Month: March 2016

One of the most shameful pages concerning Canadian federal institutions is undoubtedly the one concerning the educational sector. Already in the second half of the Ottocento, the British Crown had laid the groundwork — first with the Gradual Civilization Act of 1857, then with theIndian Act of 1876—to make populations native a mere matter of their own competence, effectively labeling them as a calegally lower tier of Canadian citizens. The Crown's goal was ovviamente to assimilate the native populations within the framework legal Canadian to make them his subjects. This became possible starting from the theosracist stories that the English colonists and Catholic missionaries shared: the "Indians" they represented a lower degree of civilization and civilization, their religion was demonic, the task of the "civilized" and God-fearing Europeans would therefore have been that of "killing the Indian in them" to make it possible at the same time conversion to the "one true God" and assimilation into the legal system of Western matrix that was rapidly forming. The English Crown and the four Christian Churches (Roman Catholic, Anglicana, Presbyterian and Methodist) came to the conclusion that the fastest way is safe to ensure the forced assimilation of the natives should have been based on the eeducation of the new generations: for this reason starting from the last years of the nineteenth century thousands of native children were forcibly removed a year agomiles to kick off the Indian Residential Schools program.