What a depressing week! This was my first real introduction to residential school and it left me feeling awful. For those that are not aware, in the 19th century, the Canadian government believed it was responsible for educating and caring for aboriginal people in Canada. It thought their best chance for success was to learn English and adopt Christianity and Canadian customs. Ideally, they would pass their adopted lifestyle on to their children, and native traditions would diminish, or be completely abolished in a few generations. The Canadian government developed a policy called "aggressive assimilation" to be taught at church-run, government-funded industrial schools, later called residential schools. The government felt children were easier to mold than adults, and the concept of a boarding school was the best way to prepare them for life in mainstream society. This went horribly wrong with the students suffering from emotional physical and sexual abuse at the hands of the church. Students were punished for speaking their own language and were kept from their families for the majority of the year. Even siblings attending the same schools were segregated based on gender. The readings and film this week exposed me to all of this for the very first time and it led me to few of questions. The first question I have is how is this much different than the Holocaust? Now I understand the holocaust had a massive death toll compared to residential schools but the premise and background behind them are very similar. Both governments believed a certain group of people were inferior to theirs. Both governments set out to eliminate a certain culture because it was inferior and both governments decided that extreme techniques were needed to achieve these goals. Hitler and the Nazis were vilified for being the worst group of people to ever grace the earth and rightfully so but after watching what I watched and reading what I read the Canadian government and the Christian church don’t look very good in comparison. They took these innocent children from their homes destroyed their lives abused them locked them up whatever you can imagine was done to these poor kids and the worst part for me was that it was government sanctioned. They knew exactly what was going on in those schools and they took over 100 years to shut all of them down. In our schooling and society class we watched a video discussing whether what happened in residential schools should be considered cultural genocide and if it is than there should be very severe penalties including jail time for those involved. The second question I had was why has this been buried from some of us as students. For me personally we didn’t learn anything about residential schools growing up the topic was never brought up once. Instead we focused on other international crimes such as The World Wars, The Holocaust, and even the genocides that were happening in Africa while were still in school. All of these topics were taught to us and painted our government and us as Canadians in a very positive light rather than facing the truth that we too had a very ugly past. I feel cheated as a student that until this week a couple months after my 27th birthday, the same week my cousin who is the same age just had his first child, and the week our new Prime Minister is making headlines for having common sense is the first time I am learning about residential schools. We need to let the story out and allow all those that were hurt by this awful decision heal, and I believe the best way for this to happen is for all these stories to be told so that the children who are now adults can regain their voice by letting their story be told in their own words.
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