Pope
Francis’s apology to the Canadian indigenous people in his recent visit to that
country reminds me of one famous saying by the colonial English poet Rudyard
Kipling – “The Whiteman’s burden.” Several centuries after wiping out the
indigenous and ethnic faiths and cultures by the European Christian Whites, the
Pope’s apologizing for what was done to the indigenous North Americans in the
process of converting them is indeed a generous gesture which his predecessors
could not do. Although no amount of
apology can ever exonerate those White bigots, Pope’s gesture nevertheless is
historic. He has termed what Catholics committed there as “Cultural genocide”.
Such genocide was carried out not only in the two Americas but also in the
continents of Africa and Australia. Some other institutionalized religions are
also equally blameworthy for such cultural genocide in other parts of the
world,
Having conquered
and colonised almost two third parts of the planet Earth, the process that really
began with much gusto since fifteenth century till the beginning of twentieth
century, the European White conquistadores, mostly British, French, Spanish,
Dutch and Portuguese, believed themselves as superior to all other human beings.
The English poet Rudyard Kipling famously remarked – “The White man’s burden” and
these three words brought forth even more enthusiastic colnialistic narrative
for the European Whites justifying their plunder, obliterating the indigenous
cultures and colonizing them that passed as a process of ‘civilizing’ the
coloured peoples. All the rest of the human beings with various cultures and
traditions other than Europeanized Christian culture were thought to be savages
and were subjected to forceful conversion or massacred.
Today, North
American indigenous people are making utmost effort to trace out their
ancestral cultures and revive whatever little they can. Despite being
aboriginals they are pushed to the farthest line of the fringe.
