McGill distances itself from Pound comments

Montreal Gazette

Published: 5 hours ago

MONTREAL - McGill University's board of governors has dissociated itself from a comment by its Chancellor, Richard Pound, in which he referred to native people here as savages.

It issued a statement Sunday saying the university does not agree with the comments Pound made to a La Presse reporter in August in Beijing.

At the time, he was contrasting 5,000 years of Chinese civilization with that which existed here 400 years ago when Canada was populated by some 10,000 people from Europe and the native population.

The country at the time was "un pays de sauvages," Pound was quoted as having said. Pound's comments "are his own and are not made on behalf of McGill," the university said.

© Montreal Gazette 2008 ... I'm glad to hear McGill distance itself from these remarks. However, I would be happier to see Pound understand and acknowledge the ignorance of his own words. I suggest he should meet with traditional leaders to learn something of the civilizations that existed in North America prior to the European invasion. In fact, some of the treaties we hold with Indigenous Nations are representative of ancient treaties among Indigenous Nations themselves, for example, the Two Row Wampum Treaty highlighted at the beginning of this blog. Their civilizations included treaties for sovereignty, peace and friendship, as well as trade and diplomatic relations, and were highly sophisticated. Indigenous medicines are only now beginning to be noticed by the modern scientific community, but were necessary to the survival of early European settlers. Indigenous ways of peace, friendship and respect have been abused by Canada's colonial government powers who operate through deceit and fraud and theft. Indeed, the truth about who was civilized and who were 'savages' is told in this quote from a residential school survivor:

The church people were worshipping the devil, not us. They wanted the gold, the coal, the land we occupied. So they terrorized us into giving it to them. How does a man who was raped every day when he was seven make anything out of his life? The residential schools were set up to destroy our lives, and they succeeded. The whites were terrorists, pure and simple. Bill Seward of Nanaimo, a survivor of the Kuper Island school