magnumpi

Oakvillian

WTF is your thing here? If you're going to throw around snippets of history, you should at least try to make sure you are not getting that history from the gutter press.

Joseph Brant's son Isaac died after a fight with his father, in which a drunk Isaac attacked Joseph with a knife (with which his father cut him while deflecting a strike at himself).

He may well have been accused of selling out his own people for personal gain, but that accusation is not actually backed up by any significant evidence. Most historical research points to the fact that Brant used the goodwill of the British to extract concessions for Six Nations civilians, notably after the Sullivan Expedition of 1779 forced large numbers to evacuate upper New York and Pennsylvania to the area around Fort Niagara over the winter.



Returning to the original post's subject, the stat holiday to commemorate the legacy of residential schools was one of the recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which the Federal government had committed to fulfil. A statement from the Heritage ministry says, in part, "We have committed to fulfilling all of the calls to action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Call to Action 80 asks the government of Canada to establish a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to honour the survivors of residential schools."

I am not certain that a statutory holiday is necessarily the best way to go about marking a "National Day for Truth and Reconciliation" but if previous generations of federal governments and supposedly Christian religious institutions, of all political colours, hadn't so royally screwed with the mental wellbeing of First Nations peoples by continuing to mandate the residential school system in the first place, we wouldn't now be in a position to mark the legacy at all, would we?