These walking lies had nothing to say to their brothers and sisters that did not sound false, ugly, and harmful they only mimicked their masters. After a short stay in the university they were sent home to their reserves or unleashed in the cities, whitewashed. They picked promising youths, they made them drink the firewater principles of capitalism and of Western culture they educated the Indian out of them, and their heads were filled and their mouths were stuffed with smart-sounding hypocrisies, grand greedy words that stuck in their throats but which they spit out nonetheless. The white élite undertook to manufacture a Native élite. In this unending colony the truth stood naked, but the settlers preferred it hidden away or at least dressed: the Natives had to love them and all they had done, something in the way a cruel father is still loved by the children who are wounded by his selfish hands.
Between the two there were hired chiefs, an Indian Affairs bureaucracy, and a small bourgeoisie, all three shams from the very beginning to the end, which served as go-betweens.
The former had the land the others had the memory of it. Not so very long ago, in Canada there numbered just less than fourteen million inhabitants: thirteen million human beings, and half a million Natives.
0 kommentar(er)
