Covering up genocide is now totes legal
Apr. 4th, 2016 06:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyLost amongst the much bigger (but also, of course, disturbing) Panama Papers story is this article, about the decision of the Ontario Court of Appeals that records from the testimony of residential school survivors can be destroyed in 15 years.
Wait, what?
This fills me with so much rage I'm shaking almost too much to type.
I grew up knowing about residential schools. It wasn't exactly a secret, and it ended within my lifetime. I knew they were rape, torture, and death camps from a very early age. I've known about the FUCKING MASS GRAVES FULL OF CHILDREN'S CORPSES for at least a decade. I only recently found out that most settler Canadians claim to have only found out about it with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings, which I don't really believe because I tend to attribute to malice what I can't believe is stupidity.
So, of course, we're going to destroy the records. Thousands of people were brave enough to testify to the rape, torture, destruction of their language and culture, and horrific abuse they suffered at the hands of the state and church, and the state has decide this isn't worth keeping. Probably in another ten years, it can be entirely forgotten. If there's one thing settler Canadians are great at, it's forgetting.
Oh yes, they're claiming that they're going to contact the survivors and ask if they want their records archived rather than shredded (obviously they do, though, or they wouldn't have fucking testified in the first place, would they?) but since a lot of them are dead and they're aging in general and we're not exactly talking about a stable population, I'm guessing they'll say, "oh, we tried to call them but the phone was out of service, into the shredder with the testimony."
And then Canada can go back to pretending its a shining example of human rights when it instituted genocide on a mass scale and there are dead children buried in unmarked graves.
Wait, what?
This fills me with so much rage I'm shaking almost too much to type.
I grew up knowing about residential schools. It wasn't exactly a secret, and it ended within my lifetime. I knew they were rape, torture, and death camps from a very early age. I've known about the FUCKING MASS GRAVES FULL OF CHILDREN'S CORPSES for at least a decade. I only recently found out that most settler Canadians claim to have only found out about it with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission findings, which I don't really believe because I tend to attribute to malice what I can't believe is stupidity.
So, of course, we're going to destroy the records. Thousands of people were brave enough to testify to the rape, torture, destruction of their language and culture, and horrific abuse they suffered at the hands of the state and church, and the state has decide this isn't worth keeping. Probably in another ten years, it can be entirely forgotten. If there's one thing settler Canadians are great at, it's forgetting.
Oh yes, they're claiming that they're going to contact the survivors and ask if they want their records archived rather than shredded (obviously they do, though, or they wouldn't have fucking testified in the first place, would they?) but since a lot of them are dead and they're aging in general and we're not exactly talking about a stable population, I'm guessing they'll say, "oh, we tried to call them but the phone was out of service, into the shredder with the testimony."
And then Canada can go back to pretending its a shining example of human rights when it instituted genocide on a mass scale and there are dead children buried in unmarked graves.
