In October, The New Yorker released a beautiful short documentary about Joe Buffalo, an indigenous skateboarder who, like many thousands of others, suffered through the brutal Canadian Residential School system. Residential schools in Canada were a form of cultural genocide where children were taken from their families, and taught religion (typically Catholicism) and language and western ways under that guise that this was necessary to ‘civilize’ the people. Of course this was typical not just in Canada but in America and Australia, (as well, as surely South America, Africa, South East Asia and the Philippines. I would bet pretty much anywhere European colonialism touched, Native People would have suffered similar re-educational abuse, but I am no expert).
It is widely known about the ‘Sixties Scoop’ where this happened in a big wave of displacing children and ruining families, but it is only becoming more widely known that these was happening in Canada even as late as the 80’s and 90’s. Joe is one of the later generations that lived through this terrible system. Being about 40, he was a child in the 80s suffering these abuses.
Kill the Indian, Save the Man
The idea of these residential schools in the late 19th and 20th century (though they existed in America as early as the 18the century) came largely from American Army Officer Richard Pratt, who is quoted in a speech in 1892 as saying:
A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres. In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.
So of course, these guys thought they were being just incredible humanitarians here. And by contrast maybe they were, as a lot of the common sentiment to dealing with North American natives was to literally kill them all. It is an ugly part of Canadian and American history but very important to understand.
The Sixities Scoop
These issues didn’t just go away after the battles were fought and people removed from their land. The terrible treatment just changed shape. Much the same way that the end of Slavery in America was by no means the end of the issue. Slavery became forced labor prisons and share cropping, and became Jim Crow and became the Prison Industrial complex.
These problems of Racism and Subjugation have a long history and its woven in to our Countries law.
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Story from Joe Buffalo
Directed by Amar Chebib
Produced by Tony Hawk