The Canadian education system has done a good job of hiding the cultural genocide of indigenous people that went into the nation’s founding. Hidden away on reserves, we were told inklings about social problems but as the affected populations were segregated away from society, they may as well have happened in another country.
The public inquiry into MMIWG (Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women and Girls) exposed societal apathy to the families of missing women and girls. The framing of the inquiry was made to look limited and localized, germane only to the respective communities and their relationships with the legal system. It had an air of distant otherness that didn’t penetrate polite Canadian society.
The discovery of unmarked graves of 215 indigenous children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School has shaken Canadians to their core. The systematic murder of children at the hands of the Catholic Church and the Canadian government is an evil so grievous and shocking as to challenge our sense of self as a nation and people. As gut wrenching as the discovery of Kamloops is, we’re bracing ourselves for worse shocks to come from other residential schools that dotted the national landscape.
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Canada has had incidents of anti-Islamic violence like the Quebec City mosque shooting in 2018 that took 6 lives. News from Quebec tends to have a regional feel in the national imagination, even for events as impactful and horrific as this. English Canada was shocked but did not feel implicated.
The vehicular homicide murders of a Muslim family in London, Ontario has changed that. The brazen nature of the killing of this innocent family out for a walk, has shocked us into awareness of the violent dimension of racial hatred.
The perpetrator, Nathaniel Veltman, has no prior record with police and appeared to be a law abiding young man. The London murders will be tried as terrorist offences.
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Canadians tend to view themselves as among the world’s most tolerant and accepting people. Our world leaders parade these qualities at global summits portraying Canada as a special and enlightened place.
The tragedies of Kamloops and London have shaken us. The belief in Canada the Good has been assailed. There will be hard soul searching about the injustice that undergirded our nation building. We have confirmation that we are not morally superior and that, in fact, we are capable of profound evil.
We can no longer compartmentalize injustices against indigenous and racialized Canadians. As Canada digests the dimension of cultural genocide and racist murder, Canadians may no longer recognize or admire themselves.
Canada’s championing human rights in other countries now appears to be so much hollow posturing. Perhaps our leaders can stop globetrotting, finger pointing and spouting glib platitudes like “The world needs a little more Canada” for a while. It’s time to deal with our own unaddressed injustices and the fallout from our murderous history.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Ksenia Makagonova on Unsplash