The Entire World Needs To Reevaluate Our Past!

By Donald “Braveheart” Stewart

As I sit in my Kailyard I wonder often about the future.

I studied history at university. Apparently now I will have to go and restudy it.

I don’t mind that at all – I quite liked it. I still do.

Over the last few months between the protests over Black Lives Matter, taking the knee, and the pulling down of statues in the UK, I am reviewing increasing numbers of theatrical events challenging the nature of Scottish past glories, the foundation of our country’s richness and in all cases, I am appalled at what is being uncovered.

But today, I am glad not to be Canadian.

Don’t get me wrong, I cannot escape the fact that as an island, Britain has seen an exceptional level of appalling crime uncovered whilst Great Britain discovers that they were never actually that great. We have found ourselves confronting slavery, our place in the tobacco trade and how we are guilty of heinous crimes, including the invention of the concentration camp in the Boer War.

It either makes those of us who live in this sceptered isle, the right experts to be talking about shame or simply unable to make comment upon others who have discovered the same type of shame, I don’t know but I do know that ignoring it is no longer an issue.

For Canada this past few months, as a country once fought over by the British and the French, they have found that the legacy of their behavior from their recent past, is haunting.
Unlike Canada, Australia, and the United States, the United Kingdom does not have to deal with the issue of indigenous race. That would be the original inhabitants of a country before the likes of the convict ships and the Mayflower set sail from Britain to go colonize and settle. Their right to live on their homeland was challenged by the arrival of white people, immigrants without status who had greed in their eyes and guns in their hands.

Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty amongst those first settlers who went with the intention of improving the lot of anyone they encountered with Christian values and civilizing manners. But even those good intentions have spilled into the law of unintended consequences in a huge manner.

The legacy of the entirety of colonization was that the indigenous people, found to be savage and less than the sum of their superiors – the ones who had come to colonize, should be converted to “our ways”. It was a poor and far-reaching legacy.

In the last few months, the impact of such prejudicial thinking has hit home in Canada in ways that you could not fully predict.

At a school, and remember we are talking about a school, hundreds of children have recently been found, in graves. One of a number of residential schools for foster children, it was used to convert the savages. It was used to take indigenous children away from their parents, their culture and their people, and attempt to remove their identities and make them more civilized – whatever that meant to them – through markedly uncivilized means.

In British Columbia, and Saskatchewan, and others, several hundred lost but not forgotten young people have been found in their final resting places. The job now is to identify who they were.
Oh, did I not say, these graves were dug, and filled, within living memory with the last of these schools closing in 1996?

We have the testimony of survivors.

Their testimony to the types of policies used to remove them – colloquially known as the “Sixties Scoop” are heartbreaking. According to the groups campaigning to expose this national scandal the policy of forced foster care involved no fewer than 40,000 children. The unfairness is compounded by the fact that whilst Canada’s population is 8% indigenous 50% of the kids in foster care were indigenous whilst in Manitoba, that rose to 90%!

The issues of poverty and attendant social issues that arise from poverty led to many of these institutionalized racist decisions being made. But let’s be honest, there are few countries with white settlers that have a decent record in allowing the indigenous population a say in the running of their own country. Instead, they found themselves being, ironically, driven into poor and insecure places, run over by the immigrants who were there to steal their land, steal their jobs and build their own welfare kingdom.

The Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, has come out and been contrite. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report in 2015 suggested that 4,000 indigenous children – at least – died in these schools from disease or malnourishment and that sexual and physical abuse was rife within them.

But the problem persists – as in there are more indigenous young people in Canada’s care system than should proportionally be the case.

Any system that uses this form of brutality to instruct, educate or normalize people has consistently been shown to compound and not solve the problems it has been brought in to correct. And so is the issue here. Many who were subject to brutality have found they are employing those tactics in their own lives. Having been sent to what felt like a prison as a child, as an adult many have found themselves in the real thing. It is a significant number but not a universal truth.

Whilst there are some who would still argue that to spare the rod would spoil the child, there is little doubt that here we have the issue of spare the blame and continue the shame. Canada has much to do. I am quite sure that many other nation states with similar histories have too.

In Britain we are grappling with slavery, and so we should. For Canada just now, my heart goes out to both sides: those with the very Greek sounding issue of the sins of their founding fathers and those who suffered at the hands of the founders of a nation that until they arrived was doing just dandy.

Slogans are easy, solutions are far harder. Let’s hope they find some peace, at least for the children who lost their lives to help us understand the issue of humanity that bit more starkly.
A view from the new Kailyard or, how you look over there, from over here…

(kailyard n. a genre of sentimental Scottish literature turned into effective invective comment from one Donald worth reading…)

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