Canadian Indian Issues

While lot of the countries in the world have problems with minorities or native people, this issue is especially important in North America. While the story of colonization has many black pages the guilt is nowhere stronger than in Canada and the U.S. Today it is very hard to define what should the government do to compensate everything that was taken away so long ago by the first colonists. Basically if we dig deeper into a history of any country we will find some ethnic minorities or nations that were oppressed or even banished from their lands. Today part of tragedies like terrorism occurs mostly because the law can’t regulate the rights of the minorities or satisfy their demands. This article shows that sometimes horrible decisions are made by the governments; one of such examples was the Canadian residential school system.

 

The Canadian residential school system was created in 19th century and at first it was an attempt to civilize Indian children and provide them education. Most of the schools were run by churches and those who are familiar with the history of the law know that church was one of the biggest enemies of the most human rights and equality related decisions. While most principles of religion are based on fundamental values like family, some of these principles are not fit for modern society. For a long time the church viewed aboriginal people even not as humans and as for more recent cases the last ones who were against the equality of gay people were religions groups. So under the control of the church the system quickly turned into an assimilation instrument and later even into an ethnical genocide tool. Indian children were taken away by force and put into schools where they were forced to forget their culture. The schools were overcrowded, had poor sanitation, and a lack of medical care and this led to death rates of up to 69 percent. Physical and sexual abuse was also a frequent thing at these schools. In 1960th the schools were finally closed. But this was not the end of this story. While during the 20th century there were numerous publications about mistreatment at the schools, these stories gained not much public attention.

 

This whole nightmare was ended in 2005, when Nora Bernard testified before the Canadian House of Commons about the physical and sexual abuse children suffered in residential schools. She was Canadian Mi'kmaq activist and a survivor of a residential school. Nora started the largest class-action lawsuit in Canadian history, representing an estimated 79,000 survivors of residential schools. In 1995 she formed an organization representing survivors of the Shubenacadie School and started the first class-action suit. After the Shubenacadie suit gained publicity, she was joined by other survivors' associations across Canada that filed similar suits.  Eventually these suits formed into one national lawsuit. This lawsuit, that is actually sometimes considered controversial, was settled by the Canadian government in 2005 for 5 billion dollars. Three years later on June 11, 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper officially apologized for the past policies of assimilation and the horrible history of residential school system finally ended.

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