Like many, a majority, of my fellow citizens, I have celebrated Canada Day in the past, as a brief glance at my blogs on July 1 will attest. I celebrated this land—soaringly beautiful, one that mere imagination could never rival. As a white immigrant, I was showered with opportunities, of which I took full advantage. I loved the possibilities that the country seems to present, even on the political plane.
The strange thing is that I was aware for many years of our colonial history, the residential schools, the torture and killing and vile medical experimentation that went on in them. I read Dr. Peter Bryce’s devastating pamphlet years ago. I knew about John A. Macdonald’s genocidal policies against the Plains First Nations, his use of deliberate starvation, complete with sadistic Indian agents .
And do we think this sort of thing stopped there? In fact, through a mixture of racist malevolence, indifference and incompetence, some Inuit were starving to death in the late 1950s (“‘The saddest time of my life’: relocating the Ahiarmiut from Ennadai Lake (1950-1958).” Polar Record , 2010. 46 (237): 113-135).
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Cold North Wind
House of Infamy
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Dawg's Blawg
Les Furies
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Shadow of the Hegemon
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