George “Tink” Tinker is professor emeritus at Iliff School of Theology in Denver and a citizen of the Osage Nation.
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The State-Planned Part of Genocide
Kamloops [British Columbia] Indian Residential School survivor Stanley Paul sings with students of South Kamloops Secondary School to honor the 215 children whose remains were discovered near the facility / Cole Burston / AFP
“TWO-HUNDRED-FIFTEEN children were buried in unmarked graves at Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia—that was just the first. We’re going to see this repeated across the continent from the Arctic North down to the Rio Grande. It’s not over. It’s just starting.
The boarding schools—what they call residential schools in Canada—were a state-planned part of the genocide of the American Indians. They were a way of removing an obstacle to getting the land and the resources. The boarding schools were part of the intentional destruction of the American Indian worldview [to give rise to] the Euro-Christian worldview of radical individualism, of private ownership, of hierarchy.
Private ownership of land is considered a fundamental human right to Euro-Christians. What good does that do for Indians, who want to honor the Earth as a close relative—as a mother, a grandmother? It was always, first of all, about the land, and still is today as we see pipeline after pipeline in Canada and the U.S.
