Two events occurred this past week in both countries that underlined the nature of historical racism. The first is the one-hundredth anniversary of the Tulsa race massacre which took place May 31 and June 1,1921 in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In its 1996 examination of events, the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 was able to confirm 39 dead, 26 Black and 13 White, based on contemporary autopsy reports, death certificates and other records. However, the commission gave several estimates ranging from 75 to 300 dead, some of whom we now know were buried in unmarked mass graves. Following the bombings and fires, about 10,000 Black people were left homeless in Tulsa. Property damage amounted to more than $1.5 million in real estate and $750,000 in personal property (equivalent to $32.65 million in 2020).
The second event is the very recent discovery in Kamloops, British Columbia, of a mass grave containing the remains of 215 children once housed in a former Indian Residential School that closed in 1978. Canada’s residential schools were compulsory boarding schools run by the government and religious authorities during the 19th and 20th Centuries with the aim of forcibly assimilating indigenous youth. From about 1863 to 1998, more than 150,000 indigenous children were taken from their families and placed in these schools. The children were often not allowed to speak their language or to practise their culture, and many were mistreated and abused. Large numbers of indigenous children were never returned to their home communities. The school in Kamloops was the largest in the residential system. Opened under Roman Catholic administration in 1890, the school had as many as 500 students when enrolment peaked in the 1950s. The children’s remains — some as young as three years old —were found with the help of a ground-penetrating radar during a survey of the school.
What is even sadder about these two events is that they were never part of a history or civics curriculum in the U.S. or Canada until very recently. The Tulsa race massacre was largely omitted from local, state, and national histories until 2020 when the massacre formally became a part of the Oklahoma school curriculum. Until a commission launched by the Canadian government in 2008 to document the impacts of the system of Indian Residential Schools, few Canadians would have ever even heard of this part of Canada’s indigenous history. When I was in high school in the mid-1960s, there was absolutely nothing in our Canadian history books about this “shameful” colonial policy. It was only in 2008 that the then-prime minister Stephen Harper, on behalf of the Canadian government, formally apologised for the system. The Canadian government subsequently signed an agreement with the Assembly of First Nations pledging to pay a lump sum in compensation to former students of Indian residential schools, expected to include tens of thousands of affected persons and families.
Systemic racism of course continues to exist today in both countries. Denying its existence is denying the historical evolution of racially-motivated policies and activities perpetrated by governments and institutions in both countries. As a society attempting hopefully to improve race relations, we need to be aware of our histories and to discuss their relevance and importance in order to really understand and appreciate our current situation. Hopefully, as in the case of the above two cases, this much needed discussion should begin among our youth and teachers in our schools.
FROLITICKS 