There have been several posts lately on Pen-l about Native land claims in Canada and the residential school system. For those interested, the recent Supreme Court of Canada decision upholding aboriginal title (Delgamuukw [the name of the first of the plaintiffs in this case] v. British Columbia) is available at : http://www.droit.umontreal.ca/doc/csc-scc/en/rec/html/delgamuu.en.html Residential schools are discussed in some detail in Chapter 10 of Volume 1 of the 1997 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples report. The entire report is available at http://www.libraxus.com/rcap/rcap_entry.htm and Chapter 10 is at http://www.libraxus.com/cgi-bin/folioisa.dll/finale.nfo/query=*/doc/{@21}? Just one quote: "The Aboriginal leader George Manuel, a residential school graduate, was rather more blunt. The schools, he wrote, were the laboratory and production line of the colonial system�the colonial system that was designed to make room for European expansion into a vast empty wilderness needed an Indian population that it could describe as lazy and shiftless�the colonial system required such an Indian for casual labour�" The Royal Commission report includes a discussion on terminology - Indian, aboriginal, First Nations, Metis, metis, Native, etc. I used "Indian" in the subject head of this post only to encourage those interested to take a look. BTW, the final volume and recommendations of the Royal Commission report would be a great reference for an assignment on cost-benefit analysis. They try to show it would cost less to address Native land claims, etc. than continue the status quo. Bill Burgess
