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Well it's about time. This is LONG overdue. I wonder when they will apologize to people of African descent for the way they treated us during slavery and even up until today.

yes, it's about damned time.

By Sarah Shenker
BBC News


Canada has apologised for forcing more than 100,000 aboriginal children to attend state-funded Christian boarding schools aimed at assimilating them. Mike Cachagee was one of those children.


Chief Phil Fontaine says the residential schools caused profound harm
Mike Cachagee is not impressed by apologies.

Aged four, he was sent from his home to a series of state-run church boarding schools, where he was stripped of his language, religion and culture.

He was physically and sexually abused.

When he returned home 12 years later, his mother did not recognise him.

"To apologise for taking me away from my family, for losing my culture and the loss of my childhood and the loss of my mother's love... How does one apologise for that?" he asks.

Still, he will be there in Ottawa when Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper takes to the floor of parliament for the historic step of apologising on behalf of the nation for one of the darkest chapters in its history.

Assimilation

Between the late 19th Century and the late 1970s, about 150,000 aboriginal children in Canada were taken from their homes and forcibly sent to boarding schools, known as residential schools.

Originally an extension of the missionary work of various churches, the schools began receiving state funding in 1874 after the government moved away from a policy of fostering aboriginal autonomy and sought instead to assimilate aboriginals into mainstream society.

CANADA'S ABORIGINALS
Made up of Indians, known as First Nations people, Metis and Inuit
Population 1.2 million out of total 33 million Canadians
48% of aboriginals are under 25 years old (31% for non-aboriginals)
Unemployment rate for 25-64 year olds almost three times the national rate
34% do not complete secondary school (15% for non-aboriginals)
Suicide rate among young aboriginals almost twice the national average
Sources: StatsCan, Aboriginal Health Organisation

From 1920, attendance was compulsory for seven- to 15-year-olds, although many former students say they were taken at a much younger age.

While some parents wanted their children to get an education and felt it was necessary to integrate into Canadian society, many children were taken from their families and communities by force.

The goal was to Christianise the children and to erase all traces of their aboriginal culture. One government official in the late 1920s boasted that within two generations, the system would end the "Indian problem".

It should "kill the Indian in the child", it was said.

What it did, says Chief Phil Fontaine, head of the Assembly of First Nations which represents Indians and himself a former student, was cause "profound harm, loss and grief to individuals, families, communities and subsequent generations".

The system was "assimilation founded on racist premises - premises of inferiority, disrespect, discrimination and inequality", he says.

'No emotions'

Conditions in many schools were dire, with poor sanitation, overcrowding and a lack of medical care.

John Milloy, a professor of Canadian studies at Trent University in Ontario who has written a book on the school system, says it was a deliberate practice to keep sick and healthy children together, leading to high death rates from tuberculosis.


Along with the pain of separation from their families, many children experienced physical and sexual abuse, although it was only in the late 1970s and early 1980s that accounts of it surfaced.

It is not clear how many were abused, but reports from former students suggest it was widespread.

Mr Cachagee, now 68, says he was fondled by one of the staff at his school in Chapleau, Ontario, and then beaten with a strap when he asked her to stop.

"I was five or six. I would be in a foetal position on the floor and she would just whack," he says.

Now president of the National Residential Schools Survivors' Society, which represents former students, he says the biggest problem for survivors is being unable to express their emotions.

"All the emotions that normal people have, we didn't learn them," he says. "We were told our language was that of the devil and that we were dirty Indians.

"They educated us, but they educated other people too and they didn't get carted off to residential schools."

An alcoholic and a drug user for 20 years, Mr Cachagee says it was only in his 40s that he managed to turn his life around, going back to university, re-establishing relationships with his children and finally realising the value of his Cree culture and language.

'Unworkable relationship'

The government's apology is part of a C$2bn ($1.9bn; £990m) package of measures agreed with aboriginal communities in 2005, known as the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

When people ask what my relationship with [my mother] was like, I say there was none. She was like a total stranger to me

Susie Jones
Former residential school student


'They wanted to brainwash us'

Under the deal, about 86,000 former students became eligible for a payment of C$10,000 plus C$3,000 for every year spent in a school. The agreement also provided for funding for the Aboriginal Health Foundation, and a truth and reconciliation programme.

Many aboriginal leaders feel the apology has been forced, since negotiations for the settlement agreement started after a number of former students brought cases against the government and churches involved, leading to large payouts.

They also point out that the Anglican, Presbyterian and United churches of Canada apologised for their part in the system in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Mr Fontaine says he has not been consulted on the wording of the apology, and Mr Cachagee says he has not been approached either.

Justice Harry LaForme, the Ontario judge heading the truth and reconciliation commission, says much will depend on the contents of the apology.

He describes the current relationship between the government and the aboriginal community as "faulty and filled with mistrust and misunderstanding".

"It is unworkable," he says, "and what happened with residential schools is part of it."

