Lies and Deracination

Canada's newest holiday: celebrating cultural genocide with more cultural genocide

LiXin Yin

A few days ago, I sat down at the local hipster cafe to enjoy the early, still relatively warmish days of the Canadian autumn while watching the world go by. Over the course of the afternoon I noticed a number of people, predominantly middle-aged women, attired in orange. My first assumption was that there must be a marathon or some other such event taking place. As it turned out, the garish theme was a signal of solidarity with Canada’s newest national holiday: Truth and Reconciliation Day.

A year ago our effeminate Crime Minister announced the first National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Voice quavering with carefully stage-managed contrition, eyes glistening with the calibrated suggestion of tears, the rainbow princess proclaimed that henceforth the 30th of September was to be set aside to commemorate the heinous crime against humanity represented by Canada’s ill-considered and clumsy attempt at assimilating the red man into Anglo-European society. Appropriately enough given that the entire thing is an exercise in Liberal Party self-aggrandizement, the day is a statutory holiday only for federal employees – the rest of us are expected to atone for the sins of our fathers while wagecucking.

The announcement came in the context of a national psychotic break occasioned by the publication in the New York Times of a blood libel against Canadian whites generally and the Catholic Church specifically, to the effect that Canadian soil was littered with the mass graves of native children that had been systematically exterminated at the residential schools which were, it was implied, the colonial equivalent of Auschwitz. Before long churches were being burned and statues of Canadian statesmen were being vandalized and toppled. It was, as one official in the governing Liberal Party put it, Canada’s George Floyd moment.

That characterization has turned out to be accurate in more ways than one. The protests were violent and destructive, with the worst of it perpetrated by exactly the same white kids that rioted over George Floyd. The political class grabbed the opportunity to engage in conspicuous soul-searching and unsubtle finger-wagging: our ancestors were bad men, we are most certainly awful racists, we have to ‘do better’ ... but our political class (white as they may be) are just the caring, sharing, concerned, enlightened people to make it all better. Which they’ll start doing by making sure every institution in Canada ritually acknowledges that it’s built on the traditional unceded native lands of eight overlapping Indian bands. Oh and if you’d grant tenure to a few more white women LARPing as native scholars and specializing in Indigenous Studies, that’d be great, too.

And just like George Floyd, the entire thing has turned out to be based on absolute nonsense.

Not a single mass grave has actually been found. What has been found are a few community cemeteries with unmarked graves, which nonetheless were generally known to their communities; and a few other sites in which ground-penetrating radar has detected disturbances in the soil, which might be graves, but could also very well be old septic systems. To date, not a single one of the supposed mass graves has been exhumed to verify the presence of even a single murdered child. Nor are there any plans to do so in the immediate future. Which is odd because you’d think everyone concerned would love nothing more than a pit full of skulls with which to underline their accusations.

Bari Weiss recently did an interview with a Canadian journalist who’s been covering the residential schools story for something like a couple of decades, which she entitled appropriately enough The Great Canadian Mass Graves Hoax. The journalist in question, Terry Glavin, immolated his career amongst Canada’s literati by writing a long-form piece examining the (lack of) evidence for the mass graves story, in which he traced its origins back to a defrocked and disgraced United Church minister, Kevin Annett. Annett made a name for himself several years ago during his own off-label Truth and Reconciliation Commission, during which he advanced lurid narratives in which the Catholic Church had helped the predatory pedophiles of the Royal Family collect indigenous children for use in dark Satanic rituals. According to Annett Canadian soil concealed a vast archipelago of mass graves, however the only evidence he seems to have produced of this systematic murder of native children was a chicken bone that he ran around the streets of Toronto waving in peoples’ faces as he claimed it was a baby’s femur or something. To their credit, native activists ultimately excommunicated him from their movement, coming to see him as a dangerous lunatic exploiting the very real emotional suffering of traumatized residential school alumni as props with which to accumulate Reddit gold.

It’s important to note that Glavin is very much a man of the old left, whose journalism is in the context of his activism on behalf of natives. He’s spent much of his life publicizing the abuses that took place at the residential schools, which he himself characterizes as cultural genocide. Put a pin in that, because I’m going to come back to it in a bit, but for now the main point is that when he called out the mass graves hoax he wasn’t doing that because he’s a racist white supremacist who hates the red man and wants to complete the system of Settler-Colonialist Idealism. He pushed back because he didn’t want all the hard work he did bringing attention to what actually did happen at the residential schools being undone by getting associated with histrionic conspiracy theories on the order of (as he puts it) Dan Brown and bigfoot.

It doesn’t matter that he’s precisely correct in fearing that outcome, any more than it matters that he spent decades fighting the good fight. So far as the Canadian left is concerned, Glavin is a traitor to the cause – just another old white dude who forgot to check his privilege at the door, and is feeding the fires of fascism that threaten to consume Our Democracy. Needless to say he’s not getting invited to parties anymore¹.

So, what actually did happen at the residential schools?

Over a century ago, near the end of the 19th century, Canada’s progressive elite decided that the Indian problem was in need of a lasting solution. The way they saw it, there were only really two options: exterminate them, or assimilate them. Leaving them be doesn’t seem to have been seriously considered: progressives have a deep-seated horror of simply letting well enough alone, since that violates their instinct to meddle and ‘improve’ things.

