Quote:
Originally Posted by Dengler Avenue
I’m curious. What’s the historical root of this? I mean, had it been like this even before the Europeans came along?
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I'm not sure what it was like in the pre-contact days, but it's pretty clear that the government policies of resettlement and forced assimilation through means such as residential schools would have had a massively disruptive effect on many Indigenous people.
You read the papers here and not a week goes by where you don't read a crime story involving some super-typical accused who does something atrocious and then at trial it is discovered that he was born with fetal alcohol syndrome, lived in foster care, was abused, etc. I'm sure that in most of those cases if you go back a generation or two you will probably find someone traumatized by residential schools who ended up drinking or whatever to cope.
(One thing I have always found curious about this, though, is that other ethnic groups have experienced large scale, long term trauma and haven't necessarily ended up in similar situations...)