We can’t afford to whitewash Canada’s history of genocide
By Lethbridge Herald on February 8, 2023.
Editor:
For the benefit of Frances Widdowson, the definition of “genocide” is “the intentional destruction of a particular group through killing, serious physical or mental harm, preventing births, and/or forcibly transferring children to another group.”
All of these actions were taken against Canada’s Indigenous population, particularly the Plains First Nations, and they constitute genocide, both cultural and physical.
Perhaps Widdowson might read history professor James Daschuk’s book “Clearing the Plains” in which he describes the genocidal actions taken by the Canadian government to make land available to settlers.
In Canada, Indigenous people were killed by soldiers, by the intentional introduction of smallpox and other diseases and by starvation when they were sent to reserves they couldn’t leave without permission, even to hunt to provide for their families.
Residential schools were created in order to “kill the Indian in the child.”
Children were removed from their families, sent to residential schools and prevented from learning their native language and culture. Many never saw their families again. How is this not genocide? How is the outlawing of traditional practices not genocide? Mass graves of Indigenous children have been discovered at sites of former residential schools.
Consider the discovery of the remains of 215 children found on the grounds of a former residential school in Kamloops. How is this not genocide?
Do not forget the 60’s Scoop where more than 20,000 Indigenous children were removed from their families and “given” to white middle-class families to adopt. How is this not genocide?
Germany now prosecutes Holocaust deniers, partly because there is some truth to the old adage that those who do not know their history are destined to repeat it.
It’s critical that we learn our history – the good, the bad, and the truly evil. It’s equally critical that we not whitewash it, as Widdowson does.
Leslie Lavers
Lethbridge
14-13
Since we are on a learning curve, by definition, when the early settlers were arriving in Southern Alberta (then called the North West Territories), and the natives attacked them, raping, torturing, dismembering, even taking young girls in some cases as wives or slaves, it was also genocide and if we are being honest, then this also must be acknowledged.
If you want to keep bringing up the past, let’s be honest and state the whole story.
(—-It was plain to be seen that the Indians did not kill them for their gold, for it was spilled on the shore where the mutilated bodies of the men lay. The woman was hanging to a limb of a tree, the limb being driven through her chin; the two children, one on each side of the mother, were hanging in the same manner, and the bodies were full of arrows.—-)
Genocide was committed towards the early settlers and that may very well have been why the early settlers feared the natives, but all didn’t have bad intentions and many ‘white’ settlers tried better the lives of the natives, including Nicholas Sheran who hired natives and paid them the same as others, not slaves, to work in his coal mining operation.
In the last few years over $48 billion has been paid out or is going to be paid to the indigenous for residential schools, etc. and that doesn’t inlude the increase of $5 billion per year paid out to total over $25 billion to the Indian Act for supports to the indigenous.
The Treaty signed was a bad deal for all sides! True Reconciliation acknowledges mistakes, forgives them and forgets them!
I have watched the attacks against non-indigenous for past issues that we never had anything to do with and the only thing you are doing is angering many who used to support you!
Not just one but 3 Prime Ministers that I am aware of have apologized and the recent payouts were not the first. This has been going on for over 30 years.
We are all getting tired of it! There is a term– Don’t bite the hand that feeds you!!!!
The costs to support the indigenous in this country is the biggest budget/portfolio and per capita surpassed provincial budgets!
We have had enough!!!!
I agree we can’t forget or whitewash the terrible things in our past. If Widdowson was here to talk about residential schools I would agree 100% of denying her a forum, but she wasn’t. It was about wokeism and how it effects our academic institutions, which by the events that happened is very alive at the U of L. I don’t care for the woman but to take ones rights away is to take everyone’s away. Although I disagreed with blockades methods I 100% agreed with their right to protest.