By Thohahoken
There were 139 Indian Residential Schools continent-wide. A crime many know all too well.
Here’s the usual legal argument: the UN Genocide conventions did not become international law until 1948, and these ‘wrongs’ happened before 1948.
Counter argument: Prime Minister Stephen Harper admitted that “the Government of Canada now recognizes that it was wrong to forcibly remove children from their homes.” Canada said that the “treatment of children” was a “sad chapter” in the saga “to kill the Indian in the child.”
Meaning: Canada admitted “Complicity in Genocide” and “Conspiracy to Commit Genocide” (UN Gen.Conv. Article 3 (b) and (e)).
Basis of claim: In 2008, the Government of Canada admitted that their actions “caused great harm”, “has had a lasting and damaging impact”, “and we apologize for having done this.” The last school closed in the 1980s and the effects of the Crime of Genocide are “lasting and damaging.”
Collateral damage: In 2008 Canada recognized the effect of Genocide declaring “you were powerless to protect your own children from suffering the same experience.” The intergenerational transmission of being “powerless to protect your own children” includes the following:
Article 2 (a): “killing members of the group” identified in IRS graveyards, but recently recorded in the Inquiry for Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls;
Article 2 (b): “causing serious bodily or mental harm” existing today in the highest suicide rates, incarcerations, murders, addictions on record, and in misdiagnosis and malpractice such as that of Joyce Echequan and others continent-wide;
Article (c): “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part” causing the highest cancer, scleroderma, miscarriages, neurological and circulatory disease rates continent-side, such as that in Land Back Grand River country;
Article (d): “measures intended to prevent births” seen in miscarriages, murders of women, uninformed consent eugenics;
Article (e): “forcibly transferring children” to residential schools, and the Sixties Scoop, custody.
That’s how clear.
And then one year later in a 2009 G2 summit said “Canada has no history of colonialism”.
the last school closed in 1996
The writer’s perspective may have included a personal date of significance. I’ve heard people attempt to correct him but he made no changes prior to publication.