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| The New Colonialists don't look like the old ones |
It is a day
to remember residential schools for Indigenous people, which, as the national Truth
and Reconciliation Commission said in its final
report, “were a systematic, government-sponsored attempt to destroy
Aboriginal cultures and languages and to assimilate Aboriginal peoples so that
they no longer existed as distinct peoples.”
Across Newfoundland
and Labrador, schools featured special events to tell the story of residential
schools in Canada. CBC Newfoundland and Labrador ran two stories, one of which
was written by a young
journalist from Labrador whose grandmothers attended a residential school.
His first sentence is both evocative and typical of the emotion that
accompanies stories of residential schools.
“For years,
the Lockwood School in Cartwright housed Indigenous children taken from their
homes all in the name of "killing the Indian within the child."
Another of
these “localizer”
pieces – ones that give a local angle to a national or international story –
explained that “[r]residential schools were established by the Canadian
government in the 1800s, with a guiding policy that has been called ‘aggressive
assimilation.’ The federal government sought to teach Indigenous children
English and have them adopt Christianity and Canadian customs, and pass that —
rather than Indigenous culture — down to their children.” That one was written by a journalist from
northern Ontario now living in St. John’s.
In 2017, CBC reported on Justin Trudeau’s apology to
Indigenous people in Labrador for the treatment they received in residential schools.
The CBC story at the time explained
that “[b]etween 1949 and 1979, thousands of Indigenous children were taken from
their communities to attend five residential schools that were run by the
International Grenfell Association or Moravians.”
There’s only
one problem with these stories: they aren’t about residential schools in
Newfoundland and Labrador.
These
stories about Canadian residential schools are imposed on something different,
namely the schools in Newfoundland and Labrador, without acknowledging the meaningful difference.
The two are distinctly different.
