Cooper: Residential school report won’t bring reconciliation – Calgary Herald

July 8, 2015

No Stampeding for this cowboy last weekend. I spent it reading the 382 pages (including 1,210 notes) of the report by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission called Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future.

The central chapter, The History, was crucial. It looks like a scholarly discussion of relations between Europeans and North Americans. Its purpose, however, was to establish the context for “the legacy,” namely the “integral part” of residential schools in “a conscious policy of cultural genocide.” Already we have a problem.

First, the reality of genocide is not to be qualified by adjectives. Second, the individuals who raped children in residential schools were sufficiently evil that humans can neither forgive nor punish them. Jesus of Nazareth said of such persons: “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.”

Read More: http://calgaryherald.com/opinion/columnists/cooper-residential-school-report-wont-bring-reconciliation