Extermination was possessed of a certain attractive finality. Just ask Uruguay, which gave their indigenous people the Red Wedding treatment in the 1830s. I hate to be the one to point this out², but no one ever gives the Uruguayans a hard time about this, for the rather obvious reason that there’s no one left to care. It’s very similar to the way that the Arabs are given a free pass for tens of millions of Sub-Saharan Africans wiped out in the overland slave trade: since the Arabs gelded all the male African slaves, and infanticided all the children born of female African sex slaves, there’s no genetic trace of the overland slave trade in modern Arabia, and therefore no persistent reminder of the historical crime. Given that North American whites get nothing but grief for both the Atlantic slave trade and the conquest of the New World, one might be tempted to draw ugly lessons about the historical wages of mercy, but I digress.

At any rate, Canada’s progressives decided that actual genocide was really a bit much, and so they opted for assimilation. The idea was fairly straightforward. Native children would be taken from their homes, and placed in boarding schools, where they would receive the absolute best quality education that money could buy. Boarding schools were then, as they are now, considered more or less the gold standard of primary and secondary education, and the Catholic clergymen entrusted with the task considered the absolute pinnacle of distinguished pedagogy. Under their tutelage, the savages would learn European languages, religion, mathematics, geography, and discipline, none of which they could hope to acquire left to their own devices. Thus prepared, they would be capable of taking their place alongside white Canadians as their equals in erudition, and go on to contribute to Canadian society and industry.

The residential schools, in other words, came from the same we-are-the-world, one-race-the-human-race, kumbaya-lollipops-and-rainbows view of humanity that animates progressivism to this day.

In practice the schools were an absolute catastrophe.

When white kids are put in boarding schools, it’s generally a bit traumatic for them to be separated from their families, but this is mitigated by their awareness that they are, after all, getting what is considered the best possible education, and that there is therefore a certain prestige associated with their attending the school. They know that their parents have saved and sacrificed to send them there, and that their presence is associated with their parents’ love for them and desire to give them the best possible start in life. Furthermore, and this cannot be emphasized too strongly, they are being educated in the organic culture of their own people, an intellectual tradition with which their very biology is inseparably intertwined. When they learn of the daring of Achilles, the greatness of Caesar, the intellectual acumen of Aristotle, it is in a very real sense their own inborn potential for daring, greatness, and intellect that is illustrated for them.

The experience of native children in the residential schools was nothing like this. Neither they nor their parents were asked if they wanted to attend: they were simply scooped up and enrolled. It was not their culture of which they learned, but an alien culture, an alien language, an alien history that had nothing, and could have nothing, to do with them. To learn only the traditions of Europe was not to emphasize to them their own potential for accomplishment, but instead to highlight their inferiority: while Europeans had been conquering empires, exploring philosophy, developing advanced mathematics, and constructing wonders of engineering, their ancestors had been picking their butts in the forest.

From all accounts many of the priests who educated them were quite brutal about it, as well. This was after all the era of spare the rod, spoil the child; corporal punishment was standard practice even in white schools, and the priests had even less compunction about beating the Indian out of the red child than they did about beating the devil out of the white kid. Infractions such as speaking their native language would earn the strap, for example.

Then there are the reports of sexual abuse. I see no reason to disbelieve these. Pederasts have always gravitated towards target-rich environments, and what better environment could there be than an isolated school in the forest, where the predator is alone with his prey?

Even without the beatings and the rape, however, the residential schools were all but guaranteed to traumatize their inmates. Kidnapping the children of another people, and raising them according to your own values, overwriting your own ways over their minds, is a vile societal crime. The Ottoman practice of abducting Slavic boys to be raised in madrassas to become jannisaries to be hurled against their own people in battle elicits a special horror in the European mind, even centuries after it ended. The residential schools were an attempt to do a similar thing on a comprehensive and ruthlessly systematic scale, with the explicit goal of utterly wiping out hundreds of nations and replacing them with an artificial homogeneity.

It’s no surprise that the legacy of the residential schools has been generations of alcoholism and drug addiction: deaths of despair ravaging a broken people. It might have been more merciful to simply wipe them out ... but it would have been far better still to simply leave them alone to find their own way, to join the modern world under their own terms, in their own fashion, with their culture, traditions, and languages intact.

But progressives can never leave well enough alone. They always have to meddle.

Walking home from the cafe, I happened to pass by the local high school. The sidewalk in front of it was decorated with a long row of hand-written signs in the earnest balloon font beloved of teenage girls, placards bearing the enumerated recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, along with a line of children’s shoes no doubt intended to symbolize the faceless legions of indigenous youth slaughtered in service of the Royal Family’s voracious sexual rites. It was the sort of display that could only have been envisioned in the dull bureaucratic minds of a coven of AWFLs³, an ostentatious visual boast that they have taken your children in the service of their own politics, and they don’t feel the least bit bad about it.

A generation of white children are being raised to hate themselves, to hate their culture, to hate their ancestors, to perceive nothing in their heritage but bigotry, hatred, oppression, and barbarism. Their minds are being overwritten with the values and morality of an alien culture, with the explicit goal of forever terminating their connection with everything that came before. The wages of this deracination are depression and drug addiction, just as one would expect ... but it’s for their own good and all for a good cause. And besides, they’re receiving the gold standard of education.

LiXin Yin

Get Telegrams From Barsoom

1. That’s worse than it sounds in Canada. Canada’s literary scene is very Soviet. The entire thing is supported by government funding, and one’s existence within it has precisely nothing to do with market demand for one’s work – which is generally nonexistent for CanLit – and everything to do with maintaining a good reputation amongst the literary councils, which in turn rests upon saying only the Approved Things in any and all public and private circumstances. That cozy Stalinist cloister of cynically disingenuous literary incest is exactly as effective at producing compelling literature as you’d expect.

2. No I don’t.

3. ‘Coven’ being the official name for a group of AWFLs.