We refuse to atone

There are several aspects to the recent revelation of 215 children’s bodies at a former residential school in Kamloops, British Columbia. First, this was not the only such school in Canada,[1] nor indeed, North America,[2] suggesting that bodies may remain be found at other locations in both Canada[3] and the United States. I am told that these schools also existed in Australia and New Zealand.

Second, these schools were part of a sustained and repeated effort to assimilate North American indigenous people into the European colonizer’s culture. Children at these schools were forbidden even to see their families, speak their native languages, or participate in their native cultural practices. The point was to take these children as tabula rasa and make them “white,” albeit with darker skin,[4] assuring that even had this project succeeded, these people would continue to suffer prejudice and discrimination. In the Democracy Now! interview, Cindy Blackstock calls this “cultural genocide.”[5]

That really understates it. Yes, what happened with these children,[6] is genocide as I understand it.[7] But the entire project of European colonization, including small pox blankets, hunting the bison to near-extinction, the Trail of Tears, the stolen land, the refusal to honor treaties, the attempts to compel people who shared common territory into individual land plots and otherwise onto “reservations,” a war that began when Columbus found the Americas, that continued at least until 1890 (some say it continues to this day), that relied heavily on massacres, and that leaves American Indians among the most economically impoverished people in North America all amount to an erasure, certainly not only of the culture, but of the people themselves—genocide[8] by even the most constrained definition.

It is not just the British and their Canadian and U.S. successors. In the Spanish mission system, priests turned a blind eye as soldiers raped women in California Indian villages, stigmatizing the women, and thus introducing a conception of hierarchy, that the priests employed to enslave the Indians.[9]

And it is not just the erasure of the people or their culture, but the erasure of the erasure. I remember, probably in a junior high school social studies class, the teacher glossing over what were obviously hideous crimes committed against Native Americans as if they were normal. The current conservative effort to suppress what they call, but isn’t really, critical race theory is largely about suppressing an account of white colonizers’ crimes and the role that race continues to play in those crimes.[10] In truth, we know what we we have done were and continue to be crimes against humanity. We refuse to atone.

  1. [1]Democracy Now! “‘There Are Many Others’: 215 Bodies Found at Canadian Residential School for Indigenous Children,” June 1, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/1/indigenous_children_remains_found_canada
  2. [2]Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2007).
  3. [3]Democracy Now! “‘There Are Many Others’: 215 Bodies Found at Canadian Residential School for Indigenous Children,” June 1, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/1/indigenous_children_remains_found_canada
  4. [4]Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2007).
  5. [5]Democracy Now! “‘There Are Many Others’: 215 Bodies Found at Canadian Residential School for Indigenous Children,” June 1, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/1/indigenous_children_remains_found_canada
  6. [6]Democracy Now! “‘There Are Many Others’: 215 Bodies Found at Canadian Residential School for Indigenous Children,” June 1, 2021, https://www.democracynow.org/2021/6/1/indigenous_children_remains_found_canada; Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2007); Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska, 2007).
  7. [7]David Benfell, “Genocide,” Not Housebroken, May 22, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/06/30/genocide/
  8. [8]David Benfell, “Genocide,” Not Housebroken, May 22, 2021, https://disunitedstates.org/2020/06/30/genocide/
  9. [9]Antonia I. Castañeda, “Sexual Violence and the Politics of Conquest in Alta California,” Major Problems in Mexican American History, ed. Zaragos Vargas (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999).
  10. [10]Barbara Sprunt, “The Brewing Political Battle Over Critical Race Theory,” National Public Radio, June 2, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1001055828/the-brewing-political-battle-over-critical-race-theory

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