The Canadian Holocaust, Essay Example

Today in 2013, few Canadians are aware of a situation that harkens back to the dark days of World War II and Hitler’s Germany when European Jews were exterminated and murdered by the tens of thousands. This situation is known as the Canadian Holocaust or Genocide. It is not a question about whether such a terrible event could possibly happen in Canada, but rather a cold, hard fact that millions of Native Indian Canadians have been tortured, raped, murdered, and exterminated over the last two hundred years by white Canadians with links to the Canadian government and the Roman Catholic Church.

As difficult as it may be to believe, there is much hard evidence and reliable documentation to support the existence of the Canadian Holocaust. The first documented evidence is provided by Kevin Annett in his Chronology of Events related to the Canadian Holocaust or Genocide. In 1857, the Legislature of Upper Canada enacted the Gradual Civilization Act which “permanently disenfranchised all Indian and Metis peoples” and placed them in a “separate, inferior legal category” as compared to other Canadians. Twenty-three years later, the Canadian Parliament passed the Indian Act which gave an “inferior social status (to) native peoples” related to their language, traditions, and culture. One result of this act was that Native Canadian Aboriginals were forcibly “imprisoned on reserve lands (as) legal wards of the state” (Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust), thus making them non-citizens and the target for racial discrimination, torture, rape, and outright murder. More recently in late 2001, the Roman Catholic Church disclosed that it “hired a known and convicted sex offender and murderer” named Martin Saxey to “work as a dormitory supervisor at its Christie Indian Residential School in Tofino, British Columbia” in the 1960’s. As Annett relates, Saxey “subsequently raped and terrorized children at this school without ever being reprimanded or prosecuted” for his actions (Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust).

Another supportive note is that the Canadian Residential School System, in conjunction with the Roman Catholic Church and state authorities, “implemented a policy of genocide, rape and pedophilia” against Native Canadian Indians and Aboriginals during the middle years of the 20th century. Exactly how many Native Canadians were either traumatized or murdered is not known but estimates range as high as 25 million individuals; also, more than 50,000 aboriginal children have turned up missing over the last fifty years and are “unaccounted for from the residential schools operated by the Catholic and other churches on behalf of the British Crown” (The Canadian Holocaust).

In addition, according to the Akha Heritage Foundation, evidence supports the idea that the history of the Canadian Holocaust “implicates every level of government in Canada,” from the RCMP to mainline churches, corporations, local police, doctors, and judges. Not surprisingly, the “web of complicity in this killing machine” is so widespread that its “concealment has required an equally elaborate campaign of cover-up that has been engineered at the highest levels of power” in the nation of Canada (The Canadian Holocaust Genocide of the Indian Peoples in Canada). Unfortunately, this concealment continues today in 2013, for as Samuel Totten points out, the “plight of Aboriginal peoples in Canada with respect to the question of genocide” faces many on-going challenges with perhaps the most challenging being the need to “grow beyond narrow and polarizing questions of whether or not Canadian colonization” (being the British colonization of Canada in the 18th and 19th centuries) shares similarities with the Jewish Holocaust of World War Two (73). Certainly, the Canadian Holocaust or Genocide of the Native Canadian peoples needs to be stopped immediately so that Native Canadians can return to practice their cultures and traditions that date back long before the arrival of the white man in Canada.

Works Cited

Annett, Kevin. Hidden From History: The Canadian Holocaust. 2005. Web. 18 May 2013.

The Canadian Holocaust. 2008. Web. 18 May 2013.

The Canadian Holocaust Genocide of the Indian Peoples in Canada. The AkhanHeritage Foundation, 2006. Web. 18 May 2013.

Totten, Samuel. Genocide of Indigenous Peoples. New Brunswick, Canada: Transaction Publishers, 2011.