The Real Genocide

 

In a recent article, unfortunately behind a paywall, Greg Piasetzki, himself legally considered Metis, writes for the Epoch Times that a federal government commission back in 1944, and again in 1948, wanted to close the Indian residential schools. “Wherever and whenever possible Indian children should be educated in association with other children.”

The federal government had never wanted the schools: they were expensive. They were, in the first place, required by treaty. The Indians wanted them. Since some Indian families were transient, and some loving in extremely remote locations, boarding was often necessary.

However, they soon realized they could not close the schools for an additional reason—because too many Indian children had nowhere else to go. The residential schools were in effect orphanages for kids whose parents were unable or unwilling to care for them. “A census taken by Indian Affairs in 1953 found that 43 percent of the 10,112 indigenous children in residential schools nationwide were listed as neglected or living in homes that were unfit because of parental problems.” For others, their parents could not feed them as well as the schools would. The Truth and Reconciliation report cites this as a consideration: if the schools did not feed the children better than at home, the parents would not send them.

The Epoch Times article also notes that there was no drive to force Indian families to send their children to a residential school. School attendance became compulsory for non-native children in Ontario in 1871. It became compulsory for Indian children only in 1920, and even then the law was rarely enforced. “About half of all students who attended between the 1880s and 1950s dropped out after Grade 1, and few students made it as far as Grade 5.” Obviously, they were not being compelled to attend, and if they or their families did not find conditions satisfactory, they left. Those who stayed were largely those who had no place else to go.

The Epoch Times traces the problems of the Indian family to alcoholism and fetal alcohol syndrome (FASD), which the recent Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report admits is still an epidemic on reserves. “Studies suggest FASD occurs among indigenous children on and off reserves at rates between 10 and 100 times greater than in the rest of Canada.” “Tragically, these problems follow them into adult life and are reflected in high rates of family violence (including spousal and sexual abuse), suicide, and addiction, and often repeat down through subsequent generations.”

Alcoholism is not the real problem, though. It is a symptom. This is due to a general collapse of morale, a shared depression due to culture shock. Charles Darwin recognized in the nineteenth century that whenever Europeans came into contact with a significantly more primitive culture, the primitive culture tends to collapse into a sense of pointlessness, very much like depression on an individual level. Men stopped working; women stopped looking after the children.

The cure, as everyone knows who has gone through culture shock, is to get out there and assimilate. Learn what your new surroundings have to offer. This is now being discouraged as “cultural genocide.” And the, better, ultimate cure is to get a new grounding in the eternal verities and the ultimate purpose of life. In other words, to get religion. And this option too is being systematically removed from the reserves and from modern Indian life, with churches actually being burned down.

In order to shut down the residential schools, officials turned to adoption for at-risk Indian children: the “Sixties scoop.” This is now condemned as another attempt at “cultural genocide.” Still today, “Nationwide, according to the 2021 Census, native children under 14 account for 53.8 percent of children in care, despite representing less than 8 percent of children that age in Canada.” They are simply now no longer adopted, but must remain in long-term care.

And we pretend to wonder why there are suicide pacts among young people on reserves. And why there are so many “missing and murdered (young) indigenous women.”

We have systematically prevented and then punished any efforts to help them.