Canadian Press report:
The question of what to do with records of deeply personal, often heart-wrenching testimony from thousands of survivors of Indian residential schools who sought compensation for sexual and other abuse lands on the doorstep of Ontario’s top court Tuesday.
On one side of the two-day hearing are those who argue a lower court judge was right to order the material destroyed in due course. On the other are those who believe it should be kept in perpetuity under appropriate lock and key.
Read more on Huffington Post (CA)
Let’s not kid ourselves, this was indeed a genocide. Call it cultural genocide or the attempted genocide of aboriginals, or both. Even the S.A. apartheid system was based off of the Canadian system, or Indian Act.
What have other peoples or countries done to preserve their history of state sponsored genocide? Destroy the records and forget it ever happened?
Is there significant need to preserve?
Some similar questions about records preservation came up in California over church sex abuse cases. But the facts of this case seem different in terms of what the survivors/victims were told about what would happen to their records.