The brutal legacy of the Indian Residential Schools is Canada's great shame. The recent discovery of the remains of 215 Indigenous children at the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School, which closed in 1978, is a horror, but it's not a new horror. It's an old horror, and it's a persistent horror. It's a reminder of decades and decades of white Canadians looking the other way, either out of some passive notion that the schools were "probably for the best," or an active belief that "killing the Indian in the child" as the infamous phrase went, was a good, necessary thing in order to maintain the social order. In either case, it's an example of a collective national sociopathy that has allowed us to disconnect from the unimaginable suffering of thousands of thousands of Native children ripped from their parents, at least 4,100 of whom died in the residential schools to which they were transported. Until we, as a country, come to terms with the cultural genocide that was perpetrated in our name by successive governments, and with the eager, gruesome complicity of the Church, we will never fully attain or embody the ideals we claim as our own, and which we hold dear. The notion that some human beings are disposable because of their colour, or their culture, is an undying obscenity. It's the premise that beats at the dark heart of genocide and slavery, and has done so since time immemorial. Let ours be the first generation not to look away, and let it end with us.
