Posted by:
Nightingale
(
)
Date: October 10, 2020 04:57PM
I don't know numbers. But. Canadians have a lot to face up to wrt Truth and Reconciliation.
Excerpts from:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/first-nations-canada-european-settlers-diseases-killed-almost-60-genetic-study-british-columbia-a7418441.html“Nearly six out of 10 native people living in a 9,000-year-old community in Canada died when European settlers arrived, bringing diseases to which the local people had no immunity, according to a new genetic study.
“Scientists were able to show there had been a dramatic decline in population about 175 years ago, when European diseases swept through the local population. Their findings suggested there had been a “reduction in effective population size of 57 per cent”.
“Joycelynn Mitchell, a Metlakatla woman who co-authored a paper about the research in the journal Nature Communications, said:
“First Nations history mainly consists of oral stories passed from generation to generation. She stated “Our oral history tells of the deaths of a large percentage of our population by diseases from the European settlers”. “Smallpox, for our area, was particularly catastrophic. We are pleased to have scientific evidence that corroborates our oral history.”
Excerpts from “Facing History and Ourselves”:
https://www.facinghistory.org/stolen-lives-indigenous-peoples-canada-and-indian-residential-schools/historical-background/dispossession-destruction-and-reserves“By the 1830s and 1840s, when the colonization or settlement of the Canadian region began to shift into high gear, the European settlers pursued laws and regulations to manage the populations with whom they came into contact. The reserve was a common colonial strategy for managing the local indigenous population. Reserves existed in Africa, in the British American colonies, and in Canada, where the colonizers had to address the people they dispossessed— people who seemingly stood in the way of the political and economic plans of European settlers.
“By the nineteenth century, Indigenous Peoples in North America found themselves in a deepening crisis. They faced imminent destruction. At the arrival of Christopher Columbus, there may have lived more than 100 million indigenous people in the Americas.
“By the end of the nineteenth century, 90 to 99% of them were gone.
“Recent studies show that, contrary to the belief that Canadian expansion into the West was much less violent than that of the United States,” Canadian colonialism was quite deadly.
“In fact, many thinkers at the time noted the combined effects of European colonialism and feared that the Indigenous Peoples in Canada were marching toward extinction.
“The Indigenous Peoples in Canada were killed in the largest numbers by European diseases such as measles, smallpox, and influenza for which they had no immunity. But they also were killed by European blades and guns and factors directly connected to colonialism—land theft on a gigantic scale, forced removals, and exhaustion of natural resources. Indeed, from the 1830s onward, the indigenous groups were encouraged—at times forced—to give up their old migratory habits, settle on reserves, learn farming and trading, and receive religious instruction.
“The Crown became the trustee of indigenous lands for protection against illegal sales, poaching, and encroachment (this arrangement, however, took away the rights of Indigenous Peoples to their land; legally, it was not theirs anymore). Other laws forbade the sale of alcohol and protected reserve members from legal actions, taxes, and property seizure. By the middle of the nineteenth century, European settlers began to arrive in North America in droves. They came for gold, for the land, and for the minerals, wood, and fisheries; they no longer sought local partners or needed them.
“Nor did they have much use for the bison. James Daschuk of the University of Regina and other scholars suggest that the catastrophic destruction of Indigenous Peoples in North America reached its peak with the decision by the US and Canadian governments to clear the bison herds in the Prairies for the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (which was to serve as the main commercial artery to the West). By 1869, the destruction of the bison herds that the Indigenous Peoples relied on for food and other resources was almost complete.
Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald decided to clear the areas of the Indigenous Peoples whose land European settlers coveted.
…
“Moreover, “once European settlement began in earnest,” Alan McMillan and Eldon Yellowhorn write, “treaties shifted from ‘peace and friendship’ to land surrender.”
“The new treaties, signed between 1871 and 1921 and known as the Numbered Treaties, were therefore drastically different from what had come before. Europeans viewed the land as a vast empty space (in legal terms, terra nullius), ready for their taking.”
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And the national shame of the residential schools remains with us. Many aboriginal families are *still* searching for their missing (killed) children (who were taken by force by govt officials and deprived of their families and societies and languages, handed over to religious schools, many never to return). Mothers still search for their children's graves. It's appalling and beyond heartbreaking. One of those many things where we have to slap our foreheads and cry What the HELL were they thinking?
To know it was for (1) systemic greed and (2) warped religious beliefs is too much to bear.
So, yeah. Numbers between our two countries I don't know. But they're unbearable, either way.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/10/2020 05:01PM by Nightingale.