Suffer the Little Children by Tamara Starblanket

Author:Tamara Starblanket
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clarity Press
Published: 2018-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Separating Rhetoric from Reality

The word game the state utilizes to separate its conduct from the horrific truth is imperative to absolving itself of criminal responsibility. The state and society, characteristic of domination, theft of our lands and our territories, and the forcible removal of our children, engage in denial by invoking benign rhetoric. With respect to the residential school, Chrisjohn, et al. explain “the [s] tandard account…disposes neatly of all problems associated with Indian residential schooling.”52 While Canada has been involved in “official, longstanding continuing policy”53 of genocide, there has also been a longstanding use of myths, “rhetoric” or “euphemisms” that convey the residential schools as less than genocide.54 Euphemisms conceal from the public at large that the act of forcibly transferring Indigenous children from one group to another, with the intended destruction of that group, is an act of genocide in international law. Statements such as “inadequately fed” show the reality of the serious bodily and mental harm experienced in the residential schools system through the classification of forced starvation. Concealing actuality through words even as the subject is discussed with apparent openness is one of the ways the oppressor upholds and can maintain its continued and on-going genocide against our Nations.

The forcible transfer of Indigenous children is not merely “profoundly negative,” and therefore “wrong,” as Prime Minister Harper so blandly put it in his apology to former residential school students. “Wrong” is a far cry from “criminal,” which, unlike “wrong,” implies the possibility of legal recourse and remedy, or indeed should raise questions as to why there has been—can be—none. Terms that characterize the harm as an “assault,” “neglect,” or “abuse” do not capture the reality experienced by Indigenous children in the residential institutions.55 “Words have a history,” as Steven Newcomb observes. “Words from the past have the ability to colonize the present. Words shape and create reality.”56 Genocide is occluded by the use of words such as causing the “woeful mistreatment, neglect and abuse of many children”57 when the woeful mistreatment is more accurately depicted as torture, starvation, disease, forced labour, and endemic sexual predation.58 The term neglect implies that what happened was not even an action to which intent might be adduced, but a non-action, reinforcing the notion that it was accidental or not intended. Neglect projects a euphemistic inversion of the intent to destroy the Original Nations (national identities) by forcibly taking Indigenous children which is accurately termed in the UNGC as an act of genocide.

Similarly, terming the harm intended as based on the objective of assimilation59 rather than what the residential institutions were designed for—which was to disassemble or destroy Indigenous Nations as such—also minimizes the destruction experienced by Indigenous children. As Venne explains “[g]enocide is genocide, no matter what form it takes and no matter what you call it.”60 Calling an apple an orange will never make an apple an orange. So terming genocide as assimilation will never change the reality experienced by children and the effort to destroy national groups, meaning Indigenous Nations.

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