Canadian Politics Today

You keep saying, "would someone think of the children!" (I'm paraphrasing). They are thinking of the children. When you listen to the interviews with the people involved in this court case, you get to see that they completely lost the connection to their culture and language. Those who tried to re-integrate into indigenous society had a hard time (one interviewee I heard said it was "impossible") because culture is a negotiated understanding of communication and interaction. In our everyday lives we carry on conversation without elaborating on things because we've grown to understand our mutual culture (example below). When these kids were taken from their homes, they were not given any cultural support. They were robbed of their culture. It's not about taking them from their homes. That may have been the right thing to do, but the government did not provide the children nor the foster parents any support in preserving the kids' connection to their culture. It's not a stretch to say it was systematic cultural genocide. But without being so harsh, the government failed to provide the cultural support that it promised and ought to have provided.


So, we take for granted our cultural awarenesses. Here's an example of what happens if you break that. This is a conversation between two friends, where one of them was a social psychology student playing the role of breaking with the cultural awareness that I'm talking about.

"Hi, Ray. How's your girlfriend feeling?"

"What do you mean how is she feeling? Do you mean physical or mental?"

"I mean how's she feeling? What's the matter with you?" (visibly irritated)

"Nothing. Just explain a little clearer what you mean."

"Skip it. How are your Med School applications coming?"

"What do you mean 'How are they?'"

"You know what I mean."

"I really don't."

"What's the matter with you? Are you sick?"

When we interact with people in our everyday lives, we expect that they are going to understand things that are unsaid. We speak in vague references with the expectation that people are going to meet us halfway. In this way, we negotiate meaning through interaction. Therefore, when a child is pulled not just out of his home, but denied access or even knowledge of his culture and community, he loses that ability to "fill in the blanks" in culturally negotiated interactions. It's extremely difficult if not impossible to re-integrate into that culture. As a result, they were robbed of their heritage and identity when this didn't need to happen. A concrete example is the fact that the vast majority, if not all of these children lost the ability to communicate in Ojibwe, for example. This is not only horribly unacceptable, as I said above, it is cultural genocide and was carried out systematically by the government via a deliberate shirking of their responsibilities and promised supports.