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shpydar OP t1_iu2rqwx wrote

Reply to comment by [deleted] in Canada House of Commons unanimously agrees to describe residential schools as genocide by shpydar

Perpetrated? Yes.

Instigated? No.

While it is true that the Catholic Church did start schools to teach Indigenous peoples before Canada became a country attendance at those schools were volunarty, and abuses were not conducted on the children. It was not until after Canada came into existance that the genocidal nature of Canada's residential schools truly began under the guidance of the First Canadian Government.

Let me point you to the statements made by Canada's Founding Father Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada's First (and third) Prime Minister and the author of Canada’s genocide of Indigenous people.

In a letter from 1870 he wrote;

>We should take immediate steps to extinguish the Indian titles … and open it for settlement. There will otherwise be an influx of squatters who will seize upon the most eligible positions and greatly disturb the symmetry [organization] of future surveys.

Between 1880 and 1885, the population of Plains First Nations dropped from 32,000 to 20,000, according to analysis by the Cree-Saulteaux academic Blair Stonechild. Most of that was due to starvation while under the care of the Canadian government under Macdonald.

>The executions of the Indians … ought to convince the Red Man that the White Man governs,

Macdonald wrote to Edgar Dewdney.

In 1885 he wrote;

>…..we have been pampering and coaxing the Indians; that we must take a new course, we must vindicate the position of the white man, we must teach the Indians what law is; we must not pauperise them, as they say we have been doing.

​

>I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole … are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce the expense,

Macdonald told the House of Commons in 1882.

In 1887 he wrote;

>The great aim of our legislation has been to do away with the tribal system and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the other inhabitants of the Dominion as speedily as they are fit to change.

The schools were run by churches yes, but they were designed and funded by the Canadian government.

Also the Canadian government performed horrific experiments on the children who attended the schools and perpetrated the Sixties Scoop which was a period (1950-1983) in which a series of policies were enacted in Canada that enabled child welfare authorities to take, or "scoop up," Indigenous children from their families and communities for placement in foster homes, from which they would be adopted by white families.

The Canadian government not only knew what was happening at the residential schools they actively took a role in perpetrating some of the abuses at those schools.

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SoMToZu t1_iu34sk4 wrote

Damn, never realized that Macdonald was a raging racist, all while we plaster his name everywhere...

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TXTCLA55 t1_iu44gjy wrote

Historical context: Most people were raging racists in the past.

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Mizral t1_iu44tye wrote

Even among his contemporaries MacDonald was considered to be particularly vicious towards First Nations.

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Happy13178 t1_iu3nzch wrote

they were all raging racists back then. Really, like all of them.

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a10sucks t1_iu5omtd wrote

That's not true. There were plenty of people who saw what was happening as monstrous and wrong.

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Happy13178 t1_iu5uhzm wrote

In the late 1800s, probably not as many as you'd like to think.

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a10sucks t1_iu5vmqq wrote

John Brown was the most popular man in the northern states for his actions against the slave states.

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Happy13178 t1_iu5vpkp wrote

And?

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a10sucks t1_iu5x2de wrote

If a man was massively popular for literally taking war to the institution of race-based slavery, what does that tell you about the popularity of the institution of slavery, of racism?

Sir John was a piece of shit even by the standards of his time.

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Happy13178 t1_iu5xfws wrote

Massively popular is subjective based on time period. He could have been massively popular in a town of 300, doesn't mean much. I'm still betting many in the late 1800s didn't give a shit, certainly not anywhere near to the point they are today, and you're arguing over a guy that's been dead for over a century for....what, internet points? This is a stupid discussion and you're wasting both our time on it.

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Mountain-Watch-6931 t1_iu46puc wrote

It was also more complicated in the sense he very much viewed populations west of Ontario differently, so treatment became more extreme in the west.

Amplified by the legitimate concern the Americans would steal the country west of Ontario if we didn’t get bodies (settlers) in fast, it was grim to be on the wrong side of policy.

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SomeDrunkAssh0le t1_iu4fg3m wrote

A tradition still carried on in toronto.

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not-ordinary t1_iu4n3c5 wrote

His old house is now the house of UofT’s school of graduate studies. Graduate defences take place there.

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RobertoSantaClara t1_iu4hsfw wrote

You never realized a 19th century Victorian era politician was racist?

Man you'll be in for one nasty surprise once you start reading 18th-19th century philosophy from other famous figures like Kant, Hume, Hegel, Voltaire, etc.

Shit, even Left Wing parties in the early 20th century were often racist. The Social Democrats in Sweden funded eugenics research in the 1920s-30s, and the early Labour movement in Australia supported a ban on all non-European immigration.

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TrainingObligation t1_iu4ops5 wrote

There's a reason the Harper Conservative government officially re-named the "Ottawa River Parkway" to the "Sir John A Macdonald Parkway" a decade ago, just as it was seeping into the larger public awareness that he was not worthy of being commemorated.

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DirtyThi3f t1_iu4gf0j wrote

They’ve been renaming many (all?) of the schools named after him. As a former student of one, I’m very happy about this.

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[deleted] t1_iu2u02k wrote

[deleted]

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shpydar OP t1_iu2vi3z wrote

and what of the other crimes I listed that the Canadian government took a direct hand in perpetrating?

It is not one or the other. It was both. Both the church staff who perpetrated beatings, sexual abuses and rapes but it was the Canadian government who purposefully starved children, sometimes to death at the schools.

From my link about the horrible experiments conducted on children at residential schools by the Canadian government.

>The First Nations nutrition experiments were a series of experiments run in Canada by Department of Pensions and National Health (now Health Canada) in the 1940s and 1950s. The experiments were conducted on at least 1,300 Indigenous people across Canada, approximately 1,000 of whom were children. The deaths connected with the experiments have been described as part of Canada's genocide of Indigenous peoples.

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Koss424 t1_iu4tye4 wrote

Done under the watchful supervision of the Canadian Government.

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