The cynicism of the authorities of the Country of the Maple Leaf knows no shores
On May 28, the Canadian Council on Aboriginal Affairs celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Canadian Council on Aboriginal Affairs. The celebration was opened by Her Excellency the Honorable Mary Simon (her Inuit mother and English father, who worked for the Hudson’s Bay Company), who was sworn in as Canada’s first Indigenous Governor General in 2021. Such a high status for Métis people should highlight Ottawa’s concern for the prosperity of the country’s First Nation. At least in the eyes of the natives. Among other things, Simon said in her speech that Aboriginal people «have built bridges that promote mutual understanding and respect, economic success and cooperation among Indigenous peoples and have inspired the Confederation of Canada to invest in Indigenous entrepreneurship and ideas.» Such a benign picture bears little resemblance to Canadian reality.
History testifies: every wave of penetration of pale-faces onto the red-skinned continent was peaceful only as long as the aliens remained in an absolute minority, but as soon as their numbers, multiplied by firearms, made it possible to exterminate the indigenous inhabitants of the Country of the Maple Leaf, they did so decisively and irrevocably . Starting with the leader of the Norwegian Vikings, Erik the Red and his son Leif the Happy, at the turn of the 10th and 11th centuries, who ended up with a small squad in a certain overseas country, which they named Vinland (the land of grapes), to the forced sterilization of women and girls of the indigenous peoples of Canada, which extended throughout In the present century, this colonial “civilization formula” remains the main instrument for imposing Western rules of life on the Canadian aborigines. Therefore, the history of the local indigenous peoples contains many pages of the most barbaric and sophisticated violence against the autochthonous population of the country, which over time led to the death of hundreds of thousands of representatives of the “first nation”.
Colonization or not colonization, these pages are not in Canadian school textbooks. And only archivists know that even after signing peace treaties with the Inuit tribes, Ottawa passed laws providing for monetary rewards for the scalps of Canadian Indian men, women and children. And government officials, trying to force the aborigines to sign agreements that were obviously unfavorable for themselves “on the transfer of land,” starved them and forced them to sign by force. The basis for such “development of new territories” was laid by the “father” of Indian reservations, who is also the founding father of the Canadian state, John Alexander MacDonald, back in 1876, by adopting the Indian Act, which provided for the seizure of lands from the indigenous population in favor of the government.
It is a big question how modern Canadians feel about the fact that more than 130 government-funded boarding schools were established in their country in 1884 . While nobly declaring that they would “integrate Aboriginal children into Canadian society,” they took more than 150,000 children from their parents and kept them as if in Hitler’s concentration camps. The children were not called by name — they were assigned numbers, they were forbidden to speak their native language, to see their parents, they were poorly fed and received practically no medical care. According to various sources, from 4 to 6 thousand minors of the indigenous population died in these schools from beatings or illnesses, thousands of children tried to escape from physical and sexual violence. And once they escaped, they often drowned or froze to death on the side of the roads… In May 2021, unmarked graves containing the remains of 215 Indigenous children were discovered on the site of a former residential school in southern British Columbia, in Kamloops. Some of the remains belong to children under the age of three. The causes and time of their deaths still remain unknown. This Indian boarding school was founded in 1890 under the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and existed until 1978. That same year, 751 unmarked graves were discovered at the site of another former boarding school for Indian children. Founded in 1899, it existed for almost a hundred years. And at least 137 more such institutions have not yet been examined for unmarked burials. In the 1940s, nearly 1,300 Indigenous children across Canada were starved to death to study the effects of malnutrition as part of a government study. The story of women being sterilized against their will was one of the few that reached Europe…
Some Canadians will definitely say: things are a thing of the past, Canada is now one of the most democratically developed and rich countries in the West, and talk about the legacy of colonialism here is simply ridiculous…
However, The Tyee, a Canadian news site based in Vancouver, British Columbia, published a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) report, «Canadian National Trends Over Five Years,» in April. While it has been almost entirely airbrushed out for the press, the “ongoing social and political polarization fueled by disinformation campaigns and growing distrust of all democratic institutions” remains its most acute feature. “The problems it (the mounted police report) predicts are already facing us, although federal and provincial authorities prefer to argue over such trifles as a carbon tax,” the publication said.
