[PEN-L:29966] The Circle Game

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

From "The Circle Game: Shadows and Substance in the Indian Residential
School Experience in Canada" by Roland Chrisjohn and Sherri Young
with Michael Maraum. Theytus Books Ltd. Penticton, B.C. 1997

                           EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

What if the Holocaust had never stopped?

What if no liberating armies invaded the territory stormed over by
the draconian State? No compassionate throng broke down the doors to
dungeons to free those imprisoned within? No collective outcry of
humanity arose as stories on the State's abuses were recounted? And
no Court of World Opinion seized the State's leaders and held them in
judgment as their misdeeds were chronicled? What if none of this
happened?

What if, instead, with the passage of time the World came to accept
the State's actions as the rightful and lawful policies of a
sovereign nation having to deal with creatures that were less than
fully human? And, what if, curbing some of the more glaring
malignancies of its genocidal excesses, the State increasingly became
prominent as both a resource for industrial powers and as an
industrial power in its own right? What if the State could depend
upon the discretion of other nations, engaged in their own local
outrages, to wink at its past, so that the lie told to and accepted
by other nations was one the State could tell itself and its 'real'
citizens without fear of contradiction? What if the men who conceived,
fashioned, implemented, and operated the machinery of destruction
grew old and venerable and acclaimed, hailed as 'Fathers' of their
country and men of insight and renown?

What if the Holocaust had never stopped, so that for the State's
victims, there was no vindication, no validation, no justice, but
instead the dawning realization that this was how things were going
to be? What if those who resisted were crushed, so that others, tired
of resisting, simply prayed that the 'next' adjustment to what
remained of their ways of life would be the one that, somehow, they
would be able to learn to live with? What if some learned to hate who
they were, or to deny it out of fear, while others embraced the
State's image of them, emulating as far as possible the State's
principles and accepting its judgment about their own families,
friends and neighbors? And what if others could find no option other
than to accept the slow, lingering death the State had mapped out for
them, or even to speed themselves along to their State-desired end?

What if?

Then you would have Canada's [and the U.S. and elsewhere where there
are Indigenous Peoples] treatment of the North American Aboriginal
population in general, and the Indian Residential School Experience
in particular.

And here and now we are going to prove it to you. "


transcribed by Jim Craven


Louis Proyect
www.marxmail.org