A wise friend of mine made a very important point. He said taking children away from their parents without consent in itself was the “greatest abuse.” You really don’t have to rail on about anything else (like I have been doing and will continue to do).  After all, according to the UN convention on Genocide that is enough to constitute genocide.

I would just put it a little differently.  Taking children away from their parents without parental consent is certainly enough to generate outrage. Yet, there are so many other egregious abuses: e.g. starving children in those schools; putting the children into what were literally fire traps; using children as forced labour instead of educating them; physical, sexual, and emotional abuse; shredding their self-esteem and denigrating their parents and their culture; bullying children and hence teaching the children that this was the way to treat their children; robbing children of the opportunity to learn how to take care of children from their parents which led directly to the effects of residential schools cascading through the generations which in turn made it impossible to do what so many blind privileged white people want them to do-i.e. “get over it.”

I don’t want to get into a suffering Olympics where we have to rate the sins when each one itself should be what the Catholics call a mortal sin. I find it impossible to say which is the “greatest abuse” when there is such a long line of horrors. Besides what is the point?

The real point is what are we going to do about it?