“Every Child Counts”
Mass Protests Against Genocide of Indigenous People. Fight for a Communist Future Where Every Child Matters
July 1—Ten thousand people marched in Montreal, Canada in solidarity with First Nations, Métis and Inuit people. This followed the tragic discovery of more than 1505 bodies of indigenous children out of the 150,000 missing in genocidal boarding schools between 1870 and 1997. Tens of thousands more marched in other cities throughout Canada.
When Europeans first invaded North America in the early 17th century, the indigenous people lived in societies based on sharing, cooperation, and collectivity. These were settled communities with both farming and hunting. They were egalitarian without private property. Women were respected and children were raised collectively. Abundance was shared and no-one went hungry. Marx’s collaborator Frederick Engels learned about pre-class communism by studying such societies. Communists today have much to learn from them to help point our way forward to scientific communism.
Schooling for Capitalist Genocide
The discovery of hundreds of children’s unmarked graves in residential schools illuminates the role of schooling in the imperialist genocide of indigenous people.
The first 250 years of English, Canadian and US conquest of indigenous people was a series of genocidal wars and broken treaties. By the 1870s, “Indian policy” in both countries shifted toward assimilation. The US and Canadian ruling classes ripped most indigenous children from their families and kept them captive in “residential schools.”
These schools, often run by churches, were part of a larger policy of destruction of the collective way of life of Native Americans/First Nations people in the growth of North American capitalism.
The US Army and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police rounded children up and sent them to the schools. Once there, children’s hair was cut and their traditional clothing taken from them. They were punished for speaking their native language, and for helping each other. The curriculum was centered on training them to be laborers and domestic servants.
“Self-reliance”—rather than collectivity—was part of the curriculum. Policy makers talked openly about conforming to white civilization, breaking up tribal relations, destroying “socialism,” and about teaching selfishness as the value essential to “civilization.”
The treatment of the First Nations/Native American children and youth that these murders exposed could hardly be called education. We call it capitalist schooling.
Capitalist schooling always exists to mold children and youth into what the capitalists need them to be.
These boarding schools had several related purposes:
*To steal the land of the indigenous people for capitalist agriculture, settlement and railroads.
*To destroy the collective and cooperative social relations of Native Americans/First Nations people.
*To drill racist ideas into indigenous children so that they would see themselves and their families as inferior to their white bosses. So that they would accept racist super-exploitation as farm laborers and domestic servants.
Over a hundred thousand children died in these schools. Canadian doctors estimated that one-fourth of the schoolchildren were dying of tuberculosis. They were so undernourished that they became subjects in “scientific experiments” to see how little food they could survive on. They were subject to sexual abuse, corporal punishment, and the psychological abuse of being removed from their families and communities.
There was always resistance. Children risked punishment to seek comfort from each other and demonstrate solidarity. Thousands ran away from these schools. Some died of exposure and misadventure along the way. Others were able to find their way home.
And there is resistance and anger amid the grief and mourning now.
The solution is not the appointment of indigenous women as Governor General in Canada and Secretary of the Interior in the US while capitalism continues its genocidal exploitation at home and abroad.
Neither is it in transforming the remaining First Nation/Native American schools into centers of ethnic nationalism to keep students focused on their separate culture instead of uniting with exploited workers of all “races” and ethnicities.
Indigenous and non-indigenous workers, students and others marched together in Montreal and across Canada this summer. Workers of all “races” marched together around the world last summer in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. They marched to demand a new future, one where Black Lives Matter and where Chaque Enfant Compte (Every Child Matters).
That new future requires us to learn from the collective traditions of our ancestors on every continent. This will help us build the communist world that we all need, where every child will be safe and valued by the whole community. To achieve this, we’ll have to overthrow our capitalist oppressors with armed revolution.
That’s what ICWP is working for. Join us.
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