Many Canadians are horrified by the abuses the United States and its client states, such as Israel, are inflicting upon the indigenous peoples of the Middle East. This revulsion is both justified and necessary, but too often it seems to me to be tinged with hatred. Our anger over injustice too easily becomes contempt for the unjust.

Hatred is a danger to anyone genuinely interested in making our society a more ethical place. Hatred harms our capacities for empathy and happiness and, though we rarely admit it, any hope we might have of achieving a sustainable and equitable future depends upon these capacities. Lacking empathy, we succumb to what the Germans call “schadenfreude,” which roughly translates into “delight in the suffering of others.” The comfort many on the left find in their anticipation of America's inevitable economic comeuppance, for example, is schadenfreude in its purest form. As happiness gives way to schadenfreude we lose our creativity and our mental flexibility, and with them our ability to intelligently confront the problems life presents us with. We begin to feel constantly threatened, and we react in increasingly paranoid ways. Regardless of how deplorable the actions of our opponents may be, resistance movements founded upon hatred, upon paranoia and schadenfreude, have little chance of building a world better than the one they seek to destroy.

Just as empathy is founded upon happiness, so is hatred founded upon a sense of innocence. Without this feeling of moral superiority, hatred simply can't take hold inside our souls. If we want to prune the hatred from our hearts, then we must first uproot innocence. This isn't difficult. Canadian innocence crumbles the moment it's scrutinized. We need simply compare the most shameful features of our opponents' behavior to the most shameful features of our own.

Compare, then, the worst atrocities committed by the United States and its client states to the atrocities Canada has inflicted upon First Nations people. Ignore the ongoing theft and ecological devastation of First Nations' land and resources, the disruption of Native economies, the continuing use of military and police forces against Aboriginal communities such as Kanesatake, and even the historical distribution of smallpox-ridden blankets among tribal peoples, and focus instead on just one facet of Canada's relationship with its indigenous population: the residential school system.

Recall that attendance at these schools was for many years compulsory. First Nations peoples who refused to send their children were threatened with the cancellation of rations, the suspension of family allowance payments, and even imprisonment. Parents who signed the application for admission to these schools didn't know that they were transferring legal guardianship of their children to the principals of the institutions.

These parents rarely parted willingly with their offspring. Many children were simply abducted without their parents' knowledge; many others were taken screaming from their mothers' arms by the RCMP. Some parents tried to escape with their children to the United States; some tried to hide their kids. Few succeeded.

The children often made the long trip to the schools en masse in cattle trucks and railroad cars, a fact seldom-reported, likely because of the obvious historical parallels. Most Canadians are now aware that the children in residential schools were prevented from speaking their own languages, that their sense of cultural identity was systematically dismantled, and that they were often victims of sexual abuse. It's also common knowledge that the explicit purpose of these schools was to destroy Aboriginal culture in order to facilitate assimilation into the larger Canadian society. What few Canadians understand is that the Native students were also subjected to “punishments” that can only be described as torture.

According to a report prepared for the Law Commission of Canada by Rhonda Claes and Deborah Clifton ( Institutional Child Abuse: Needs and Expectations for Redress Of Victims of Abuse at Native Residential Schools , 2002), children as young as four were beaten with wooden boards, sticks and pointers, whips, studded belts, and leather and rubber straps—straps that sometimes had tacks, nails, or wires embedded in them. Some children had needles pushed through their tongues. Some were burned and scalded. Electrical shock devices were used on physically restrained children. Kids were sometimes beaten into unconsciousness; blood was drawn, bones were broken. The sick were occasionally made to eat their own vomit. Children were locked in closets, publicly strip-searched, and forced to parade wearing soiled bed sheets over their heads. They were denied contact with their parents, and had no recourse to anyone who could conceivably protect them.

In addition to these punishments, the children suffered from gross physical neglect. The schools were poorly designed. Ventilation, heating, and plumbing were typically inadequate, and the children lacked adequate medical care. Diseases like tuberculosis spread fast through the student population. A 1907 report by Dr Peter Bryce, a former Medical Inspector for the Department of Indian Affairs, announced that students in these schools had an average death rate of 30%.

