mr_trudo

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/Page/document/v5/content/subscribe?user_URL=http://www.theglobeandmail.com%2Fservlet%2Fstory%2FRTGAM.20070327.wxnatives27%2FBNStory%2FNational%2F&ord=647590&brand=theglobeandmail&force_login=true

You maybe asking what do I mean by this? To quote wikipedia:

"Students were required to stay in residences on school premises, which were often walled or fortified in some manner, and were often forcibly removed from their homes, parents, and communities. Most students had no contact with their families for up to 10 months at a time due to the distance between their home communities and schools. Often, they did not have contact with their families for years at a time...

In 1909, Dr. Peter Bryce, general medical superintendent for the Department of Indian Affairs reported to the department that between 1894 and 1908 mortality rates at residential schools in Western Canada ranged from 35% to 60% over five years (that is, five years after entry, 35% to 60% of students had died). These statistics did not become public until 1922, when Bryce, who was no longer working for the government, published The Story of a National Crime: Being a Record of the Health Conditions of the Indians of Canada from 1904 to 1921. In particular, he alleged that the high mortality rates were frequently deliberate, with healthy children being exposed to children with tuberculosis.

Until the late 1950s, residential schools were severely underfunded, and relied on the forced labour of their students to maintain their facilities. The work was arduous, and severely compromised the academic and social development of the students. Literary education, or any serious efforts to inspire literacy in English or French, were almost non-existent. School books and textbooks, if they were present at all, were drawn mainly from the curricula of the provincially funded public schools for non-Aboriginal students, and teachers at the residential schools were notoriously under-trained.

In the 1990s, it was revealed that many students at residential schools were subjected to severe physical, psychological, and sexual abuse by teachers and school officials. Several prominent court cases led to large monetary payments from the federal government and churches to former students of residential schools.

The last residential school closed in 1996. Although a settlement has been offered to former students, the federal government has decided not to apologize for the system or any damage caused. "

A mortality rate of 30 to 60% across the whole system over a 5 year period is quite shocking. Under Stalin, the worst winter in the concentration camps or "gulag" had a 20% mortality rate, which included my great grandfather, and that was at a time when the Soviet Union began a successful push to stop the Nazis plan of enslaving and extermining Central and Eastern Europe, a burden British North America has been nowhere close to having. Had had the situation been worse, and the same tragity repeated 5 years in a row, that create a 5 year mortality rate of 68%. As well, the gulag has no assimilation or genocidial intension, rather it was for economic in nature and faciliated social control of dissidents, criminals and captures of war.

I know from my father's Polish background that Polish society still suffers from the scares and backwardness of the brutality of the 20th Century. One can say the same thing about many cultures and Canada's First Nations is one of them.