There have been several posts lately on Pen-l about Native land claims in Canada and the residential school system. For those interested, the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision upholding aboriginal title (Delgamuukw [the name of the first of the plaintiffs in this case] v. British Columbia) is available at : http://www.droit.umontreal.ca/doc/csc-scc/en/rec/html/delgamuu.en.html Residential schools are discussed in some detail in Chapter 10 of Volume 1 of the 1997 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples report. The entire report is available at http://www.libraxus.com/rcap/rcap_entry.htm and Chapter 10 is at http://www.libraxus.com/cgi-bin/folioisa.dll/finale.nfo/query=*/doc/{@21}? Just one quote: "The Aboriginal leader George Manuel, a residential school graduate, was rather more blunt. The schools, he wrote, were the laboratory and production line of the colonial system…the colonial system that was designed to make room for European expansion into a vast empty wilderness needed an Indian population that it could describe as lazy and shiftless…the colonial system required such an Indian for casual labour…" The Royal Commission report includes a discussion on terminology - Indian, aboriginal, First Nations, Metis, metis, Native, etc. I used "Indian" in the subject head of this post only to encourage those interested to take a look. BTW, the final volume and recommendations of the Royal Commission report would be a great reference for an assignment on cost-benefit analysis. They try to show it would cost less to address Native land claims, etc. than continue the status quo. Bill Burgess
