Editor:
This is the land where making amends for historical wrongs committed long ago has become politically de rigueur, and our self-flagellating exercise of applying today's moral and social standards to historical circumstances has turned into a politically driven new version of “historical revisionism.”
The report by the "Truth and Reconciliation Commission" in 2008 has launched Canada and Canadians on yet another never-ending collective guilt trip of 94 ways of atoning for having perpetrated "cultural genocide" on its aboriginal people.
In the same year, on June 11, 2008, then Prime Minister Stephen Harper, on behalf of all Canadians, offered a full apology for Canada’s sad chapter of abuse suffered by aboriginal children in Indian residential schools.
Notwithstanding real concerns expressed in the Report, we can’t keep going forward by looking in the rear-view mirror, and thereby impeding, not advancing aboriginal success.
In 1857, 10 years prior to Confederation and John A. MacDonald becoming Canada’s first Prime Minister in 1867, the “Gradual Civilization Act” as a Statute of the Province of Canada was enacted in the 12th year of the colonial reign of Queen Victoria (1837 -1901).
Encouraging the “Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes” in the Province of Canada, the Act was part of a state effort to use government policy to assimilate indigenous peoples to the economic and social customs of European settler society, employing Residential Schools to purge indigenous identity to serve the purpose of Canadian state formation.
Now that statues of Sir John A. MacDonald have become victims of a token gesture groundswell of ill-fated out-of-control vandalism, with only perfunctory government calls for calm, how soon throughout the land will Queen Victoria statues tumble under whose reign Residential Schools were established in 1857, some 10 years prior to John A. MacDonald becoming Canada's first Prime Minister?
E.W. Bopp
