Abstract

Excerpted From: Federico Lenzerini, Indigenous Peoples' Cultural Heritage and International Law: A Tale of Wrongs and of Struggle for Survival and Renaissance, 32 Michigan State International Law Review 57 (2024) (150 Footnotes) (Full Document Requested)

In 2010, Stephanie Wood, a young member of the Squamish Indigenous Nation in North Vancouver, B.C., wrote a story about the residential school system in Canada, a formal scheme for the schooling of Indigenous children in the country lasting from the 17th century until the late 1990s:

[t]wo primary objectives of the residential schools system were to remove and isolate children from the influence of their homes, families, traditions and cultures, and to assimilate them into the dominant culture.” There was a girl, Lucy. She had long dark hair, brown eyes, high cheekbones, and the rich skin of an Indian. She was very small .... She was given a white uniform, a dress, and separated from her sisters. For how long this would go on, she didn't know .... First thing Lucy noticed was that many of the children looked sick. She wondered why they were continuing to go to class when some were dead-white, glassy in sweat. Soon she saw that it was the teachers that were making them attend. She asked a girl beside her what it was that was making them sick. The girl didn't know. Nobody did. Yet it seemed almost as if these children, hot and weary-eyed, coughing and thin, were disappearing .... It was the end of her first year, she was going home for the summer, and Lucy could speak English. Lucy could write English. Yet somehow, in the midst of her forceful education, the ability to grasp her native language had nearly left her. She would spend mornings trying to dress herself to conceal the bruises spotting her skin so her parents would not see, and trying to reconnect with her sisters. Needless to say, that summer at home was very quiet. They were sent back to school. Attendance was obligatory. Lucy spoke English and wrote in English and she had Catholicism pushed upon her, the white man's ways suffocating her and slowly filling up her insides, so her original self and heritage had no room to remain. Throughout her education Lucy had nuns whip her and priests hurt her .... Lucy left when she was fifteen, and she felt hollow. She had lost her native home and family; she was not a part of them nor they a part of her. They spoke different languages and had not seen each other for more than two months at a time for years. They'd gone on without her. She had no hope, nor a place that she was needed. All the years of being treated as if she were purposeless and worthless had ground the notion into her brain. Her life felt like an aimless trail of pointless being; her faith was lost .... To kill the Indian in the child. That had been the ultimate goal. To remove the culture, the language, the beliefs and leave the children as a shell with all but the appearance of the white man, inflated with the ideas of the self-proclaimed dominating race.

This is a very powerful story, showing that for Indigenous people's cultural heritage--in all its components, intangible and tangible, animate and inanimate, visible and invisible--represents a fundamental element of their very life and existence. Depriving Indigenous communities of their own heritage is a tale of wrongs. As will be elaborated in the following section, trying to re-establish the intimate, spiritual relationship Indigenous peoples usually entertain with such a heritage is consequently a tale of struggle for survival and renaissance.

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Depriving Indigenous peoples of their cultural heritage amounts to tearing off a part of their soul from them. As has been recognized by international human rights bodies, when an Indigenous community is separated from its own cultural heritage (for instance through preventing it from practicing its traditional cultural ceremonies) serious consequences may arise resulting in severe violations of the collective rights of the community and of the individual rights of its members. These violations often translate into deep suffering that in many cases persists for generations. Situations of this kind, for the people concerned, must be like a nightmare in which a dark heart has obscured the beauty and harmony of their dream of life, disrupting the good order of their own spiritual and material existence. That of eradicating such a dark heart of the nightmare is a healing process which is first of spiritual, cultural, and social character. However, it is also a process which may be triggered through relying on legal remedies, especially those based on existing human rights standards. This is why, today, it is all the more necessary to increase reliance on the means of recourse to human rights bodies and competent courts, at both the international and the domestic level. This is in fact essential to maximize the opportunities for Indigenous peoples to recover their own cultural heritage and to re-establish their intimate relation with it, as an indispensable condition for preserving their cultural identity and distinctiveness and, eventually, their very physical existence.