Will America learn lessons from Canada?

KIM SEUNG-JUNG
The author is an archaeology professor at the University of Toronto.

I first learned of the “Land Acknowledgement” after coming to Canada. It is a declaration read at a public event, and it goes, “We are on the lands of the Indigenous Peoples of thousands of years in history. I acknowledge the fact publicly and am grateful to work on this land.”

Memorial monuments to the First Nation are erected all over Canada, and a government agency — the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — has been established to publicly recognize the history of the country’s indigenous people. There are a number of benefits. The unique patterns found in indigenous cultures are legally protected and cannot be used by non-indigenous artists.

At first, it was difficult to understand why people praised the First Nations so much.

In the summer of 2002, Pope Francis visited Canada and officially apologized for indigenous residential schools that were once managed by the Catholic Church. The 139 indigenous residential schools, run by the government for about 150 years since the late 19th century, aimed to assimilate the “barbaric” indigenous people to white culture and society.

About 150,000 children were taken away from their families, assigned to boarding schools and put through a program to exterminate their cultures and languages. Cruel punishment of putting a needle through the tongue and sexual assaults were committed. It has been confirmed that more than 4,000 indigenous children died at boarding schools from illness, abuse and neglect. This is only a fraction of the history of abuse against the indigenous people.

Canada is trying to reflect on — and compensate for — its dark past, though belatedly, but the United States, which provided a prototype model for such boarding schools, has made no official apology yet, let alone provided compensation. I wonder if the United States will follow Canada’s example and acknowledge its history of abusing indigenous people — or if it will continue to push it off, as it has done in the past.