Reparations for Historical Injustice and Intergenerational Trauma

Canadian First Nations (Indians) are said to suffer historical trauma from attendance at residential schools, through loss of culture passed down across generations. But the empirical evidence for this claim is weak. Less than a third of Canadian Indians ever attended residential schools, and the av...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Kulturní studia
Main Author: Tom Flanagan
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:Czech
German
English
Russian
Slovak
Published: Kulturní studia 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.7160/KS.2022.190201
https://doaj.org/article/ef803e78ce3b49999fa7b027ba656afa
Description
Summary:Canadian First Nations (Indians) are said to suffer historical trauma from attendance at residential schools, through loss of culture passed down across generations. But the empirical evidence for this claim is weak. Less than a third of Canadian Indians ever attended residential schools, and the average period of attendance was only 4.5 years. Moreover, the research on intergenerational trauma arising from attendance at the residential schools suffers from numerous methodological weaknesses described in detail in the paper. Claims of intergenerational trauma are being used to justify demands for reparations, but that amounts to transferring wealth from contemporary people who have done nothing wrong to other contemporary people who have suffered no wrong.