When the Past of the Racist Canadian State Is Also Its PresentToday, in Canada more than 52 per cent of all children in foster care are Indigenous. Indigenous youth commit suicide at rates more than three times the national average. Suicide rates for Inuit children and youth are 33 times that of non-Indigenous children. Close to 50 per cent of Indigenous children are living in poverty. While these are the facts, the Trudeau Liberals continue to deny the treaty rights of Indigenous children and their families to basic services such as education, health care, and housing, and more than 30 communities even lack safe drinking water.
Cindy Blackstock, a member of the Gitxsan First Nation, Executive Director of the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada and a professor at McGill University, has called out the Trudeau government's disinformation when it says that the crimes of the Canadian state against Indigenous peoples are a thing of the past. She points out that the Trudeau Liberal government continues to litigate against Indigenous children; continues to deny Indigenous children the same level of funding for social programs as other children, and refuses to comply with the 2016 Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruling that the government pay $40,000 each in compensation to 50,000 Indigenous children for its neglect and denial of services to them and their families. She pointed out that the denial of proper funding for services for Indigenous children has directly resulted in higher levels of family separation now than during the period of the residential schools. Blackstock wrote a poignant article titled "Screaming into silence," published on June 30 by Maclean's Magazine. The article eloquently makes the case that the crimes committed against Indigenous children and the Indigenous peoples are not in the past but in the present. She writes: "Residential school survivors knew where the children were buried because some of them had dug their graves. They told their truths to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and gave the country a national plan in their 94 calls to action for ending the injustices facing this generation of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children, and to ensure nothing like this happens again. Some of us heard them, but what they said was too confrontational for most -- so people called them 'stories' and looked away. The survivors must have felt they were screaming into silence.
"Canada refused to implement Bryce's reforms and pushed him out of the public service in 1922 for refusing to stay quiet. That same year, Bryce walked onto the premises of Ottawa bookseller James Hope & Sons with his pamphlet, 'The Story of a National Crime.' More headlines followed, but then the story died -- and so did the children. Bryce died in 1932 and he was erased from Canada's history. His family says his greatest lament was that 'the work did not get done.' He must have felt like he, too, was screaming into silence. "First Nations, Métis and Inuit parents often spoke up but were ignored, and many were arrested for refusing to send their kids to these death traps. While the parents were in jail, the government took the kids. Over the decades, people of all walks of life regularly peppered the federal government with reports of child abuse, neglect and death in residential schools. Canada just waited out the media storm and continued business as usual."
"I was born in 1964 in northern BC. I could have been in one of those schools, but I was spared. I remember being the only 'Indian' kid in my classrooms and wondering where the other Indian kids were. The townspeople had an answer for that -- Indians were too dumb to learn, were drunks and would just grow up to be on welfare. "I began to hear the truths about residential schools decades later. At first only faintly, and then with growing strength as survivors told their truths, with great pain, so they could make sure this never happened to their grandchildren. It all made sense: why so many numb the pain with alcohol and drugs, why others disappeared and died amid deafening public silence. The government's colonial project was made possible by purposefully feeding the populace a steady diet of distractions, misinformation and stereotypes. "The Prime Minister talks about the horrors and injustices in the past tense -- probably to avoid any accountability for the serious harms the government continues to foist on this generation of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children. "Canada used the Indian Act to drive kids into residential schools, and it is still in force. The country says I am a 'status Indian.' I have a card saying so, but it expired decades ago and I don't plan on renewing it. I want no part of Canada's racist game. "Yet I am a player in this wicked colonial game, and so are you. The Indian Act is still around despite a royal commission laying out a 20-year plan to get rid of it in 1996 and the public service inequities that Bryce pointed out more than a century ago. "One hundred years after Bryce's report, the First Nations Child and Family Caring Society and the Assembly of First Nations filed a human rights case against the federal government. Canada fought the case tooth and nail, relying on legal technicalities bereft of any serious consideration of how the inequities were affecting Indigenous children being separated from their families and placed in foster care at higher rates than in residential schools, experiencing irremediable harm and, in some cases, death. In 2016, the Human Rights Tribunal ordered Canada to immediately cease its discriminatory conduct. The government welcomed the decision and then did not comply. The tribunal has been forced to issue 19 further orders and has linked Canada's ongoing non-compliance to the unnecessary foster placements of many kids and to the deaths of three. "I used to know how much children's caskets cost because I had to raise funds for them so often.
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"The buried
children died afraid and alone -- away from
their families -- in 'schools' that were more
akin to re-education camps, run by the Canadian
government and the Christian churches from the
1830s to 1996. Many could have survived if
public will had forced Ottawa to implement the
life-saving reforms posited by Dr. Peter
Henderson Bryce, the chief medical health
officer of the Department of Indian Affairs in
1907. Bryce found that tuberculosis was ravaging
the malnourished children at 20 times the rate
of others, fuelled by dramatically unequal
'Indian' health funding and poor health
practices. As the 1907 headline of the Evening
Citizen reported, there was 'absolute
inattention to the bare necessities of health'
and the schools were 'veritable hotbeds of
disease.' Other newspapers wrote that the
children were 'dying like flies,' compelling
lawyer Samuel Hume Blake to say in 1908, 'In
that Canada fails to obviate the preventable
causes of deaths, it brings itself into
unpleasant nearness to manslaughter.'
Which is
precisely what Canada is hoping will happen
today as well. Speaking out and smashing the
silence is key to making sure a spoke is put in
the wheel of the refusal of governments to carry
out their duty and get away with it. Blackstock
continues:
"In mid-June,
federal ministers who have worn orange shirts
and orange ribbons held news conferences about
'allowing' First Nations names on Canadian
passports and, more substantively, passing the
United Nations Declaration on the Rights of
Indigenous Peoples into Canadian law. I could
not view those conferences because I was in
Federal Court watching Canada's lawyers try to
overturn two tribunal orders requiring it to
compensate First Nations children it had
discriminated against (and they are still
children) and to avoid paying for public
services for Indigenous kids off-reserve and
without Indian Act status. I also
attended a news conference with survivors from
St. Anne's residential school in northeastern
Ontario who wanted the federal government to
drop its legal battle against them. That school
actually had a homemade electric chair for
punishing students."
