The Antisocial Socialist

I was fortunate—in a manner of speaking—to attend a workshop on residential schools last night, featuring several survivors and Kevin Annett, who recently made a movie called Unrepentant. (Visit that site; it's very good and has a link to Google Video where you can watch the whole movie. Which I haven't gotten around to doing yet.)

I like to think that I know a fair bit about residential schools—enough to have, even as a kid, felt vaguely squeamish about how their atrocities tended to be downplayed in history textbooks—but the workshop taught me a few new things. For example, in the early 1900s, a government bureaucrat named Dr. Peter Bryce was sent around to residential schools to investigate health and safety. In the summer of 1907, he reported a death rate of 30-50% in most residential schools—the result of a deliberate policy of keeping children infected with tuberculosis and other contagious diseases in the same dorms and classrooms as non-infected children. The death rate stayed constant for the next 40 years.

Let me repeat that. Thirty to fifty percent of residential school children, who had already been violently kidnapped from their homes and often raped and tortured as well, died. Dr. Bryce's second report in 1909 revealed an even higher death toll: 40-60%. His findings, later published in 1922 as The Story of a National Crime: An appeal for justice to the Indians of Canada, were buried by the Department of Indian Affairs, and he was removed from his position.

There are mass graves in Canada. For children. After World War II, Canada was instrumental in re-writing the UN's definition of genocide to exclude many of the state's crimes. Still, the residential schools easily fall under the UN's definition of genocide.

The annual death rate in Auschwitz was 15 to 25%. Proportionately, more children were murdered by the Canadian government and various churches than died at Auschwitz. No one was ever convicted for those murders. The government now offers a paltry $10,000 compensation to survivors with strings attached—you can't sue after receiving the compensation. It's also hard to get, since the churches and the government disposed of a great deal of records.

One thing that really hit home, though, was when one of the speakers mentioned that the death rate from the Black Plague in Europe was 30-60%. No study of European history is complete without an analysis of the shattering, world-altering consequences of the bubonic plague—economic, social, political, religious.

And yet, the First Nations are expected to swallow the loss of 40-60% of their children with a blithe attitude of "forgive and forget." The last residential school closed in 1996, but they're just expected to move on with their lives. If half the students died in one Canadian school, would we expect their parents to shake hands with the killers and accept a few crumbs? Would we expect the survivors to remain sane, their children to be emotionally whole?

Again and again I see this attitude, that various populations (but never white populations) should swallow the atrocities done to them and embrace their oppressors. Only someone who has never actually suffered would be that naïve, or cruel.