BarrieToday welcomes letters to the editor at [email protected]. Please include your daytime phone number and address (for verification of authorship, not publication). The following letter is in response to stories titled 'Catholics question relationship with church after residential school grave discovery' published on June 27, and 'Solar lights placed next to each unmarked grave at former residential school site' published on June 26.
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The simple truth is that the Canada experienced by racial minorities is not the Canada experienced by white citizens.
For one thing, our entire society has been cleverly arranged and orchestrated to favour one people, not all people. This is why the hypocrisy of Canada Day as a celebration is lost on some people who fail to fully consider the misery and oppression that that seemingly innocuous maple leaf has visited upon racial minorities.
The revelations of murder, criminal negligence, and wrongful death inflicted upon Indigenous people by the residential school system means our country is no longer superior to morally depraved nations like China or Nazi Germany — a point even our foes now agree upon.
It makes the very idea of celebrating Canada Day like a joke told in poor taste. What exactly should we celebrate?
The discovery of more children’s remains in unmarked grave sites in Cowessess, Sask., means that this country’s dirty genocidal secret is now revealed before the whole world. The complicity between the Catholic Church and the government of Canada to abduct Indigenous children into these “schools” and kill some, while forcibly converting others to European cultural traditions, is what even the International Criminal Court calls genocide.
This is why so many call upon Canadians to scrap celebrations and exercise a little compassion by acknowledging the evil that is white supremacy. The same evil that led 12 per cent of respondents on a recent Angus Reid poll to indicate they believe “some races are superior to others.”
The idea of creating a national ombudsman to monitor human rights abuses against Indigenous people is a good start, but a thorough criminal investigation into Catholic Church members and residential school staff is needed.
The children’s stories need to be told and their tormentors need to be charged criminally, if only in absentia.
The Catholic Church must acknowledge its sad history of racism and white supremacy and pay reparations to survivors, affected communities and families. Let them pay for the proper burial of the victims and perform the necessary burial rites.
Canada’s government must be tried criminally, but they must pay a different price: they must offer every support to Indigenous people they failed to offer in the past.
Christopher Mansour
Barrie
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