A narrative I read a lot on social media is that Canada “deserves” to have it’s culture and peoples displaced by mass immigration as payback for the settler’s crimes against the natives.
I think there is something very strange about this argument.
To live in a perpetual state of guilt is actually a very Catholic mindset.
It’s the idea that: “you’ve made a mistake that is infinitely unforgivable, and the only way forward is to maximize your repentance at every opportunity.”
Especially since none of those settlers are alive today.
We live in a finite world. The damage done to the natives was terrible, but finite.
So the reconciliation effort is also finite.
The upper bound of this is ensuring that every single descendant of the natives that was persecuted lives a happy and fulfilled life.
If we could categorize their happiness with a number it would be equal to that of if colonization never happened.
Of course this is really not possible. The culture that was lost cannot be found again. And the nomadic lifestyle doesn’t work today.
Hopefully material comforts can make up for it. But this is really a question on “the meaning of life”, and not something for the government to solve.
Obviously this reconciliation has nothing to do with immigration from India, the Phillipines, China, Cameroon, etc.
And it’s silly to relate the two.