Monthly Archives: May 2018

Reflection Questions

Question: Should today’s government be held responsible to decisions past governments have made?

 

Today’s government didn’t completely connect with the past government, meaning they didn’t have much to do with it. It’s possible that if today’s government laws and beliefs were the same back at that time, something like residential schools wouldn’t have happened.

 

The government is what caused it in the first place. Though they may not be the same now, the government itself still made those decisions in the past, and if lead by the wrong people again, something wrong could happen again in the future. People may even think bad things are happening now with our current government, because they don’t agree with some things.

 

I don’t think that today’s government should be held accountable for it, as they clearly would not have wanted it to happen in the first place. Even if they believed otherwise, they were still not the same people to make those options. It’d be like shaming one specific country for doing something, even if it was in the past and their current leaders even disagree with it.

Inter-Generational Impacts

While the Whites believed that this was right,

The Indians didn’t like this school hygiene.

They all wanted to stand up and fight

As they all knew what this would mean.

 

For generations, their culture stayed the same

But the Whites began to take their aim.

They left the older. Strong and firm.

They took the younger and made them turn.

 

They were stripped of their own identity

And were told to be ashamed of their own ethnicity.

They were told their culture was wrong

And was told this new one is where they belong.

 

Graduates were sent back to their families

To replace the older and wise.

The family then heard of the agonies,

But this new culture, would still be advertised.

 

 

In other words, these essentially brainwashed graduates would return home and take lead of their tribe, and change things that suit the Whites better, causing the next generations to do the same, if not put in a Residential school anyway.