No more settler tears, no more humanitarian consternation: Recognizing our racist history and present NOW!

Abstract

The recent ‘discoveries’ of the remains of the 215 murdered children at the Kamloops residential school, and the 751 murdered children at the Marieval residential school in Saskatchewan, has, for many, brought to the forefront the systematic and willful negation of Canada’s genocidal settler colonial history that continues today. We write as two white settler colonialists with European descent (Thomas and Wendy) and one non-status Indigenous person from the Oneida Nation (Catherine) in what is today called Canada. What we find most striking is the outrage and outpouring of white tears in the aftermath of these ‘discoveries’; this outrage is both perplexing and offensive. It is perplexing as these are not ‘discoveries’ at all. Indigenous people have always known about these massacres, about the children who would go out to the field at night and never return; about the bodies that were never returned to their families; about the children who were told their parents never wanted to see them again and were forcibly placed into settlers’ homes; children who were tortured and molested to ‘beat the Indian out of the child’; the countless suicides in bathrooms; and the forced abortions and sterilizations of girls who were raped by priests and clergy, to name only a few of the atrocities (Berrera, 2021; Mosby, 2013). Indigenous people have been screaming and pleading for decades to be heard, to be listened to, and to be believed (Kestler-D’Amour, 2021). Countless oral histories and traditional historical accounts, reports, declarations r(e.g., United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples), commissions (e.g., Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada), court battles, etc. have sought to bring these stories to the forefront and yet, we ask, where was the outrage then?