'Complete breakdown'

The hope is that a full and sincere apology will be a new starting point, "a reference point for a new beginning", Mike Cachagee says.


Mr LaForme says Canadians are largely unaware of aboriginal history

Chuck Strahl, the Minister of Indian Affairs and Northern Development, said he hoped it would bring "renewed hope, faith, mutual respect and trust" between aboriginals and the government.

Canada's 1.2 million aboriginals are the country's poorest and most disadvantaged group. Rates of alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide are higher among aboriginals than among non-aboriginal Canadians.

"Aboriginals have been in Canada for 30,000 years. We were a vibrant community and did quite well for all those years. Then we had a complete moral, cultural and spiritual breakdown because of this," says Mr Cachagee.

He says the general Canadian attitude to what happened is indifference: "It's like the elephant in the living room that no-one wants to look at."

His view is echoed by Mr LaForme, who adds that the Canadian public is by-and-large unaware of the history of aboriginal people.

Mr Cachagee says he does not think the government's apology will make him feel any different about what happened to him or his people.

"But I am optimistic that it will shed light on the issues that aboriginal people have to deal with," he says, "so that my grandchildren and great-grandchildren's attitudes - and the attitudes of Canadians towards them - will be different."

And for those who think you've pain enough in taxes etc, consider how many vets are First Nations, study our war history, find out how many were decorated, find out how they fought for Canada in spite of the treatment and learn what the commanders though of us, and even though we were exempy from conscription/draft, research how we enlisted in droves. I think what we have in the way of treaty rights was certainly bought and paid for by our women, children, and our veterans.

A Canadian Indian’s age-old call to U.S. duty
Corporal killed in Iraq served with Army, Marines



By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service



FREDERICTON, Canada -- Someone gave Theresa Seeley tobacco to scatter on her son's coffin -- a gift, in the Indian tradition, for the elders waiting to greet his soul.

She was uncomfortable with it. "That wasn't what we believed in," she said. Her son Michael was raised "like every other Joe Canadian," with little time for the folklore of his Mi'kmaq tribe.

But as she looked around the crowded graveyard at the funeral, on a New Brunswick hill near where Michael had cavorted on his bike and skipped school with full-of-life glee, it was hard to pick the group in which her son had fit.

There, saluting in solemn slow motion, were soldiers -- American officers, formal and stiff -- who had brought his body from Iraq as one of their own. There were other soldiers, Canadians, honoring a casualty of a war not theirs. There were non-natives, Michael's friends from school and town. And there were representatives from two tribes, come to acknowledge the cost of a centuries-old custom that has sent Indians to fight in U.S. wars.

Seeley gently tossed the tobacco into the grave.

Her son, Cpl. Michael T. Seeley, 27, was killed Oct. 30 by a roadside bomb outside Baghdad. He was on the last two days of his second tour of Iraq -- the first with U.S. Marines, the second with the U.S. Army. He lived in Canada, a country overwhelmingly opposed to the Iraq war. But he wore a U.S. military uniform, as do at least two dozen other native citizens of North America entitled to fight for either country.

"It hearkens back to the warrior tradition that is part of the culture of many tribes," said John Moses, an assistant curator at the Canadian Museum of Civilization near Ottawa. "Culturally, it remains a significant rite of passage among North American Indians to perform some military service.

"And if they are trying to get in the thick of things quicker, enlistment in the U.S. armed services is probably the way to go," said Moses, a First Nations, as natives are called in Canada, who served in the Canadian armed forces.

Michael always wanted things quicker, said his mother, sitting at her kitchen table a week after she buried her son. Hers is a white-frame house with a pool in the back, a basketball hoop in the front and an assortment of cars parked outside. It is "off-reserve" -- fewer than half of Canada's aboriginals live on native reserves -- and is like so many other suburban homes spreading through the flat woodland outside Fredericton.

Various others of her four sons and daughter, girlfriends and relatives gathered in the warm kitchen, listening quietly while Theresa Seeley talked without tears of Michael, the rambunctious one.

He was easily bored, anxious to get on with life. School did not interest him, but he liked being a cadet in the reserves. After he graduated from Fredericton High School in 1998, the relatively small Canadian military said they would have a space for him in a year. Instead, he called the U.S. Marines in Maine and insisted on joining right away.

The Pentagon says the U.S. military includes 172 persons born in Canada, most with dual citizenship or U.S. permanent residence status. But Canadian-born First Nations need not meet those requirements. A 1794 treaty between the fledgling United States and Britain recognized that native bands straddled the border and should cross freely.

That pact, called the Jay Treaty, formalized the long history of cross-border enlistment. Six hundred Nova Scotian Mi'kmaq fought with George Washington. A Canadian Mohawk was a cavalry lieutenant at the side of Lt. Col. George Custer at the massacre at Little Bighorn. Canadian Indians, a term they themselves still use, have fought as U.S. troops in every modern war.

