This past weekend a mass grave containing over 200 indigenous children was found near the grounds of an old Residential School in Kamloops BC. The find has sparked off a great deal of shock, sadness, outrage and other reactions and emotions.
It has also generated some questions of why the Residential School system happened and the answer is invariably that it was racism, plain and simple, particularly on the part of John A MacDonald.
Unfortunately it is not that simple because history is not that simple. You have to put history into context in order to understand it and in order to attempt not to make the same historical mistakes again and again.
At the time of the establishment of the Residential School system white, European men had been ruling the world for three hundred years. The Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Germans, the French and the English had colonies on all of the continents. They managed to take these lands from the indigenous people of these lands without much effort. So naturally, they believed that the white race was superior to all other races and that they had been gifted the world by God.
In addition white Europeans were not accepting of other cultures, even when they were white Europeans. During the latter part of the 19th Century the English viewed the French with suspicion and contempt, the French viewed the Germans with fear and the Germans thought anybody born east of the Danube was from another planet. So if Europeans were not accepting of fellow white, Christian Europeans they would definitely not be accepting of non-white, non-Christian and "savage" cultures of the people they found in the new world. That is assuming they even recognized the people they found living here as having cultures, which was probably not the case.
Finally the white politicians that implemented all of these policies believed that they were doing it for the benefit of the indigenous people. Who would not want to enjoy the benefits of European civilization? Keep in mind that these men were so ignorant they were mostly unaware of how uneven was the benefits of living in the European civilization was spread throughout their own societies. They were all wealthy, often owning land or some kind of business and they were doing quite well living in their civilization. As far as they were concerned their efforts were just and beneficent. I sometimes wonder if the lower classes of society would have been making the decisions whether some of the more egregious policies directed at the indigenous people would have been enacted. Probably some, as casual racism was not confined to the upper class, but perhaps not all.
As well, by bringing them into the shining light of God and his Son you were saving their souls from eternal damnation.
Of course, the problem was the indigenous people did have their own cultures and wanted to maintain them so they had to be forced to give them up and become good Christians in a "civilized" society.
None of this is to defend these policies or the men who enacted them. What I am trying to do is to put all of this into historical context. You see there is a widespread belief that you can prevent repeating history by learning it but there is an underlying fallacy in that belief that just knowing of an event in history is enough to prevent it from happening again.
That is wrong. What you must learn from history is the context around an historical event, situation or decision. That way you can learn the reasons or conditions that lead to them and then learn to recognize those reasons or conditions if you encounter them in the future. Only by doing that do you have any chance of not making the same historical mistakes more than once.
I will give you an example. Many Americans have acknowledged that putting Japanese Americans into internment camps during the Second World War was wrong. However, many of these same Americans saw no problem with the Trump Administration's policy of putting the children of southern migrants into internment camps. If you look at the context for the establishment of the Japanese camps and compare it to the context for the Trump camps there are a great number of parallels. Certainly, not a perfect match but enough to see that many Americans did not learn the right historical lessons from the Japanese camps experience.
My biggest fear in all of this is Canadians will not learn the real lessons that the Residential School System should be teaching us. They will never go beyond the superficial, demanding the removal of some statues and reparations for the victims and/or their descendants, before moving on and failing to recognize the conditions for a similar tragedy sometime in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment