Treatment of Indigenous Canadians Research Assignment

Appendix A
Current Desecrations
As terrible as the treatment of indigenous Canadians was in the past, it is yet more terrible that such treatment is still ongoing. The desecration of the ancestors which happened when the Huron-Wendat ancestors were dug up and re-interred (Council of the Huron-Wendat Nation, 2016) elsewhere is something which is made all the worse by the fact that we are supposed to know better by this point in time.
When the two peoples first met, there was inevitably going to be some conflict unless and until both sides made an effort to understand the other, particularly when it comes to burial rites and responsibilities (Johnston, 2006). The Council made information available in the preceding year concerning the cultural rites of the Huron-Wendat nations (Council of the Huron-Wendat Nation, 2016), to go with the information which is already available via academic and cultural sources, so it is particularly surprising that this desecration was allowed.
The newspaper article suggests that the desecration may have been done with the explicit knowledge of governing bodies, and it is this suggestion which betrays just how far people have to go in mending affairs between descendants of the original colonists, and the people of the Huron-Wendat nation. The problem here is two-fold: we as a Western society do have a concept of desecration –it’s why we as a society tend to react so badly to people ruining graveyards, or using them as their own private playgrounds. But we don’t seem able to extend that feeling about desecration onto another culture. Second, it has been stated that the Huron-Wendat nation has, since 2015, been actively working to improve the knowledge of their nation’s cultural history and rituals, so the fact that such a desecrat...