No Canadian politician ever said anything close to this. It is a misquotation instead of US General Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. What he actually said was “kill the Indian; save the man.” And in the speech where he said this, he pointed out that residential schools would not do this.

If the intent were ever to destroy Indian culture, fairly obviously, it would not have been the Indian bands themselves who demanded and partly funded them. The obvious way to do that, as Pratt pointed out, would not have been to set up separate schools for Indians; it would have been to integrate the Indians and have them attend the public schools. Rather, the residential schools were an attempt to retain a distinct Indian culture. It was taken for granted from the start that, having graduated, the students would remain on the reserves and live apart. That may have been a mistake; but it was the opposite to the common claim.

Modern radical leftists may be upset that the schools taught religion and morals. They may assert that this at least was an attempt to subvert Indian culture. Apparently they think Indian culture had no morals, and morals are a bad thing. This is both depraved and historically ignorant. Ryerson, in the founding document, specified that pupils attend the church of their own denomination, not that of the official denomination of each residential school. He could take it for granted, rightly, that Indians were Christian. Indeed, when the British took possession of Canada after the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, their first act in order to ensure peace with the Indians was to formally guarantee them the right to keep their Catholic priests. The first Protestant church in Ontario, in turn, was probably that built in Brantford by Mohawks emigrating from New York State. Without benefit, at the time, of clergy.

The current delusional attitude towards our history is profoundly prejudicial to Indians, and, at the same time, an extreme example of hate speech against Canadians of European extraction.

And the CBC, taxpayer-funded to provide information and sustain public discourse, is instead openly censoring and suppressing public discourse.