Generation after generation of First Nations children were sent to these schools. The survivors returned to their impoverished and brutalized communities in a state of severe trauma. With their psychological development viciously disrupted, and without either the personal or collective resources to repair the damage inflicted upon them, they had little choice but to self-destruct. All-too-many ended up in our psychiatric hospitals, our jails, and on our streets.

Imagine being forced to send your own children to institutions where torture is a near-certainty, where rape is commonplace, and where they'll have a 30% chance of dying before graduation. Imagine being part of a penniless and powerless community whose children have for generations been subjected to this nightmare. Imagine that instead of eliciting compassion, the symptoms of the many psychological injuries that you and your children suffer elicit only contempt from the very people whose institutions inflicted them. Imagine being despised throughout your life as a “dirty, drunken Indian.” Imagine seeing your children despised in the same way. Imagine, finally, that you've involuntarily learned how to despise yourself.

Research conducted in Israel with Holocaust survivors demonstrates that trauma is passed down through the generations: the children of concentration camp survivors regularly display symptoms of trauma even though they themselves have no direct experience of Nazi persecution. Research conducted in the United States demonstrates that the same is true for the children of traumatized Viet Nam veterans. The reasons for this are quite obvious. Traumatized parents simply can't give their children the same quality of emotional care that non-traumatized parents can provide, and they tend to model traumatized emotions and behaviors to their offspring. While the effects of intergenerational trauma diminish as the generations go by, poverty, social marginalization, ghettoization, and cultural disruption all conspire to reinforce the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next.

The last residential school closed in Tofino in 1983. The Government of Canada estimates that there are approximately 87,500 people alive today who once attended these institutions. Their children and grandchildren comprise the remainder of Canada's Aboriginal population, which hovers around the 800,000 mark. Even if we accept the most optimistic forecasts, the consequences of this trauma will plague First Nations communities for decades, if not centuries, to come. How could it be otherwise? Canada has nearly destroyed the ability of First Nations communities to transmit the basic requirements for sanity from one generation to the next. The obscene rates of alcoholism, violence, disease, and suicide that we see in so many First Nations communities are expressions of wounds that Canada has inflicted.

Every non-Aboriginal Canadian shares responsibility for this injustice, because every non-Aboriginal Canadian continues to profit from it. Our wealth depends upon our economy, and Canada's economy depends upon resource extraction. Throughout Canada, but particularly in British Columbia, where so much First Nations territory has never been ceded through treaties, those resources are extracted primarily from land that First Nations people have legitimate claims of ownership over. Canada's ability to obtain these resources is inversely proportional to the ability of First Nations communities to defend their claims. To the degree that trauma prevents First Nations people from successfully launching this defense, we can reasonably say that non-Aboriginal Canadians are enriched by that trauma.

All non-Aboriginal Canadians are stained by this injustice. It doesn't matter which party we belong to, or which political, social, or spiritual philosophy we endorse. Our beliefs and our actions can no more wash this blood from our hands than they can return it to the veins from which it was drawn. This is a hard thing for many people to hear, regardless of whether they're on the Left or the Right of the political spectrum. We value our sense of innocence, or at least the notion that lost innocence may once again be found. Often, our participation in political activity is driven primarily by our need to defend our belief in our own innocence. We seem to believe that without this belief we can't be happy. Failing to see that empathy is the true heart of happiness, many of us sacrifice empathy for the illusion of innocence, and thereby fall prey to self-righteousness and hatred.

If we want to act ethically, we must rid ourselves of this illusion. When it comes to our relationship with Canada's indigenous people, the only ethical course available to non-Aboriginal Canadians is to acknowledge our misdeeds, to ally ourselves with First Nations liberation movements, to work hard to repair the damage we've caused, and to do whatever we can to ensure that no further injustices are committed on our behalf. Most of all, we need to use our power as non-Aboriginal Canadians to restrain governments and corporations whose actions unjustly advance our economic well-being at the expense of Canada's First Nations.

In this way we'll immunize ourselves against self -righteousness, and thereby ensure that our anger over the suffering of the victims of American imperialism is guided, though by no means anesthetized, by humility and kindness. This will also motivate us to challenge the crimes we're responsible for as passionately as we challenge the crimes committed by others. If we choose otherwise, then our ideals are nothing more than alibis, and worth less than the breath it takes to spout them.

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