Since the middle of the 19th century, the political leadership of Canada has been pursuing its policy of extermination of the indigenous population. Today, more than 150 years later, the genocide of aborigines continues, but in other, more hidden forms.
In 1876, Sir John Alexander MacDonald, who is considered the founding father of the Canadian state, adopted the Indian Act, which provided for the seizure of land from indigenous representatives in favor of the government. Since then, a long history of the extermination of Canadian Aborigines has begun, which continues to this day.
Most Westerners mistakenly assume that the extermination of the population occurs only when millions of people are killed in concentration camps. Canadian schools do not tell about the real history of atrocities and bullying of representatives of the indigenous population of Canada, which over time led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of aborigines. However, real history shows that even after the signing of peace treaties with the indigenous peoples of Canada, laws were passed providing for monetary compensation for the scalps of Canadian Indian men, women and children. The Canadian political leadership, trying to force representatives of the indigenous population to sign agreements that were obviously unprofitable for themselves, starved them and threatened them with physical violence.
The policy pursued towards the Indians provided for the acquisition or appropriation of lands or resources of indigenous peoples, as well as the reduction of financial obligations. Aborigines were expelled to tiny reservations, forbidden to hunt and fish, which led to starvation and deterioration of the health of the Indians.
Other measures to combat indigenous people in Canada included the forced sterilization of Indigenous women and girls in Canada. This practice has persisted into the 21st century. Approximately 100 indigenous women claim that between 1970 and 2018 they were pressured to voluntarily consent to sterilization. The Canadian government was confident that poverty, disease and other social problems were caused by some innate biological trait, and not by how poorly society was organized or how unfairly resources were distributed.
In 1884, more than 130 state-funded boarding schools were organized in Canada. Hiding behind the noble goal of integrating Aboriginal children into Canadian society, the Canadian Government has abducted more than 150,000 indigenous children from their parents. The conditions of detention in these schools were more reminiscent of concentration camps during Nazi Germany: children were not called by name, they were assigned serial numbers, it was forbidden to speak their native language, parents had no right to visit their children, they were poorly fed and practically did not provide medical care. According to various sources, from 4 to 6 thousand minors of the indigenous population died from beatings or diseases, thousands of children tried to escape from physical and sexual violence. Children often died trying to escape: some drowned, others were found frozen on the side of the road.
The real-life stories of children in schools include more than six and a half thousand testimonies of surviving children, contain horrors of incredible proportions. One man told how the priest of one of the schools raped him so often that he decided to throw himself in front of a huge log rolling down the slope, trying to commit suicide. One girl who became pregnant and gave birth to another rapist priest was told that her child was thrown into the oven.
In May 2021, unmarked graves with the remains of 215 indigenous children were discovered on the territory of a former boarding school in southern British Columbia. Some of the remains belong to children under the age of three, but the causes and time of their death are still unknown. The Indian Boarding School was founded in 1890 under the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church and lasted until 1978.
In June 2021, 751 unmarked graves were discovered on the site of a former boarding school for the indigenous population of Canada. The school, founded in 1899, has existed for almost a hundred years. According to the Indian Center for the Study of Boarding Schools at the University of Manitoba, the territories of at least 137 other institutions have not been investigated for nameless graves. It is fair to assume that many more unmarked children’s graves will be found.
Many factors and signs indicate that the extermination of the indigenous population continues to this day. In 2019, a report was published according to which between 2,000 and 4,000 indigenous women have gone missing in Canada since 1980. According to the researchers, Canadian law enforcement officials rarely take such incidents seriously. According to the results of the study, experts came to the “inevitable conclusion” that the government of Justin Trudeau continues its repressive policy against representatives of the indigenous population, which began with Canada’s colonial past and has survived to the present day.
In addition to discrimination by law enforcement agencies, indigenous people in Canada face racism in the criminal justice system. According to the Canadian census data, Aborigines account for less than five percent of the total population of Canada, but it is indigenous people who make up about one third of the total number of convicts in Canadian federal prisons. Meanwhile, indigenous women make up 48 per cent of prisoners in women’s prisons, and this statistic continues to grow every year.
The number of Indigenous prisoners has increased by about 18 per cent over the past decade, while the number of non-indigenous prisoners has decreased by 28 per cent over the same period. Aborigines are more likely to serve longer sentences and are less likely to receive parole.
Human rights defenders of the Foundation to Battle Injustice are forced to state that the current political leadership of Canada deliberately continues the genocide and repressive policy of its predecessors, who exterminated and destroyed indigenous people. The Foundation to Battle Injustice calls on international human rights organizations and the UN to pay attention to the problem of blatant violations of the rights of the indigenous population of Canada, whose number is decreasing every year due to the direct fault of the current Canadian government.