The Canadian government has apologized for the killings of thousands of sled dogs decades ago.
Crown-Indigenous Relations Minister Carolyn Bennett delivered the apology in Iqaluit.
She says the government made a mistake by assuming it knew what was best for Inuit people.
Between 1950 and 1975, Inuit in Nunavut's Baffin region were moved from mobile camps to permanent communities.
Sled dogs proved a hazard in the communities and the government required owners to muzzle and chain the animals.
An inquiry report in 2010 found that it became easier for authorities to shoot the dogs instead of enforcing the ordinances.
"We have and will learn from these great errors," Bennett said Wednesday.
"We are committed to ensuring our future is different from our past. We apologize to Qikiqtani Inuit for the deep and lasting effects this has had in their lives and in their communities."
Comments
The circularity, or perhaps the downward spiral of human stupidity seems neverending. Not a good portent for our species' ultimate survival - no matter how sophisticated our technology or understanding of our global existence.
It seems that nothing can subdue our unwarranted human arrogance. That arrogance is most deleterious amongst the political and government functionary classes. I do like the Soviet term Apparatchik. My mind construes it as pejorative in tone.
European Canadians' interactions with our first nations peoples have always been tainted by not only our genocidal intent, but by the penny pinching, fraudulant, and criminal abuse of power we have exercised for far too long. Having failed to exterminate the inconvenient indian, we have tried to shelve them away in remote and inaccessible closet reserves, depriving them of the opportunities and services we consider inalienable human rights for us white, european usurpers.
It may be of some small comfort that the most likely survivors of the global climate disruption collapse will be those self sufficient, surviving-against-all-odds, indigenous peoples of the world. Too bad they will inherit the total mess we have made of it.
As for the specific crime of slaughtering the sled dogs, it was, and is, a cruel but typically callous human exploitation of the creature we formed a bond with thousands of years ago, to our mutual benefit. The modern treatment of domesticated and wild animals is an existential, original sin against the miracle of evolved, and co-existing, interdependent living ecosystems that sustain all life on the planet. Even if a similar miracle has been produced in another part of the universe, it can never replace this one. It is a fundamental law of nature and life, that it never repeats itself, evolution demands that when one ecosystem is destroyed it is a failed experiment and something else must be tried. What we call life never stands still, it continually varies to adapt to environmental changes. Can humans destroy all life on earth? Possibly, but perhaps something can survive to create a new form or forms, of life. One can only hope it will be smarter, and more capable of co-existence.