A National Crime

See this link: "Over the Hump of Denial"?

Well, I am not sure; but the new report finally actually documenting some of the children who died due to the Canadian residential schools policy is yet another step in the process of re-membering.  However, we need to be reminded that the authors of the report have yet to be given access to all the government records about this time in Canadian history.

A Few Thoughts:

In hearing about this report, I was particularly struck by the fact that around 500 of the 3000 dead children so far counted did not even have their names recorded by the institutions in which they were resident and had died.  As someone who does a lot of genealogy, this seems to be a very telling indifference to the lives of these young charges. 

And one can only try to imagine the emotions of the parents -- and any siblings -- when their child was taken away and nothing was ever heard of her/him again.  There simply was no record.  We have always known that many graves were not marked, but one might presume that the children ought not to have been totally nameless.  Apparently, to the administrators, the children simply 'disappeared', just as people (albeit, often adults) in other countries around the world have 'disappeared' during various political crises. 

I am struggling with the word "missing" because it seems to me to be too benign (too denial-like) to capture the nature of what actually happened.

Some years back, I read a book by John S. Milloy, "A National Crime: The Canadian Government and the Residential School System, 1879-1986".  "Crime" seems a much more direct and descriptive word than "missing".  What struck me at the time of my reading the book was how impersonal and systematic was the residential school process.  The sense I got was that the perpetrators were mostly functionaries and administrators carrying out their bureaucratic orders.  On the face of it, not particularly sinister. 

In many ways this echos the current sense I have of the functioning of the national department of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development and its previous incarnations.  It seems to me that not much has changed in terms of the bureaucracy.  Death rates on Canadian reserves is much higher than the general population; suicide is epidemic; drinking water issues are endemic; drug abuse is rampant.  But, indeed, as I write this commentary, the the web site for the Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, even though it includes sections called: "Top Stories" and "What's New", does NOT include mention of this most-recent report of the death's of residential school missing children.  Perhaps the department believes that death among the indigenous peoples of Canada is actually 'yesterday's news'.

Finally, with regard to my thoughts on the Canadian residential schools matter, on the deaths, and on the indifferent, bureaucratic nature of the residential school enterprise, this recent re-counting and Milloy's book reminds me of a similar sense I took many years back, from the trial for crimes against humanity of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann. 

My impressions at that time were not so much about Eichmann as a person, but that his job -- the consequences of which were so sinster and devastating -- was essentially one of 'facilitating and managing the logistics' of mass deportation' of Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, and others to extermination.  I think it fair to say that the Canadian residential school system was not designed so much for personal extermination as it was for cultural extermination.  However, Eichmann's administrative, bureaucratic, indifferent sensibility seems to me, not unlike the operation of the Canadian residential school system described in Milloy's book.  The work itself was/is often seen as bereft of any sense of complicity in anything like a criminal undertaking.  The events are still often rationalized away by both perpetrators and observers.  But the consequences ought not to be denied.