Tribune. Le Monde on July 10 publishes an op-ed by Indigenous historian Crystal Gail Fraser: “We clearly still don’t know the whole truth about residential schools” on the issue of residential schools in Canada. I share the indignation of Mme Fraser in front of the terrible injustices committed against the indigenous peoples of Canada and am sensitive to his description of the living conditions in the Indian residential schools.
However, his tribune contains untruths and abuses of language that do not serve the cause of justice and truth. Mme Fraser states that Canadian Indian law, which she points out is still in force, “ criminalizes certain cultural practices (ceremonies, sun dancing, etc.), prohibits locals from taking counsel and provides for the forced placement of children in “Indian residential schools” “. It would have been honest to point out that these scandalous clauses have not applied to natives for seventy years because they were removed from the law in 1951.
Mme Fraser denounces “ policies aimed at starving “ indigenous peoples. It is indisputable that colonial and ethnocentric policies had catastrophic effects on the living conditions of indigenous people, but to claim that these effects were the intended purpose of these policies is an affront to the truth.
Lies and exaggerations are counterproductive
In Canada, there has been a shameful policy of subjugating aboriginal people to a culture considered superior. Religion was a privileged instrument of this “Civilizing mission” inherited from French and then British colonization. The term “Cultural genocide” appropriate to describe this situation? Perhaps, but then it would be possible to affirm that France practiced a genocidal policy in the majority of its colonies and even within France, in Brittany and Occitania in particular.
Use of the term “Genocide” to describe colonial oppression carries the risk of trivializing a concept coined to define an extreme hateful action aimed at physically eradicating ethnic groups such as the Jews in the Nazi era, the Tutsi in Rwanda or the Armenians during the Great War.
Convinced of the merits of anti-racist claims in general and indigenous people in particular, I am concerned about the lies and exaggerations which only serve to fuel the reaction against these claims. In Canada, as in France, a right-wing movement opposed to pluralism is instrumentalizing the language abuse of anti-racists to discredit the promotion of minority rights. In the field of lies and emotion, racists will always be more effective than us. Let us stay on the ground of truth where the antiracists will always be the strongest!