This week, Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, issued a public apology to Canada’s nearly one million Native Americans for past actions taken by his government to deprive them of their culture and rights.

In a sweeping reform program conducted during most of the 19^th century and designed to “integrate” indigenous peoples into mainstream culture, Canada (and the U.S.) carried out a policy so harsh it would currently be considered reprehensible even if used against terrorists.

The model for this forced acculturation started in the U.S. and was adopted in Canada in the 1880s in the form of boarding schools. Children were literally taken away from their parents and placed in schools sponsored by either the government or, more commonly, religious organizations.

But these were not "schools" in any recognizable sense of the term, and certainly not what we would think of as boarding schools; institutions of learning where the rich send their offspring to be educated, pampered and supervised. These were prison camps for children. Inmates as young as five were subjected to physical and psychological punishment, hard labor, social deprivation, starvation and even sexual abuse at the hands of captors who called themselves Christians. Those running the schools justified their behavior by painting indigenous people as lazy, filthy and subhuman.

With the collusion of the Canadian government, more than 50,000 Native American children were murdered in these “residential” schools at the hands of Roman Catholic, Anglican, and United Church of Canada priests, ministers, and their associates. Compared to these atrocities, the recently publicized pedophilia of priests seems like a drop in the bucket of social injustice.

According to the report, deaths from beatings, starvation, prolonged exposure to cold while naked – even poisoning, electric shock and medical experimentation (involving removal of organs and radiation exposure) – were considered the norm. In 1928, Alberta passed a law allowing for the sterilization of Native American girls; in 1933, British Columbia adopted its own law.

In 1995, prior to investigation, records of these forced sterilizations were destroyed, but one individual admits that doctors sterilized entire groups of children when they reached puberty – an attempt at minority population control analogous to that of Hitler’s henchmen. Once sterile, these young girls (and boys) were exchanged for monetary consideration to prostitution and pedophile rings by their captors, with the full knowledge and consent of both business and government officials.

Even when not murdered or sterilized, these children faced a hard life. They were forced into field work because many schools relied on the sale of crops to make them financially viable. Either that, or the children were rented to nearby farms, whose owners paid a pittance to the schools for this slave labor and treated the children accordingly. In school, or in the hands of the population, they were poorly fed, often beaten for failing to work hard enough, deprived of medical care, sexually violated by their captors, punished in school by whipping, burning, or isolation when they spoke their native language instead of English, and – at the age of 18 – returned to their tribes as broken people deprived of any ability to communicate with their elders, any sense of culture, and any human spirit.

Tribal life was not an improvement. In 1876, the Canadian government banned the Potlach ceremony and all other native religious services. An attitude of European paternalism was also enforced, so that Native women – who, in their own formerly maternalistic societies had enjoyed all the rights and privileges of men – were reduced to items of property. By 1985, less than five percent of Native American women had regained their Indian rights, and Indian males – taking their cue from their oppressors – blocked women from taking part in tribal decision-making processes.

The intent, at least on the part of whites, was to prevent intermarriage. The effect was to destroy what was best in Native culture – an egalitarian approach to government that valued everyone’s input. The consequences were far-reaching, and the tribes have only recently recovered a sense of this sexual equality, leading to a female chief of the Cherokee nation from 1985-1995 (Wilma Mankiller), chief of the Six Nations Roberta Jamieson, and such notable Native activists as Winona LaDuke, who twice ran for vice president on Ralph Nader’s independent party ticket.

Bishop Vital-Justin Grandin (1829-1902) of St. Albert parish (Saskatchewan) said of these schools:

When they graduate… the children have lost everything native except their blood. They have forgotten their mother tongue and, in this way, cannot live native life anymore; we instill in them a pronounced distaste for the native life so that they will be humiliated when reminded of their origin.

In 1966, the Catholic Church had him venerated.

Sitting Bull, who fled to Canada after the battle of Little Big Horn, said:

We will yield to our neighbors, even our animal neighbors, the same right as we claim to inhabit the land. But we have now to deal with another breed of people. Love of possessions is a disease with them. They would make rules to suit themselves. They have a religion that they follow when it suits them. They degrade the land with their waste. We cannot live the way of these people – they have little respect for Nature and they offend our ideals. You have taken our land and made us outcasts.

This policy culminated in 2002 in the proposed First Nations Governance Act – an act lauded by Indian Affairs Minister Robert Nault, who called the legislation an interim step toward self-government not meant to replace existing laws.

Roberta Jamieson, along with many tribal leaders, denounced the proposed act, saying that it was nothing more than a new set of rules and failed to deal with the real problems of education, housing, healthcare or poverty faced by the First Nation’s 13 tribes, which include the Westbank, Musqueam, Lheit-Lit’en, N’Quatqua, Squamish, Siksika, Muskoday, Cowessess, Opaskwayak Cree, Nipissing, Mississaugas of Scugog Island, Chippewas of Georgina Island and Chippewas of Mnjikaning.people (Inuit and Metis, or mixed blood, are excluded).

In fact, the Act, coming on the heels of the 1996 agreement which allowed First Nation’s people to pass their own laws to manage, develop, conserve and protect their ancestral lands, seemed like a step backward, since it would have instituted taxes and limited the kinds of spending First Nations could engage in, in their own interest. As Jamieson noted in her 2003 letter:

The real purpose of the legislation is not about providing Six Nations – or any First Nation – with effective ‘tools of governance.’ It is about limiting and restricting our peoples in the exercise of our inherent, aboriginal, and Treaty rights, all recognized and affirmed in section 35 Constitution Act, 1982. It is about restricting our inherent rights to govern ourselves. It is about unilaterally offloading and limiting Canada’s fiduciary liabilities and controlling costs. It is about more Government control over the lives of our peoples.

As one First Nation member described it, the Act would have done more for the Canadian government than for First Nations people because its single most disturbing feature limited federal liability for mismanaged and misinterpreted treaty agreements to $5 million.

Fortunately, the Act failed. The public apology is a step forward. The United States government, even more culpable than Canada regarding the issue of Native American abuses, has never apologized to its indigenous people for its behavior and continues to operate like a slumlord in regard to Indian lands and policy.

Hopi prophecy regarding the survival of the United States says:

The United States will be destroyed, land and people, by atomic bombs and radioactivity. Only the Hopis and their homeland will be preserved as an oasis to which refugees will flee. There is no shelter for evil. Those who take no part in the making of world division by ideology are ready to resume life in another world, be they Black, White, Red, or Yellow race. They are all one, brothers.

Perhaps it is time for a public apology in this country, before the prophecy is fulfilled.

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