YCL-LJC Central Executive Committee, 31 May 2021
The Young Communist League of Canada – Ligue de la jeunesse communiste du Canada mourns the 215 children found at Kamloops Indian Residential School and calls for the Canadian state to end its genocide of Indigenous people and begin reconciliation now.
The discovery of 215 undocumented children’s bodies at the site of a former residential school (closed only in 1978) is devastating. It, however, comes as no surprise. Until only a handful of years ago, the residential school system in Canada abused, traumatized, and even killed children, stripping seven generations of survivors and victims of their cultures, their languages, their families, and their identities and self-conceptions as Indigenous people. The residential school system, operated by the colonial British Crown, the Canadian state, Canadian churches, and other accomplices had a sexual, physical, and mental abuse rate of nearly 100%, and mortality rates of up to 60%. Though the last residential school closed in 1996, shamefully within many of our lifetimes, this process of cultural and physical genocide continues.
Indigenous women across the country continue to be sterilized without their consent, Indigenous people are nearly a quarter of those incarcerated in Canadian prisons, and Indigenous children make up the vast majority of those in the foster care system, despite now constituting less than 5% of the country’s population — these are just some of the modern implementations of the same colonial policies that founded the Canadian state.
We reject categorizations of this discovery of 215 child victims as “reminders of a dark chapter in Canadian history”. The foundations of Canada are colonial, and the Canadian state has never made efforts to shed its colonial nature. With residential schools having still existed within many of our lifetimes, this is not simply a “dark chapter”, nor is it “history”: this is our present.
We as young communists call on a real process of reconciliation. No more belated apologies and no more empty platitudes. Canada must do the bare minimum and respond immediately and to the fullest extent to the 94 calls to action presented by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Despite indescribable trauma inflicted upon Indigenous people since the foundation of the Canadian state, Indigenous resistance continues. Young people across Canada are demanding a legitimate reckoning with genocidal Canadian policy: young Indigenous people and elders alike, many of whom come from families of residential school survivors or are survivors themselves, are demanding that the Canadian government, Canadian churches, the British Crown, and collaborators in this genocide openly acknowledge their involvement, end their complicity in ongoing genocide, and implement the 94 calls to action recommended by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Many have honoured these children, only 215 among countless others, by placing children’s shoes at the steps of residential schools, churches, and monuments glorifying those involved in anti-Indigenous genocide.
As young communists we demand a new Canadian system that explicitly enshrines the rights of all Indigenous and other oppressed nations within Canada and to allow these nations the direct ability to chart their future. We continue to fight against Canadian imperialism at home and abroad, for self-determination and the sovereignty of all people. No more sham apologies: we demand reconciliation and an end to genocide and national chauvinism now.