Posted on 10/30/2017 7:54:24 PM PDT by Olog-hai
Colleen Cardinal often wondered why her parents turned bright red in the sun but she grew dark along with her sisters. The puzzle was solved when she was a young teen, and the woman she had thought of as her mother disclosed that she had been picked out of a catalog of native children available for adoption.
Cardinal was one of thousands of indigenous children taken from their birth families from the 1960s to mid-1980s and sent to live with white families, who officials at the time insisted could give them better care. Many lost touch with their original culture and language.
It echoes the history of residential schools in Canada. Some 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families over much of the last century and put in government schools, where they were forced to convert to Christianity and not allowed to speak their native languages. Many were beaten and verbally abused, and up to 6,000 are said to have died.
The government has since apologized and offered compensation for the victims of residential schools, and now it’s paying compensation for what is known as the “Sixties Scoop” in which children were essentially scooped up from reservations and their native families. But many say the settlement is too little, too late.
Cardinal says it won’t undo what was for her a traumatic experience. She was taken from her Plains Cree family in Alberta and sent to a home about 1,600 miles (2,600 kilometers) away alongside a lake in rural Ontario, where she said her two older sisters were sexually abused. …
(Excerpt) Read more at hosted.ap.org ...
Why should today’s Canadian citizens compensate them? Wasn’t it France and the Crown of England who persecuted the natives in the early years? Let them pay.
This is about First Nations children taken in the 1960s. Not very long ago.
‘AP style’ is woefully out of date with the Cold Open among the worst offenders.
‘Joe Sixpack started his car that morning as he always did.......’
Thanks for posting...good article. Sounds a lot like what happened to Indian children in the US in the 1890s. They were taken from their families and sent to various Indian Schools.
Jim Thorpe is the most famous of the American Indian children. He grew up in the Sac and Fox Nation in Oklahoma, and attended Carlisle Indian Industrial School, where he was a two-time All-American for the school’s football team.
Kill the Indian: Save the Man
My great grandmother was 1/2 Cherokee and died before native Americans were allowed to vote. This article brought that to mind for some reason.
It always irritates me when places discovered by white explorers are celebrated as if they didn’t exist before whites arrived there ...
That’s how orphans and the children of those unable to care for them were treated when there was no welfare system in place to perpetuate poverty. The boarding schools, usually run by church groups, provided total immersion into the western culture including teaching life skills with a heavy emphasis on Christianity. In America, the Orphan Trains ran until the ‘30s, and boarding schools and colleges for American Indians existed from 1640-something until the mid 1960’s. For the most part, the boarding schools were very successful at producing graduates who were immediately employable and in whom was instilled a sense that they were limited only by their imagination. Not many chose to take those skills back to the reservation or return to reservation life. The private adoptions were more iffy; but there weren’t background checks back then - just the word of a clergyman or other similar official. And the priority was on placing the child as quickly as possible since space in orphanages was limited and usually a miserable experience.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_Train
From what I have seen knowing a lot of so called natives the government was most likely right.
“It always irritates me when places discovered by white explorers are celebrated as if they didn’t exist before whites arrived there ...”
I suspect you have been indoctrinated to think this way. It started as an attack by the left against Columbus and his discovery of America. Its part of their effort to demonize everything and everyone involved in the founding of this nation. When someone finds something that is unknown in their world/culture they legitimately get to claim to have “discovered” it, even if it existed before. Penicillin existed long before it was “discovered” and as a result millions of lives have been saved. By your way of thinking its no big deal, after all, Fleming didnt invent it, he just found something that was around for millions of years. Explorers like Columbus deserve credit for their discoveries as they risk their lives on perilous journeys into the unknown, (and often never return) in order to bring knowledge to their world.
Perhaps you would have preferred to live on berries and squirrel.
It's a great, inspiring account, available on Kindle.
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