I am a non-indigenous Canadian who immigrated to this country from Southeast Asia. When I read about the remains of 215 children, one of whom as young as three years of age, being found at a former residential school in Kamloops, BC, I was appalled.
Canada’s history with residential schools is a long one. Egerton Ryerson, the Chief superintendent of Education, Canada West, Ontario, created the model for residential schools. His statement “Indians should be schooled in separate, denominational, boarding, English-only and agriculturally-oriented institutions” became the basis for the establishment of residential schools in Canada, the implementation of which resulted in young indigenous children being separated from their parents. The goal was to integrate these children into a Euro-Canadian culture. It did not succeed. The indigenous children ended up being abused or dead, as shown in the recent news, and unable to blend in with the white European community after all the efforts of both government and church.
Last year, at the height of the George Floyd protests which spilled over to Toronto, the statue of Egerton Ryerson was splashed with pink paint (in the pic above). As well, the statue of the first Prime Minister of Canada, John A. Mcdonald, at Queen’s Park was also defaced. Mcdonald had a rocky relationship with Canada’s indigenous people. In 1882, he said this to the House of Commons, “I have reason to believe that the agents as a whole…are doing all they can, by refusing food until the Indians are on the verge of starvation, to reduce expense”, as quoted from the National Post’s article dated August 28, 2018 by Tristin Hopper.
I was born and raised in a country colonized first by Spain for 323 years, then by the US for 50 years. Spain brought Christianity to the Philippine Archipelago and enabled it to be the only Asian country that is Christian. Sadly, it also brought my Spanish fraternal ancestors who settled in the islands with their Spanish compatriots. Colonization may be good for the colonizer but bad for the colonized. Spain ruled my old country side by side with the Catholic Church and it was not a good partnership. Abuses are always a by-product of any colonization, whether it’s the settler kind or the economic one. The Philippines had both kinds which left the country bruised and confused over its identity. In 1896, two years before the Spanish American War which resulted in Spain ceding the Philippines to the US after it lost the war, an affluent Filipino named Jose Rizal was executed in Manila by firing squad for his seditious writings. His death was so dramatic that he was declared a martyr and designated as the country’s national hero. A monument of him facing the Manila Bay was erected in the heart of Manila and is oguarded 24/7 by soldiers.
Injecting a new culture into an already existing culture doesn’t really work. It only confuses the populace. And employing radical means such as starvation as what happened during John Mcdonald’s time when American hunters hunted down bisons almost to an extinction, bisons being the food of the indigenous, only results in abuses and deaths. Brutal, in my opinion. In my quiet moments, I muse over what my old country would’ve become had the Spaniards not colonized it. There was an existing culture and a structure of government to rule the communities when Ferdinand Magellan landed on the shores of Cebu in Visayas, one of the three main provinces in the Philippines. The communities were ruled by a Datu, a Sultan or a Raja. Chances are the Philippines would’ve ended up a Muslim nation.
