Dear Editor:
RE: ‘Only thing they did’? (June 24).
Although I agree that the church and the staff at the residential schools are to be held responsible for the inhumane and indefensible treatment of children at residential schools, I do believe that the government is equally culpable and also needs to be held to account.
For more than 100 years, it was Canada’s official policy to “Take the Indian out of the Indian,” as Sir Duncan Campbell Scott, head of the Indian Affairs department, defined his mandate in the early 1900s. The best way to do this was to begin with the children so they created and contracted out to the churches what became known as residential schools.
As residential schools began to close, the government continued to steal children in the “Sixties Scoop” which took 20,000 Indigenous children from their families and adopted them out to mostly white families. And lest we think these racist actions are limited to the past, it continues today with provincial governments directing children’s aid societies to remove Indigenous newborns from their mothers via “birth alerts.”
The theft of children is only one of the many ways in which the First Peoples of this land have been harmed. It is heartbreaking and unacceptable that the only response to their cries for justice are apologies and more studies.
Canadians are called to act! How? Educate yourself. Read the 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and do something. Call/write your MP and MPP and demand they do something. We, who have benefited from the theft of land and the genocide of peoples, owe more than we can pay but we need to begin.
Heidi Matthews,
Erin