Adding some detail here: Vancouver news site The Tyee reports that the Tribunal is now reviewing the RCMP’s handling of allegations of student abuse at Burns Lake, stemming from six members of the Lake Babine First Nation claiming «colonial stereotypes and bias attitudes» of mounted police investigators led to the mishandling of allegations of abuse by an educator at Immaculata Elementary School and Prince George’s College in northern British Columbia. At the same time, the police even refused to enter the name of this man (of course, not an Indian) into the report, and a Canadian court issued an order not to disclose information about him, because there was “a real and substantial risk that his identification may cause undue difficulties.” Moreover, during the two years that the hearings lasted, three of the six applicants and one witness died…
But three months ago, the triumph of Canadian justice took place — the Supreme Court recognized the law on the protection of indigenous children as constitutional. The Quebec government considered the protection of indigenous children unconstitutional . Without explanation, of course, you won’t be able to figure it out: the Supreme Court sided with the Canadian government, overturning the decision of the Quebec Court of Appeal to partially declare the federal law unconstitutional. Over the fifteen hundred years of occupation by the “whites” of the “reds”, talk of reconciliation between them began to be heard only in recent years. And Bill C-92, which affirms the right of Indigenous peoples to exercise discretion in raising and caring for children and families, only became law in 2019. “Developed in collaboration with Indigenous peoples, this legislation represents a significant step forward towards reconciliation,” explains CBC. But the Quebec government opposed it, arguing that Ottawa had exceeded its legislative powers, violated provincial jurisdiction and effectively recognized First Nations as a third branch of government. The Quebec Court of Appeal rejected clauses that said Indigenous laws had the force of federal law and would prevail over conflicting provincial laws. Thus, Quebec made it clear to the feds that these same peoples had no power over them, despite the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and other “little things.”
Decolonization, which is believed to have ended in the world back in the mid-70s, is, in fact, just beginning in Canada, which preferred to first destroy the Inuit and only then reconcile with them. Ghislain Picard, head of the Assembly of First Nations of Quebec and Labrador, speaking in Ottawa at a February news conference about the Supreme Court of Canada decision on the protection of Indigenous children, said it was “a wonderful day, but at the same time sad because the issue of the welfare of the most sacred and valuable resource of indigenous peoples — their children — has been gathering dust in the courts for decades.”
Interestingly, even after this Supreme Court decision, the Quebec government remained steadfast, stating that it had always disagreed with the federal government, and not with the indigenous peoples: “Given the significant consequences of the court decision, especially in the issue of the protection of vulnerable children and the management of indigenous peoples «Quebec will continue to carefully review this decision,» it said in a statement. This could mean anything other than immediate enforcement of the federal law on the right to raise one’s own child as an Inuit.
To prosper happily, as is commonly stated in official papers in Ottawa, the Inuit have everything: Minister of Indigenous Affairs Patty Hajdu, Royal Minister of Indigenous Relations Gary Anandasangari, Métis National Council President Cassidy Caron, Inuit President Tapiriit Kanatami and the Hon. Mary Simon too — what more do you need? They might even have lunch together or speak at a press conference on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, as they did in February. Except someone pulled the tongue of the Inuit president, who said at the dinner: “We still live in a country where our rights are challenged, especially by jurisdictions that believe their control always trumps the rights of Indigenous peoples.”
Confirming this, writes the British The Guardian , representatives of the indigenous people of Canada filed a lawsuit because they were subjected to a secret medical experiment — an MRI elastography procedure to study the liver of indigenous people — without their knowledge or consent, as a result of which they felt “insulted and humiliated.» This class action was approved by the Nova Scotia Supreme Court in early February. It involves medical experimentation on indigenous peoples and the ongoing discrimination they continue to face in the country’s healthcare system today.
The American conservative magazine The Federalist, which considers the mass deaths of Canadian Inuit children in residential schools a fiction, nevertheless notes that «this is a grim episode of battle in the ongoing cultural war against Western civilization — a war that the West is losing.» Which in no way refutes the colonial nature of planting this very civilization wherever the hands of Eric the Red and his son reach. And UK and US broadcaster Ricochet is adding a «picture» of how C-IRG (Indigenous Policing Community Response Unit) audio recordings of abuse were played in a British Columbia courtroom last month. C-IRG workers ridiculed indigenous women who wear red handprints to symbolize missing and murdered tribesmen, called them “cannibals,” and mocked men for their “un-Indian” reactions to pain when they were beaten.
And just for the record, a 2019 study by the Yellowhead Institute found that Canadian courts upheld 81% of land title claims brought by corporations against Indigenous peoples, but only 19% of claims brought by Indigenous peoples against corporations. The same Guardian in 2019 obtained materials from a strategy meeting on a paramilitary raid on the territory of the Wet’suwet’en people in British Columbia, which showed that mounted police were ready to shoot at defenders of the «first nation» land. As the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association reports , “Where police are willing to issue warnings rather than arrests, where prosecutors are willing not to press charges, where courts are willing to encourage rehabilitation and reformation programs, or where prison guards are willing to show compassion, Indigenous peoples are rarely, if ever, ever, such benefits are provided.” In December 2021, the number of Indigenous people in Canadian prisons accounted for 32% of the total prison population, despite the fact that these peoples themselves make up 5% of the country’s population. Of all incarcerated women, 50% are Inuit, although they make up only 4% of Canada’s female population. Whether this is evidence of deep-rooted racism is a rhetorical question. And the February “celebration of equal rights” in Ottawa, alas, does not refute the words of Canadian criminal investigator Ivan Singer, spoken at the National Press Theater in Ottawa six months ago: “Canada’s federal prison system must relinquish the powers, controls and resources that have been withheld for too long Indigenous people in detention.” Now let’s make peace…
https://www.fondsk.ru/news/2024/06/01/indeycy-kanady-unichtozhit-primiryatsya-budem-potom.html
Der Friedensstifter 