What if, no liberating armies invaded the territory stormed over by a draconian State? No compassionate throng broke down the doors to dungeons to free those imprisoned within? No collective outcry of humanity arose as stories of the State^’s abuses were recounted? And no court of World Opinion seized the State^’s leaders and held them in judgement as their misdeeds were chronicled? What if none of this happened?

What if, instead, with the passage of time the World came to accept the State's actions as the rightful and lawful policies of a sovereign nation having to deal with creatures that were less than fully human? And what if, curbing some of the more glaring malignancies of its genocidal excesses, the State increasingly became prominent as both a resource for industrial powers and as an industrial power in its own right? What if the State could rely upon the discretion of other nations, engaged in their own local outrages, to wink at its past, so that the lie told to and accepted by other nations was one the State could tell itself and its "real" citizens without fear of contradiction? What if the men who conceived, fashioned, implemented and operated the machinery of destruction grew old and were venerated and hailed as the "Fathers" of their country and as men of insight and renown?

What if, the Holocaust had never stopped, so that, for the State's victims, there was no vindication, no validation, no justice, but instead the dawning realization that this was how things were going to be? What if those who resisted were crushed, so that others, tired of resisting, simply prayed that the "next" adjustment to what remained of their ways of life would be the one that, somehow, they would be able to learn to live with? What if some learned to hate who they were, or to deny it out of fear, while others embraced the State's image of them, emulating as far as possible the State's principles and accepting its judgment about their own families, friends, neighbors and joined the State as their own oppressors and abusers? And what if others could find no option other than to accept the slow, lingering death the State had mapped out for them, or even to speed themselves along to their State-desired end?

What if?

Then, you would have Canada's and the United State's treatment of the North American Aboriginal population in general, and the Indian Residential School Experience in particular.

The patterns of abuse in Aboriginal Boarding and Residential Schools in North America researched and documented by the Four worlds International Institute for Human and Community development and the other Aboriginal research groups in Canada and the United States include the following:

Physical Abuses

Psychological Emotional Abuses
 

• Administrationof beatings to naked or partially naked children before their fellow students and/or institutional officials;
• Public, individually directed verbal abuse, belittlingand threatening;
• Racism;
• Performig public strip searches and genital inspections of children;
• Forced removal of children from their homes families and people;
• Cutting children's hair or shaving their heads (as policy);
• Withholding presents, letters and other personal property of children;
• Locking children in closets, sometimes for extended periods (as punishment);
• Segregation of the sexes;
• Proscription of the use of Aboriginal languages;
• Proscription of aboriginal religious or spiritual practices;.
• Eliminating any avenue by which to bring grievances, inform parents or notify external authorities of abuses;
• Forced labour;
• Long term isolated confinement

Enforcing Unsuitable Living Conditions

· Starvation (as punishment);

· Inadequate nutrition (e.g., nutrition levels below that of needed for normal growth and subsistence);

· Providing food unfit for human consumption;

· Exploiting child labour;

· Forced labour under unsafe working conditions;

·Inadequate medical services, sometimes leading to children's deaths;
 

Omissions of Action
 

Church Inaction

                    · Failure to bring local incidents of abuse to the attention of higher church authorities;