Ah, relativity, the great boon of first-world countries. Indeed, when one thinks about the calamities and social injustices that are running rampant all over the world, it’s easy for such people as New Zealanders, Spaniards, Canadians, and other such citizens to think to themselves: “You know what? We’ve actually got it pretty good, all things considered.”
But, putting aside the point that it dissuades us from thinking about how things could be better, these attitudes also allow us to shy away from dark pasts that such countries have yet to make up for. Canada, with its horrific sprawl of mass graves at former residential school sites, is and should be beholden to one such past.
That said, is screaming in a little girl’s face the solution to such an issue? Yeah, no, definitely not.
Nevertheless, someone thought it productive to try a stunt like that anyway. If you’ll peep the thoroughly unpleasant, 45-second interaction posted by TikTok‘s @alexis_004_, the person in question speedwalks intimidatingly up to a little girl and her mother, and begins screaming about how evil Canada is; a tirade they carry over to the people sitting on a nearby bench. It only escalates when the little girl starts crying, and our indignant subject wheels around, furiously urging her to cry even more, claiming that Canada is just as bad as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. This expands to every onlooker in the vicinity, who, if this person is to be believed, are all guilty of Canada’s evils.
This is, of course, an entirely counterproductive way to have conversations about the past, but that doesn’t mean these conversations shouldn’t be had at all. After all, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, the last residential school in Canada only closed in the year 1996. For those of you not in the know, residential schools were established in the year 1880 as a joint enterprise between Christian churches and the Canadian government to assimilate Indigenous youth into more Euro-Canadian ways of being. Here, staff endeavored to “kill the Indian in the child” by isolating the children from their culture and scorning it, all while subjecting them to unthinkable physical, emotional, spiritual, and sexual abuse. Over 4,000 children died during their time in residential schools, and thousands more carry related trauma (generational and otherwise) to this day.
On a more personal anecdote, I, a Canadian who attended college in Canada, subsequently became familiar with land acknowledgments, in which certain events and lectures would begin with the acknowledgment that they were taking place on unceded land that was forcibly taken from Indigenous people. Typically, we would stand for these acknowledgments, but I had one professor who never did, and their reasoning fell along the lines of “If we actually cared about the fact that it’s unceded, we’d give the land back.”
There is, of course, only so much that the host of a university event can do in the realm of national reparations on a scale that large, but I think about my professor’s point a lot; when does the virtue of awareness turn into unrightly absolving oneself of responsibility?