The Aboriginals in Canada

For many years it has been observed that the natives or aboriginal people in Canada has been taken advantage of their rights and freedom and continue to exist under oppression resulting to many unacceptable conditions.Canada has a   long history of Colonianism and Capitalism that affect the life of the natives emotionally and mentally. The Colonialism and Capitalism resulted to undertakings, unfair treatment, and inequality that have tormented the Aboriginal people for many centuries and are still frightful realities today. The evidences of inequality are very much shown in the remains or results of the residential school system and in the Oka Crisis of 1990 today or in the 20th century.



The term residential schools refers to an extensive school system set up by the Canadian government and administered by churches that had the nominal objective of educating Aboriginal children but also the more damaging and equally explicit objectives of indoctrinating them into Euro-Canadian and Christian ways of living and assimilating them into mainstream Canadian society. The residential school system operated from the 1880s into the closing decades of the 20th century. The system forcibly separated children from their families for extended periods of time and forbade them to acknowledge their Aboriginal heritage and culture or to speak their own languages. Children were severely punished if these, among other, strict rules were broken. Former students of residential schools have spoken of horrendous abuse at the hands of residential school staff: physical, sexual, emotional, and psychological. Residential schools provided Aboriginal students with an inferior education, often only up to grade five, that focused on training students for manual labour in agriculture, light industry such as woodworking, and domestic work such as laundry work and sewing.1


The arrangement in 1911 agreement and the discussion during the negotiation period was clear that there was a...