Canada Boarding School Horror Reminds Us Of The Inhumane Existence Heaped On Children Of So Called 'Criminal Tribes' In India

As the remains of 215 children of indigenous ‘Indian’ communities are discovered in Church-run residential schools in Canada, what is bewildering is the fact that the disaster seems to be common knowledge around there for generations.

The book Finding the Mother Tree, is the least likely book where you would expect to find a tangential reference to such a school of horror. Written by Dr. Suzanne Simard, Professor of Forest Ecology in the University of British Columbia, the book is about 'tree connectivity and communication and its impact on the health and biodiversity of forests.' The book came in May this year. You find this conversation inside the book:

"“Yeah, Tiff and I are in the bunkhouse on the Onward, near the Mission. You know, the Indian Residential School the pedophile priests ran.”

"He looked at his feet in disgust over what those bastards had done to the kids. This part of Canada’s history was shameful. Kelly and I knew kids who’d been at the school and had seen firsthand how it destroyed plenty of them."

"Some had escaped, like our friend Clarence, now a traditional cedar-totem carver on Haida Gwaii." (Simard, Suzanne. Finding the Mother Tree (p. 137). Penguin Books Ltd. Kindle Edition)

So the point is they know. The society knows, The authority know. The Church definitely knows. But they chose silence. It was only this particular discovery that shed some light on the heinous crime of Christendom on indigenous spiritual traditions.

But the Church will choose and the Western civilisation, including the media, will choose when to say 'sorry' and the quantum of apology and the party the apology is offered to. They will apologise to a memory or a thin veil of existence of the native ‘Indians’. They will apologise inside the Church. They will apologize on the altar of a Christian God and in a Christian way.

The Church will apologise only when it knows the enemy against whom the crimes were committed has been vanquished thoroughly. If the situation so compels, the Pope may even denounce the Holocaust but when a dictator spews anti-semitic rhetoric of deicide charges against the Jews, the Pope would remain silent.

In the case of India, the Pope will neither issue an apology, or even utter a soft 'sorry' for the longest inquisition in the history of the world which the Church wreaked on Indian soil.

In the case of the now-endangered native ‘Indians’, the Canadian Bishops may at some point ask the Pope to issue an apology. But in the case of the Indian clergy, they themselves would declare that the Pope need not and should not apologise.

The children of India too had endured such a fate as their spiritual cousins across the Pacific and Atlantic.

“Segregation is one of the most effective means of combating epidemics of crime.” These were the words of Booth-Tucker of the Salvation Army. And the context was 'civilising' the children of the communities declared as “criminal” by the British.

Who were these “criminal tribes” and castes?

The Sansis of Punjab relate themselves historically to emperor Ranjit Singh. They were made “criminal tribes” because they resisted the British colonialism.

In my own Tamil Nadu, documents from the 18 century, of the famous Vaishnavite Thirumohur temple, describe how when the armies of the British East India company plundered the temples, carrying away the sacred jewellery loaded on camels, Kallars— the traditional village as well as highway guards of the region— attacked the British plunderers and retrieved the loot and handed it back to the temple.

Soon after, when the British established their administration in the region, they promptly declared the Kallars as a 'criminal tribe'.

In 1910, Booth-Tucker had written his Criminocurology or, The Indian Criminal And What To Do With Him— a veritable 20th century Malleus Maleficarum, demanding stronger action and a “gospel of compulsion”.

In 1911 the Criminal Tribes Act (CTA) was reissued in India and it was decided that the “criminal tribes” were redeemable by increasing punitive measures. The CTA of 1911, in its provisions 17 and 19, gave power to the authorities to separate and remove children from their parents and transfer any child to any settlement or school in any part of British India.

On 13 June 1896, an anonymous letter to The Hindu reported how the British propaganda of terming Kallars as a criminal caste had led to the burning of Kallar houses. Women and children were burnt to death. The letter writer had agonised, 'Mr Editor, what have these poor Kallars done to the Government?'

It was only after 1947 did some officials and leaders became sensitive to the utterly inhuman conditions which the so-called criminal tribes and castes were subjected to in India. Thus, the terse report by A. Aiyappan— then Secretary for the Aboriginal Tribes Welfare Enquiry Committee (1948) — recorded the condition of Bitragunta settlement near Madras as like those of “Nazi concentration camps” and of children being kept “behind barbed wire as though they are very dangerous animals”.

At Stuartpuram settlement in Tamil Nadu, the Committee recorded evidence about “some high-handed actions of the manager” which resulted in “a volume of feeling against the management being left in the hands of missionaries”.

The Committee report still showed a colonial hangover— accepting the basic premise that these communities “need” the settlement and that “the case for continuing the work of the existing settlements and, if possible, extending and improving them is stronger now than it was in the past”.

The committee also flagged its concern for a beef-taboo entering the tribal communities through what it called “Hindu missionaries”. Yet, the stark reality of the cruelty they witnessed forced them to concede that the boarding school system, introduced by Christian missionaries with British support, “involved cruelty both to the children and the parents”.

Will we ever fully uncover the extent of crimes these missionaries committed against our own children? Alas, they too are kids of non-Christian Gods and Goddesses like their Canadian brothers and sisters.

(A section of this article originally appeared in Swarajya in an article on a similar topic).