Reconciliation

photo: Reuters



BBC
Manitoba apologises to indigenous families for 'cultural loss'
19 June 2015
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-33203840

The Canadian province of Manitoba has apologised to indigenous families for decades of forced adoptions. Premier Greg Selinger said on Thursday the practice left "intergenerational scars and cultural loss".

The programme sought to integrate children into mainstream Canadian society, but in doing so rid them of their native culture. The Canadian government apologised in 2008, but this is first time a province has taken responsibility.

"I hope that we can join together down a new path of reconciliation, healing and co-operation," Mr Selinger said. "There is a long road ahead of us. It takes time to heal great pain."

Hundreds of thousands of indigenous children were taken away from their parents by welfare services and put into the care of mostly white families between the 1960s and 1980s in Canada.
In some cases, the forced adoptions resulted in the rape and beatings of the indigenous children by their adoptive parents.

Justice Murray Sinclair, head of Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, said he was happy about the apology, but if there is no action, it is meaningless. The Commission's work recently concluded. Its report found rules that required Canadian aboriginals to attend state-funded church schools were responsible for "cultural genocide". The group was created in 2006 as part of a $5bn (£3.3bn) class action settlement between the government, churches and the surviving students.

"The real question though is how are they going to change?" he said. "Everyone needs to accept the fact that they have been responsible for the perpetuation of the cultural genocide that we identified."

Survivors are still healing...

How could intelligent people not know what they were dealing with? To take children away from their parents, to put them in the charge of others not of their culture. Did they not expect abuse? Or did they think that child abuse was a small price to pay for whatever political, sociological goal they had?

I have no idea.

I do know that North American society is geared towards abuse and exploitation.
Our own personal histories of abuse keep us in a revolving door that prevents us from crossing over the threshold into a better future.

When will we here in the USA have our Reconciliation?
Even now after the Charleston shootings by a racial terrorist, there are those who are trying to pervert the perverse, to call the crime an attack on Christians, instead of a racially motivated crime.

They must be remembering how their ancestors were skewered on tridents and served up as strange fruit to gladiators in the Flavian Amphitheater. It wasn't that long ago, and they seem to be able to remember it better than crimes not 50 years old.

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