Quote:
Originally Posted by esquire
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...)
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I think it was the shattering of Indigenous families that proved absolutely so destructive.
People can survive trauma if they have someone else to lean on. Wars, famine and crushing poverty are all things humans have faced. The family provides the base of support and value in human life. I attribute the success of many immigrants to Canada to the family structures they imported with them.
Vietnamese Canadians survived the destruction of their home country that had been ravaged by war for decades. The values imparted through family allowed them to thrive in a hostile and foreign land - hard work, education and making the right choices in life. They've gone on to become one of the most successful immigrant groups in Canada.
There's so much that is learned through osmosis in life. Family provides that learning - the osmosis of one's values, how to participate in society and belief structure. By shattering family, there's none of that learning happening.
Which I don't think other Canadians understand. They just think a cheque should fix the problem. Uh, no. By totally upending generations of people, the trauma is passed down because the foundation of human life is shot. All the shoring up in the world won't fix a house that just had a bulldozer run through the foundation.
Fixing that foundation will take
generations. Generations of work, patience, money, respect and time.
It's not going to be a quick fix. I'm reminded of JFK's inaugural speech: "All this will not be finished in the first one hundred days. Nor will it be finished in the first one thousand days; nor in the life of this Administration; nor even perhaps in our lifetime on this planet. But let us begin."
We would be wise to adopt the same patience he tried to get Americans to adopt regarding peace.