What is Canada?
It was just this year that the Canadian government apologized for the residential schools that were put in place to assimilate Native students into the mainstream Canadian culture. As evidenced by the deputy superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott’s words, the goal of the Indian Act was for “Indians [to] progress into civilization and finally disappear as a separate and distinct people, not by race extinction but by gradual assimilation with their fellow-citizens.”
Unlike Joe’s claim, we were not always, “really, really nice.”
In the end, the cost of indifference is a world where people like George Bush and Stephen Harper are heads of state. It is a world where genocide makes headlines and continues to occur; it’s a world where large financial institutions get bailed out with government money that could have fed and sheltered millions of people.
It is a world that allows the Oka Crisis and residential schools to occur, a world with a climate changing for the worse, a world running out of natural resources.
http://www.theomega.ca/article/4988
No comments:
Post a Comment