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Whom Shall the Indigenous Children Haunt?

Recent news reports cite the discovery of the remains of children on or near the property of residential schools established to educate children born of Canada’s First Nation in a campaign to assimilate them into Canadian society. Canada had about 150 residential schools and an estimated 150,000 Indigenous children passed through the schools between their opening, around 1883, and their closing in 1996.

Rightly, there are demands to examine how this wholesale deprivation of basic human rights could have occurred in one of the world’s leading democratic countries. Surely, the Catholic Church and protestant denominations will bear severe media lashings for the horrific mistreatment and murder of these children. But these institutions and their staff are only the proximate causes of the tragedy. 

What of the root causes? What about the arrogance and incompetence of the elitist government and subsidiary agency leadership? It was these people, who, in an insufferable display of hubris, ordered the children to attend these schools. These people set themselves up as primus inter paresto render the children into a forced homogeneity with the rest of Canada. These self-absorbed, oh-so-important people remain with us today, not in fact, but in kind. Regrettably, they have increased in number and power.

It is possible, however, that even this horrendous indifference to individual rights might not have born such bitter fruit as the thousands of graves now being plotted and marked by machines. Unfortunately, these children were the further victims of the generic incompetence that infects such government-bred programs. Where was the oversight and control of these schools to ensure that the children were living under humane conditions and learning that which would enable them to better succeed in the Canadian society? Answer: nowhere to be found. Neither then, nor today. 

C.S. Lewis wrote, “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

We delude ourselves as we celebrate America’s Independence Day. This is no longer the land of the free and the home of the brave. In fact, we live increasingly under the egregiously corrupt care such moral tyrants. First Nation children were early victims. The rest of us will shortly follow.