Canada has lost its halo: we must confront our Indigenous genocide | Tara Sutton

IIt is not often that Canadians have to apologize for their country. I have traveled the world reporting on conflict and human rights and am always greeted positively when I say I am Canadian. “It’s a beautiful country,” I am told. “Your country cares about its citizens.” In Canada, people make nice noises when I retell the tragic story I was working on. “We are so lucky to live in Canada,” they say.

Canadians like the idea of ​​a “good” country full of “good” people. There is even a name for it: “the angel complex”. Look at all the immigrants and refugees we welcome here, the doctrine is – we are not like these American racists or these European xenophobes. Canada sees itself as proudly multicultural, tolerant, peace-loving and polite. A beacon for the world.

Except for the 5% of the population who came here first. For the indigenous peoples of this land, the existence of the land is the cause of centuries of suffering, so severe that human rights courts label it genocide.

Children detained at the Kamloops Indian Residential School in Kamloops, British Columbia in 1931, where unmarked graves were found containing the remains of 215 children whose deaths have not been documented. Photo: National Center for Truth and Reconciliation / EPA

It is dangerous to believe your own hype, to be convinced that you are the “good guys”. Since 1980, between 2,000 and 4,000 indigenous women have been missing in Canada – enforced disappearances that were rarely taken seriously by the police. The final report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls came to the “inevitable conclusion” that Canada, from its pre-colonial past to the present day, aimed to “destroy indigenous peoples”.

The 2019 report explained how Canada’s policies qualify as genocide. What followed the publication was not a nationwide confession or a day of remembrance, but a ramblings in the gossiping class about what genocide actually was: Rwanda, Auschwitz – those were genocides! There was also talk of how damaging the term genocide would be to Canada’s international standing. We are mostly good, why should our actions of the past 200 years get in our way?

In 2015, four years before this missing women report, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) completed its work. This was a mammoth venture, with more than 6,500 boarding system survivors witnessing – compulsory boarding schools that the Canadian government paid Christian churches to run. Indigenous children were forced to take part. They were malnourished, often sexually and physically abused, and used as guinea pigs for medical experiments. After years of painstaking investigation, the commission issued 94 calls for action to the Canadian government. Until a few weeks ago, the government had only completed 10 of them.

Canada’s dirty secret was revealed to the world when the remains of 215 missing Indigenous children were found in unmarked graves on dormitory grounds near Kamloops, British Columbia last month. Thousands of indigenous children went missing for nearly two centuries: why did it take so long to be found? Everyone was someone’s child, stolen from their parents, brutalized, neglected, and buried in an unmarked grave. Parents and family members of these children have said for years that there are burial sites around the school. It was taking so long because no one who could do anything believed them or cared about it.

Last week, 751 more unmarked graves were found on the grounds of the Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan, which was in operation until 1997. This leaves 137 other boarding schools to be examined. It can be assumed that many more unmarked children’s graves will be found. Yet the desire for concealment and denial is still strong. In a tweet following the Kamloops discovery, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described boarding schools as a “dark chapter” as if something was long gone.

Violence and torture on this scale remind me of the coverage of life in Cambodia under Pol Pot

Seven generations of indigenous peoples went through these “schools”. They were created to “take the Indian out of the child,” in the words of Canada’s First Prime Minister John A. Macdonald, to force assimilation through the loss of language and culture.

The stories of the realities of life of children at these schools that are told in the four volumes of the TRC, including 6,500 testimonies from child survivors, contain horrors of unbelievable proportions. One man speaks of having been raped so many times by the priest in charge that he threw himself in front of a huge log that was being rolled downhill and broke several bones to ensure that he would be evacuated.

Dried flowers in a pair of children’s shoes at a memorial on Parliament Hill in Ottawa for the 215 children whose remains were found in Kamloops. Photo: Justin Tang / AP

Children often died trying to escape; some drowned, others were found frozen to death by the roadside. A girl who was impregnated by another rapist was told that her baby had been thrown in an oven. Even the happy child who escaped physical or sexual abuse would have been indefinitely separated from their parents, vilified their culture and cut their hair, forbidden to speak their own language, given a number instead of a name , would be malnourished, ill-dressed, and given racist names.

In the last month there has been a spate of government activity suddenly ready for action. The calls by the TRC in 2015 are suddenly at the top of the agenda. Why did Canada need the discovery of the children’s remains to finally believe it had committed genocide?

Violence and torture on this scale remind me of the coverage of life in Cambodia under Pol Pot. It contains all of the elements of the worst things I’ve ever seen – hunger, displacement, kidnapping, rape, disappearance, unmarked graves, genocide.

It is time for Canada to remove its halo and look in the mirror. It can no longer be up to the survivors of the Canadian genocide to enlighten us to prove they suffered. If there is to be true reconciliation in Canada, these stories must all be borne by us. The unmarked graves of Kamloops make it impossible to say we didn’t know.

This article was changed on June 29, 2021 to correct the spelling of John A Macdonald.