PBS高端访谈:加拿大政府向土著人民拨款6亿美元

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　　He said there needed to be an effort to, quote, correct past injustices² and bring about a better quality of life.

　　On Friday, the Canadian government took a step to repair that relationship.

　　It agreed to pay $600 million in legal settlements for a program that for years forcibly separated indigenous children from their families and put them up for adoption³ around the country and around the world.

　　Ian Austen has been covering the story for "The New York Times" and joins me now via Skype from Ottawa.

　　Ian, let's first talk about how long running was this program? How many people would it affect?

　　We're not sure precisely⁴ how many it affected⁵ but the best guess is about 35,000 people and it started in 1965 in various parts of the country, petered out about 19, 20 years later.

　　How did the social workers determined⁶ whether a child needed to be taken out of their village, the reservation, their family?

　　Well, there were two huge problems from the outset.

　　As the federal government was planning this program, it was very much aware that there would be a danger of eroding⁷ indigenous culture.

　　So, it told the provinces that they should go and talk to leaders in indigenous communities about how social services should be provided to children.

　　For whatever reason, that was never done.

　　And what happened was, social workers were set up to these remote, often remote communities.

　　And they had no training about indigenous culture at all, and the biggest thing they didn't know about is indigenous culture has a heritage of communal⁸ child rearing.

　　I was told many years, the first time I went to a reserve, you never asked a kid who their parents are.

　　You say, where are you staying? Because they -- at that point, they might be staying with an aunts, they might be staying with a grandparent.

　　So, these social workers came up -- had no idea of any of this, looked around are around,

　　it was the antithesis⁹ of southern Canada, and for them the solution was to just take these kids away and have them adopted on

　　the thinking being that they would be better off anywhere else than they were in their homes.

　　So, what happened? They're adults now. I mean, did they sort of assimilate as the goal was or did they find themselves in a kind of weird¹⁰ no man's land

　　where they didn't fit in southern Canada, but then now they didn't fit back into the tribe?

　　This program took away -- took them right out of the reserves, took away their birth names.

　　They would get new names when they were adopted, often new given names.

　　And the court case that spurned¹¹ this settlement found that there was a terrible legacy¹² of emotional, mental and social problems affecting these people,

　　because they -- as kids, they were bullied¹³ by white kids at school.

　　So, they never felt, even if they were with a loving family, they never really felt part of white southern culture,

　　but they really couldn't go back home because they didn't know the language, you know, they had been completely pulled from that culture as well.

　　So, there are this -- there was this whole generation of people who grew up in kind of social, cultural, emotional limbo¹⁴.

　　Ian Austen of "The New York Times", joining us via Skype today from Ottawa, thanks so much. Thank you very much. undefined

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