By the time you read this, a few thousand First Nations members from across Canada will have received a one-time payment. If they buy themselves a new car (for the first time in their lives, and a modest new car, not a fancy new car), the money will be spent in a day. Most of Canada will know what the payment costs, but not why this group is entitled to it.
It is not a gift.
In 1996, lawyers acting on behalf of survivors of the ill-conceived Indian residential schools system launched a lawsuit against Canada. The residential school system dates back to the 1850s. Indian children, picked indiscriminately from any reserve within Canada, were taken to these schools. From the far northern territories and all provinces they came, by kidnapping, bribery and lies.
Those lies prompted some parents to believe a better future for their children lay with the residential schools, and some parents even took them to the schools themselves. For a while, the government seized upon that to show native parents were willing to have their children attend these schools. But too much damage was done.
No matter how they arrived, the children who attended the residential schools were systematically destroyed as an indigenous people by their supervisors. Languages, ways of life, self-esteem, loving memories and belief systems were destroyed. Many no longer recognized their parents. Anything that comprises an individual was destroyed. This went on into the late 1970s.
By the 1950s, Indian children were being chased through the woods and across open fields, taken while in their home day schools and picked up while walking home after they were followed by ominous-looking black cars. It must have seemed like a cattle roundup to the government employees taking the children. The Indians themselves had no knowledge of kids being rounded up and taken by the hundreds, since communications among the bands was limited.
All this was to preserve the residential schools population when vacancies occurred. Sickness, torture, rapes and molestations of every kind, loneliness, disorientation and depression, hunger (starvation), dismemberment or good behaviour - these were not reasons for them to be allowed to leave these now-infamous schools. Only death or maturity qualified a student for that.
Collecting the one-time payment of $28,000 is simply a slap in the face, another insult. News reports across Canada show that other people who suffered under similar conditions have been paid millions. They apparently receive more simply because they weren't hauled away in droves, nor did they come home speaking different languages, nor were they looked upon as a form of alien being.
To pay about 80,000 surviving aboriginals millions of dollars each would amount to $80 billion and more. Would this break Canada?
If a Canadian court finds against someone in a civil action, that person has to pay, even if he has to "sell the farm," as it were, to satisfy the court. In the case of aboriginal peoples, it seems, Canada does not have to go into debt to compensate for crimes against humanity.
Living under those conditions for a 150-year period that historians rigidly ignore, and enduring daily physical and mental torture: that was the lot of the First Nations children in those schools, people who are today every native community's elders. How would non-native Canada handle it if all its elders where raped, beaten and spoke only Ojibwe or Cree? Would they still be seen as capable of serving as their community's elders?
Many whites have said, "No amount of money can pay for what was done, so we might as well not even look at that. Maybe we could build healing centres to offer long-term care." They didn't even want to try.
What is it about us that makes white folks so scared and so inhumane? Why do they see us as irrelevant, even though in every Canadian war we have been ready to fight? These things, these hurts, will go with the elders when their twilight turns to darkness.
As if these elders haven't been treated cruelly enough, in early September of this year, Canadians, supported by some native leaders, said the money paid in compensation would be drunk up in a couple of weeks or snorted a bit more quickly than that. And not long ago, Canada voted in the United Nations against a Declaration of Rights to Indigenous Peoples. It gives recognition to the rights of aboriginals around the world.
How cruel do you want to be to a people who fought in your wars from the beginning, suffered with your diseases and followed your orders into the apartheid of the Indian reserves?
- Bud Whiteye is a member of the Walpole Island First Nation and a communications consultant for the Heritage Centre at Walpole Island. A journalist for more than 20 years, he has written for newspapers and magazines, and has been an associate producer for CBC Radio.