In Canadian culture I believe we tend to care more about international issues, but we struggle to acknowledge our own internal unsolved matters. As a country we are quick to criticize the poor treatment of people in other countries such as with slavery in the United States and with the Nazis under Hitler in Germany, but we are not accepting or even denying that similar treatment of people exists in Canada. Many non-indigenous Canadians have no idea nor care about the conflict that is still not fully resolved between the original land livers and the new. Since the arrival of European settlers coming in contact with the people indigenous to the land, the drastically different views on life have caused conflict between these two cultures. As a result of the settlers, the European culture became the dominant in Canadian society and took over the indigenous nations leaving them virtually powerless and insignificant. When the confederation of Canada was being assembled, it was difficult to include the indigenous nations because their concept of ownership, money and property was totally different than the vision of the new European settlers, and who also made no effort to explain this. Canadians, at that time, decided that indigenous people were too much of a hassle to understand, and claimed that they were dirty and uneducated because of the way that they lived. They wanted indigenous people to be gone from the newly settled land that they claimed was their own. European Canadians believed that the solution to this situation would be to assimilate the indigenous people and place those that did not want to adapt European culture on a reserve, out of the way of the new modern day society. This was the start of the cultural genocide that is going on in Canada still today. Some may argue that the treatment of indigenous people does not warrant the use of the term "genocide" because significant lives were not lost, unlike the Holocast. However, that does not matter. A culture lived by innocent people was lost. Canada has an issue that needs to be healed. Culture genocide is genocide.
While this may sound harsh, I believe it is the truth. Cultural genocide is not limited to the deliberate killing of a race with weapons. It is an act that also includes dehumanizing people and stripping them of their own respect and dignity. As we saw in history with Hitler and the Nazis, it is easy to treat people horribly when you no longer care about them or consider them human beings. While many Canadians would be horrified by the comparison of Canada to Nazi Germany, the reality is that impact of the treatment of indigenous people has left scars that our equally everlasting. Over the years the damage that our culture has caused to these human lives is unacceptable and irreversible. What happened in our country many years ago has left many indigenous people dead, tortured or still suffering socially, emotionally and physically. Survivors of Canada's cultural genocide are still dealing with these traumatic experiences with resulting mental illnesses or poverty. The novel Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese identifies with the realistic and current struggles of the indigenous people of Canada and this is represented through the eyes and the emotions of a child named Saul Indian Horse who had lived in a residential school for most of his childhood.