Last week, many Canadians were gratified to learn that the International Criminal Court (ICC) had issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Maria Lvova-Belova, Russia’s Commissioner for Children’s Rights.
They are alleged to have directed the mass abduction of Ukrainian children and their indoctrination into Russian culture, the culture of their people’s enemy.
We know without thinking that this is a monstrous crime. But can we, at the same time, ignore what it means about us?
At its heart, the story of Canada is the story of kidnapping at enormous scale.
“Take the Indian out of the child,” our first prime minister entreated. And dutifully we set to work. We passed legislation, erected buildings, founded institutions and branches of government. We set in motion the inexorable power of the state, power fettered only by democracy, and those civilized enough to vote agreed it was for the best.
There must have been dissenters, but we do not know their names.
Our police officers, our federal agents, our social workers and our clergy took Indigenous children by the hand. Sometimes with force. Always with the cruelty of our collective shaming.
We said we would make them less stupid, less crude, less like their parents and their people.
We did not think of equality or acceptance. After they spoke our languages and practiced our religion, we would continue to despise them all the same.
When societies are without children, generation after generation, everything dies. The knowledge of millennia, the knowledge of how to live as a people — it all withers to nothing.
Cultural genocide, our former Chief Justice has called it. The single indelible mark Canada has made on human history is the deliberate erasure of cultures — many, many cultures — some partial, others total.
