Oooo. My mom said she got caned coz she was a lefty and had to learn how to write n everything with her right hand to not get in trouble
Yes, it is similar to that type of abuse where you are hit/striked until you act a certain way or do something. For this, it had the added layer of racism too. Lefties don't face any type of oppression nowadays but native people unfortunately still face lots of struggles. And left handed people were never kidnapped from their families until they wrote with their right hands.
I hear you. That's absolutely disgusting of them to even ask that. I don't watch the news so I missed that story but Canada needs to stop sugar coating our history
This is fairly recent history. These residential schools operated well into the 20th century here in the US. My school district had a busing program which they finally stopped in 2002, yet schools are still highly segregated here for many reasons. So there are still people alive who worked at and supported these institutions. I think one of our goals as a society is to not repeat the mistakes of our past, yet we disagree on how to do that. Obviously, from reading this thread, I see we all agree that genocide and child abuse are wrong, no one argues that. Yet enough of our society also agreed with residential schools enough for these institutions to exist and function. They turn a blind eye and they sugarcoat our history books. These people are clever manipulators who can present intelligent arguments for hate. No one can argue that our society is also very divided right now. That's the perfect setup for these and other institutions of hate to start up again. My mother was alive when there were residential schools, and think of how Indians were portrayed on the Westerns that were popular in the 50's and 60's. They believed they were educating these (I hate to say it) "savages". The majority of people also didn't know they were as bad as they really were, and there was a bunch of almost propaganda at the time to make it appear like we were doing these people a favor. Presently, we also have a bunch of immigrants moving in, and there are arguments on how much should they assimilate to our culture. Then there's also the question of how much of your culture do you leave behind when you assimilate to a new culture. I don't have answers to any of this. The arguments for these schools at the time were that they were mainly in sparsely populated areas in the West, they taught these children how to read and write in English, and taught them Christianity. Of course horrible things happened too, and I'm not trying go say it didn't. All of the native people I went to school with acted very "white", and they were all Baptists. That probably has a lot to do with these schools and the mass re-education and forced assimilation of indigenous people. One of my good friends in high school would say her family's Cherokee like I say my family is German, and then that was the end. Again, yes my family's from Germany, but we're not you-know-whats, and that's another long story, but again we don't want to repeat the mistakes of our past. In order to not repeat the mistakes of our past though, we need to be aware of how it started, and being silent about it is not the way. Our society is very divided in multiple ways, and we are dealing with a pandemic and a recession, things are going to get harder before they get easier. Amidst all of this chaos, we need to realize when these clever manipulators are at work, when we're being lied to. The majority of people will just go along with their lives, the sugarcoating is comfortable. We have to agree on where to draw the line and say that this is wrong. Again, I don't have answers, these are big complicated issues. I don't have a kid, but I have thought about what I would do if my "kid" got an assignment like this. I would help them write an argument. I really like writing research papers. Their principal can call me in their office, they can take me all the way to the board of education. True educators appreciate intelligent arguments backed up by research, even when the facts make them uncomfortable. Bravo to those parents for taking it all the way to the media, because these conversations need to keep happening. It's good that it made people angry, because what happened to indigenous people and these children should make people angry. We should be angry that racism is still happening, and it's taking so many new forms. We should worry for the people who are still comfortable when they know things like this are happening. I hope my fellow United Statesians had a nice Thanksgiving, even though we know the story of the first Thanksgiving was mostly you-know-what. I guess I'm thankful that we've made the progress we have made, but there is also a lot of work to be done. Be kind to people 😗💨❤️
Similar, although I would argue Nazi concentration camps were worse and had a more openly murderous genocidal agenda, wherein residential schools were more "we are trying to teach Natives to be white people!" (which is a form of genocide too, just a different type than the Nazis used in their Final Solution)