The term “Final Solution” was not coined by the Nazis, but by Indian Affairs Superintendent Duncan Campbell Scott in April of 1910 when he referred to how he envisioned the “Indian Problem” in Canada being resolved. Scott was describing planned murder when he came up with the expression, since he first used it in response to a concern raised by a west coast Indian Agent about the high level of deaths in the coastal residential schools. On April 12, 1910, Scott wrote:
“It is readily acknowledged that Indian children lose their natural resistance to illness by habitating so closely in these schools, and that they die at a much higher rate than in their villages. But this alone does not justify a change in the policy of this Department, which is geared towards the final solution of our Indian Problem.”
(Department of Indian Affairs Superintendent D.C. Scott to B.C. Indian Agent General Major D. McKay, DIA Archives, RG 10 series).
In 1920, under Scott’s direction, it became mandatory for all native children between the ages of seven and fifteen to attend one of Canada’s Residential Schools. In the 1930’s he brought over German doctors to do medical experiments on our children. According to the study the majority of the lives of these children were extinguished. School children are taught his poetry (‘the Battle of Lundy’s Lane’) with no mention of his role as the butcher of the country’s First Nations people.
“I want to get rid of the Indian problem. I do not think as a matter of fact, that the country ought to continuously protect a class of people who are able to stand alone… Our objective is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question, and no Indian Department, that is the whole object of this Bill.” -Duncan Campbell Scott
Between 1920 and 1969, government-sponsored United Catholic Church boarding schools converted ‘savage’ Indian and Eskimo children to Christianity. 10 months of the year the native children were taken away from their families and culture. They were given numbers to identify themselves when they arrived at the schools, severely punished if caught speaking their own indigenous language and never allowed to laugh, to read, to hug or talk of their native heritage, deeply scarring them for life. Now revealed,pedophilia rings, torture, sterilization and experiments at the hands of the nuns and priests were commonplace.
Designed for genocide, many schools had a 50% death rate.
