Canada and Australia: Aboriginal Children and the State
www.carleton.ca

“… Resolution of the terrible memories associated with forced removal of children from their families — along with land claims and associated treaty rights — constitutes a central moral issue facing governments in these former British colonies.”

“In Canada, residential schools were operated by the federal government, often in partnership with religious denominations, from as early as 1874 to as recently as 1986. The broad based Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, conducted during the 1990s, received countless accounts of physical and sexual abuse at residential schools…”

“In Australia, a similar national inquiry in 1995 investigated claims that as many as 100,000 Aboriginal children were forcibly removed from their homes and transferred to the custody of white families from 1870 to 1970…”

Also about Australia:

Bringing them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families
www.austlii.edu.au

Rabbit Proof Fence, starring Kenneth Brannagh, is a very moving film about aboriginal children in Australia.

Canadian Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples: Looking Forward, Looking Back
www.ainc-inac.gc.ca, Indian and Northern Affairs Canada, 1996

Highlights from the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples

Some points from this report:

• “A careful reading of history shows that Canada was founded on a series of bargains with Aboriginal peoples – bargains this country has never fully honoured. Treaties between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal governments were agreements to share the land…”

• “…Canadians know little about the peaceful and co-operative relationship that grew up between First Peoples and the first European visitors in the early years of contact. They know even less about how it changed, over the centuries, into something less honourable…”

• “…dishonoured treaties, theft of Aboriginal lands, suppression of Aboriginal cultures, abduction of Aboriginal children, impoverishment and disempowerment of Aboriginal peoples…”

• Royal Proclamation of 1763: “Whereas it is just and reasonable, and essential to Our Interests and the Security of Our Colonies, that the several Nations or Tribes of Indians, with whom we are connected and who live under Our Protection, should not be molested or disturbed in the Possession of such parts of Our Dominions and Territories as, not having been ceded to or purchased by Us, are reserved for them, or any of them, as their Hunting Grounds…

• “Treaties were a way of recognizing each other’s independence and sovereignty and a mark of mutual respect.”

• In the 1800s, “an ideology proclaiming European superiority over all other peoples of the earth was taking hold.”

• “Protection took the form of compulsory education, economic adjustment programs, social
  and political control by federal agents…”

• “Colonial and Canadian governments established ‘reserves’ of land for Aboriginal people – usually of inadequate size and resources – with or without treaty agreements.”

• “In 1857, the Province of Canada passed an act to “Encourage the Gradual Civilization of the Indian Tribes”.”

• “Under Louis Riel, the Métis of the Red River Valley struggled for their own land and government. They were promised both in the Manitoba Act of 1870, but those promises were later denied.”

• “Confederation, declared in 1867, was a new partnership between English and French colonists to manage lands and resources north of the 49th parallel. It was negotiated without reference to Aboriginal nations…”

• “…Prime Minister John A. Macdonald announced that it would be his government’s goal to “do away with the tribal system, and assimilate the Indian people in all respects with the inhabitants of the Dominion.””

• “The British North America Act, young Canada’s new constitution, made “Indians, and Lands reserved for the Indians” a subject for government regulation, like mines or roads. Parliament took on the job with vigour – passing laws to replace traditional Aboriginal governments with band councils with insignificant powers, taking control of valuable resources located on reserves, taking charge of reserve finances, imposing an unfamiliar system of land tenure, and applying non-Aboriginal concepts of marriage and parenting. These laws, and others, were codified in the Indian Acts of 1876, 1880, 1884 and later. The Department of the Interior (later, Indian Affairs) sent Indian agents to every region to see that the laws were obeyed.”

• “In 1884, the potlatch ceremony, central to the cultures of west coast Aboriginal nations, was outlawed.”

• ” In 1885, the sun dance, central to the cultures of prairie Aboriginal nations, was outlawed. Participation was a criminal offence.”

• “In 1885, the Department of Indian Affairs instituted a pass system. No outsider could come onto a reserve to do business with an Aboriginal resident without permission from the Indian agent. In many places, the directives were interpreted to mean that no Aboriginal person could leave the reserve without permission from the Indian agent. Reserves were beginning to resemble prisons.”

• “In 1849, the first of what would become a network of residential schools for Aboriginal children was opened in Alderville, Ontario. Church and government leaders had come to the conclusion that the problem (as they saw it) of Aboriginal independence and ‘savagery’ could be solved by taking children from their families at an early age and instilling the ways of the dominant society during eight or nine years of residential schooling far from home.

  “Attendance was compulsory. Aboriginal languages, customs and habits of mind were suppressed. The bonds between many hundreds of Aboriginal children and their families and nations were bent and broken, with disastrous results.”

• “…Canadian governments moved Aboriginal communities from one place to another at will.”

• Indians who served in the world wars were “denied many of the benefits awarded to other vets. Land was taken from their reserves and used ‘for military purposes’…”

• “First Nations were nearly unanimous in their rejection” of the government’s 1969 White Paper on Indian policy, which offered them “equality” – i.e. assimilation – which they saw as “the end of their existence as distinct peoples.”

• “A dozen years of intense political struggle by Aboriginal people, including appeals to the Queen and the British Parliament, produced an historic breakthrough. “Existing Aboriginal and treaty rights” were recognized in the Constitution Act, 1982.”

• “But governments have so far refused to recognize the continuity of Aboriginal nations and the need to permit their decolonization at last. By their actions, if not their words, governments continue to block Aboriginal nations from assuming the broad powers of governance that would permit them to fashion their own institutions and work out their own solutions to social, economic and political problems. It is this refusal that effectively blocks the way forward. “

(Original Post
Also: Libertarianism and First Nations Self-Government)