There needs to be a concerted effort in Canada to write and teach the real history of native Canadians – in the public and private school systems, from the pulpits and at the crossroads of every small and large community.
As it stands, your average “Joe and Mary Canadian” is making no effort to discover the truth, and that’s a problem.
That means Canadians, by and large, aren’t entirely aware of who we are as a people, so our self-identity is limited. Yet when we punched the living crap out of native Canadian children in residential schools, the grimy mud and blood stains stayed on our shirts. They need to be cleaned.
The worst part of it is that those kids lying on the roadway as adults, crushed in more ways than one, can’t get up.
Now a new tragedy has come to light having to do with residential schools in Canada. It’s more proof of the need for a true and complete national cleansing.
Apparently we experimented on hungry native kids in the 1940s and ’50s.
This isn’t hyperbole. It’s in the archives, and now it’s in the headlines. Recently published research suggests that a past federal government sponsored research into testing the effects of malnutrition. The research involved about 1,300 Aboriginal children in six residential schools in Port Alberni, B.C., Kenora, Ont., Schubenacadie, N.S., and Lethbridge, Alta.
According to these new revelations, one of the schools withheld milk rations for two years, to less than half the required amount, in order to establish a baseline for when the allowance was increased.
Some children were given vitamins, iron and iodine supplements, while others were not.
The depressing news goes on and on.
Here in Canada, we experimented on hungry children.
Every year, the Jewish community sends children to Poland on the March of the Living. The purpose is to encourage interaction between Jews and Poles, and to educate young people about what can happen when countries lose their minds and create irreparable destruction. Through such programs, we’ve ensured that countries such as Poland answer for their deeds. It seems to have worked, at least in part, as there is a much stronger relationship today between Poland and the Jewish People.
I call on the Harper government to underwrite a similar type of program, coast to coast, here in Canada. It could be called “March for the Native” and would be open to every woman, man and young person across the nation, who could go on subsidized group trips to see the destruction caused by residential schools and to create true interaction between non-natives and Aboriginal peoples.
Over time, our nation needs to heal! This includes churches, police forces, three levels of government, and every Canadian – men, women and children. Most of all, it includes our Aboriginal brothers and sisters. We need to embrace the evil forces this country let loose, the ones responsible for the murder of more than 50,000 native children and a teepee full of lifelong depression.
We need to grapple with the reality, as Germany did after the war, that Canada experimented on children – native children.
We experimented on children. Oh my God.
Avrum.rosensweig@veahavta.org
