Canada: through the dark past

Canada's government attempts to draw a line under the most blemished chapter in the country's history this week.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper will make an official apology to Canadian First Nations (ie, Indians) on Wednesday when he stands up in Parliament and formally expresses remorse to the country's 'school survivors.' From the 1870s to the 1970s, around 150,000 native Indian children were forcibly removed from their parents and sent to distant residential schools in an attempt to purge them of their native cultures and languages and integrate them into Canadian society. Many say they were abused mentally, physically and sexually. Contemporary accounts suggest up to half the children in some institutions died of tuberculosis.

Harper will not, despite pressure from academics, concede that taking children from their parents and giving them to outsiders constituted an act of genocide. Aggrieved bloggers point to Article Two of the UN Convention on Genocide, which states that
forcibly transferring children of one group to another constitutes an act of genocide.

Harper's approach has strong parallels with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd's apology to the 'stolen generations' of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families by Australian government agencies and church missions between approximately 1869 and -- officially -- 1969, allegedly under assimilation policies. Yet unlike in Canada, where a truth and reconciliation commission was created in 2006 as part of a $5 billion class action settlement, Rudd has resisted calls to compensate Australia's Aborigines for the abuse and injustice they suffered.

Indian leaders believe the abuse and isolation contributed to high rates of alcoholism and drug addiction among Aboriginals living on remote reserves today. As of the 2006 Canadian Census, there are around 1.2 million Aboriginal people in Canada, 3.8% of the country's total population, and they remain the country's poorest and most disadvantaged group.

A cautious approach to the apology may assuage the anger of indigenous people, without stoking the resentment of the majority of Canadians who agree with the apology but do not want to be humiliated for a past beyond their control. It will also write the missing chapter in Canadian history. Yet improving ties between the country's marginalised native population and the rest is fantasy.

One prominent academic calls what happened a genocide, yet for many years few Canadians knew what had happened.