Lives Devoid of Meaningful Purpose

Sometimes it seems near to impossible to do anything right, despite the best of intentions. And often enough human communities do act out of the conviction that their decisions are made with the best of intentions. Those intentions being to endow children with the wherewithal to experience learning opportunities of a kind not available to them in the communities in which they traditionally live.

Encouraging government and church groups to join forces to establish a network of residential schools for children of aboriginal origin. The children would be taken from their homes and removed to the residential schools, where throughout the school year they would learn the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic, geography and history. Admittedly, not their own history necessarily.

They would learn these things, in a language strange to them, not their own tribal languages, that they used all their lives to communicate with their families and their friends on Indian Reserves, but another, exotic one unfamiliar and urgently pressed upon them. They would also be taught practical life-skills and sports.

Take young children away from their home settings and you have children that become home-sick, once they transcend their initial fear; children who yearn to return to the familiar and the comforting. Young boys separated from their families at an early age in Britain to attend "public" (private) schools suffered similar pangs of suffering and longing for home.

And the physical punishments they endured, the humiliations, and the occasions of abuse, including sexual abuse were legendary. While their parents may have been aware of these inconvenient circumstances, this was the tradition of the upper class and the privileged, the wealthy and the titled, and not to be forsworn simply because children detested it.

In Canada, thousands of aboriginal children of Indian and Inuit ancestry were taken from their homes and installed in residential schools. And while many of those now-grown residents feel the lessons they learned there in practical self-help and basic education served them well throughout their lives, this opinion is hardly shared by all.

Certainly not by those many who felt their lives to have been irretrievably ruined by the experience. Whose resentment of having been taken from their families and having been exposed to what they say was rough treatment verging on abuse, and to neglect and absolute abuse, including abuse of a sexual nature has long caused them to blame that well-meant system for their later inability to get on with life.

It is entirely possible that the virally unpleasant conditions in which Canada's First Nations live in too many Indian Reserves, with patchy health services, poor education opportunities, few-to-no employment opportunities, substandard housing and a lack of dependably potable water, is the real culprit. Passivity to their condition, dependence on alcohol and drugs saps the spirit.

Yet these communities insist they must live in the traditional ways of their forefathers, despite that modern conditions are so far different from that of their forbears. They no longer live as hunter-gatherers; their traditional diet has been vulgarized by imported fast food and unhealthy nutritional choices impairing their health as surely as drink and drugs do.

No decent employment opportunities leads to resentment and depression. Blaming the residential schools experience is as handy an excuse as any. That First Nations suffer social discrimination in the present day is hardly to be credited. That First Nations people fail to sufficiently respect themselves to make the effort to make something of their lives, to reach out for opportunities is a general failure.

A failure not only of the entire country to help the First Nations communities position themselves more advantageously, but more to the point, a distinct failure on the part of the Assembly of First Nations and generally, the various First Nations Councils and chiefs which have steadfastly overlooked and failed to meet the real needs of their people.

The Government of Canada, through the Indian Act and through the reliance on elected chiefs of First Nations tribes have all failed to meet even the basic needs of First Nations. Truth is, government hardly knows what to do, where to turn, and the chiefs insist on their traditional right to accept funding and allocate it as they will.

The distinct failure of any and most attempts to move the matter of disadvantaged First Nations toward a completed agenda, the lack of movement on Aboriginal Claims, the abandonment of aboriginal children to inadequate education opportunities, speaks as a monumental national failure of the first order.

And although Prime Minister Stephen Harper had the grace and the vision to offer, on behalf of all Canadians, a sincere apology to the 'survivors' of Indian residential schools, the cash settlements have done little, it would appear, to assuage the wounds, nor to advance the lives of those same Canadians in any meaningful manner.

News that the cash compensation, instead of restoring some modicum of self-regard has instead caused deaths among these Canadians, is disheartening in the extreme. Recipients of that compensation have gone on to squander it, drinking themselves to death, drugging themselves to death, and committing suicide.

There are most certainly times when perplexed and well-meaning outsiders frantically attempt to compensate for the unrealized harm they have done to others, and it all amounts to nothing of any value. Sad beyond understanding.