It's long overdue. Though rehearsed, it seemed candid and sincere. Now ... when do the Churches own up for the abuse?
What did you think of the government's apology to aboriginal Canadians?
- Thread starter CBC News
- Start date
At some point, not too far down the road, the government will have to make a decision on how long we continue to financially support native Canadians. Their numbers are growing rapidly and it would be best if we don't leave it too long.
They've all paid out now in the reparation payments. And if people keep pushing the way they do in the churches, there will be apologies. The problem is the stubborn heads of the church don't always agree with their parishes. So you may have whole congregations of Christians wanting to issue an apology, while the priests and ministers drag their heels and mumble about how the abuse and pedophilia was unfortunate but excusably not the fault of the institution at large.
Admitting fault doesn't come easily to a group who think they've been granted all their power by God Himself. To stand up and state that they overlooked the extremely vulnerable nature of those children, and didn't do a good enough job protecting them from the possibility of harm, seems to be beyond the men and women who claim to live their lives following the path of a man who taught humility.
Oh, I was discussing the chance of a forthcoming apology, not what prompted them to take on the residential schools in the first place.
I'll gladly delve into that.
Ethnocentricity... from all points of view. The government, the churches, and the people, all pitied and felt they needed to 'fix' the natives, because yes, we do view the world according to our own skin color. How many native spiritual drawings have black people in them? Their spirits, if they weren't animal, were depicted as native. Every ethnicity is guilty of it. Just not all end up in a position that the white man was in, to try to make their view everyone else's reality to.
Now, to my understanding, the government set out a program, and hired out those schools to the churches. I'm awfully young and haven't done as much reading as I probably should have on the issue. And while I feel the churches should be apologizing for not giving those kids enough protections, the schools were a government program, and the churches were hired lackies. I don't know that you can blame the residential schools on what or who the churches view God as. Perhaps you can... perhaps not... I don't really know what the jumping off point was for the whole debacle wolf.