After Sept. 11, 2001, Theresa Seeley knew her son's choice would send him to war. He went as a sniper with the first troops into Iraq in 2003, and reached Baghdad unscathed. His letters from the field, dutifully collected by the U.S. military, were returned to him for lack of Canadian postage. He ended his tour undaunted, complaining only that his Marine pay was too low.

"He loved the challenge of it. But it never seemed he could get ahead," said his mother. He switched his enlistment to the Army, which seemed to have a better pay package, and returned to Iraq in October 2005. He was supposed to come home this Oct. 28, but volunteered to stay four days longer to allow others in his unit more leave time for Thanksgiving in the United States.

On the evening of Oct. 30, two officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police arrived at Theresa Seeley's door. Her son had been driving a Humvee in a patrol convoy, they said. The concussion of the bomb killed him, they said.

"There must be a mistake," Theresa Sweeney said.

The Web site http://icasualties.org, which tracks Iraq war fatalities, identifies 29 Indian or Alaska Native troops killed so far, but does not distinguish which side of the porous border they came from.

"We are both American and Canadian. We feel America is our home, too," said George Paul, who compiled a partial list of Canadian natives in the U.S. armed forces two years ago for the First Nations Drum newspaper. He found 26, and is certain there are many more.

Down the road from the Seeleys' home outside Fredericton, on the Maliseet Reserve, Tony Kennedy, 35, said joining the U.S. Marines was a childhood dream.

"I got tired of reading about battles. I wanted to fight some," said Kennedy, who became a Marine officer and served in Iraq in 2004, and now is pursuing a master's degree in military history.

For Kennedy's neighbor on the Maliseet Reserve, Veronica Brooks, 22, the motivation was not to fight, but to get away. She was bored with college and saw no alluring job prospects. On a whim, she and her sister Jessica drove three hours to Presque Isle, Maine, to sign up with a U.S. Army recruiter in 2003.

"It's been a good experience," said Brooks, a chemical operations specialist in the Army. She has reenlisted for four more years. "I've gotten to go places I never expected and see different cultures. I love it."

She just returned to her home in October after 10 months in Kuwait. She blushed with pride when she stepped off the plane wearing her smart dress uniform. Her father had planted an American flag on the front lawn, and run a cord out with a spotlight to shine on it.

"I'm very, very proud of her," said her father, Walter Brooks, 42. He said neighbors applaud his daughter's move, despite the widespread unpopularity of the Iraq war in Canada.

For some natives on reserves, a political view about the propriety of the Iraq war is "a luxury they don't have," said Janice Switlo, an Edmonton legal activist for indigenous rights. Native reserves have soaring social problems: alcoholism, unemployment, domestic abuse. Enlistment is a way out.

"Sometimes the situation in the reserves is so horrendous, they want to get as far away from it as possible," she said. To exploit this appeal, U.S. recruiters used to stalk Indian and native Inuit communities. In 2003, Canada protested the practice, prompting the U.S. military to order its recruiters not to enter the country. But the recruiters await ready on the other side of the border.

Seeley said she does not regret that her son used his native heritage as a ticket from Canada to Iraq. He followed his wishes.

"It was always up to him," she said, with a steady voice. She laughs more than cries at her memories. Her family calls her strong, brave. She shakes her head in disagreement.

"I've seen him" in his coffin, "seen how peaceful he looked. I've had a funeral. But there's no feeling," she said, a swell of frustration rising to catch her voice. Just for a moment. She recovers.

"Part of me doesn't believe it," she says. "When I do -- when I start to feel -- I may fall apart."

http://www.rlnn.com/ArtNov06/ACanadianIndiansAgeOldCallUsDuty.html

And as I male I take no shame in admitting I cried yesterday. i taped the whole thing, and the biggest moment for me was our leader for the first time! and way too long over do, taking their rightful place in the House of Commons and allowed to speak. It never happened before and hopefully one day, we will have seats in the house.
And for those who are on the otherside , i'll share with you in one area of agreement, it is up to our people to change things and turn it around , we are trying. We are getting educated, training our own. However if you read the posts on abuse in these forum, you will see how long stemming and long-term the damage is. It will not be overnight to reverse the alcoholism, drugs, and abuse within our familes and communities, and it is not impossible; but will take time. We are a proud culture and we are resilient as our pressence testifies. There will always be those who don't want to try and stay stuck, this happens across all cultures and groups, but for those of us who want to change, can change, have changed and healed; the doors to a wonderful new sense and bond of nationhood will happen. And for those who think you've pain enough in taxes etc, consider how many vets are First Nations, study our war history, find out how many were decorated, find out how they fought for Canada in spite of the treatment and learn what the commanders though of us, and even though we were exempy from conscription/draft, research how we enlisted in droves. I think what we have in the way of treaty rights was certainly bought and paid for by our women, children, and our veterans.