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.