Propaganda is used to manipulate and produce a certain view from its intended audience, often used to support or create a certain bias, usually based on partial information. This particular ad creates a spectacular illusion of life for children in residential schools in Canada. Complete with smiling children, cheerful music and other lightheartedness, this ad was everything a propaganda should aspire for. With all of this its almost painless to imagine- when portrayed so positively- that to a vulnerable and perhaps naïve Canadian populous the residential schools can be seen as an almost noble act of the Canadian government. This is especially ironic in the video, as it describes the previous Aboriginals way of life as one of “isolation and neglect”, had they not been so fortunate as to attend a residential school.

This ad was particularly interesting in relation to relatively recent Canadian history, in which significant acts of genocide and child labor can be seen in the residential schools. The United Nations define one act of genocide as “forcibly transferring children of the group to another group”. In Canada, by passing the “Indian Act” this effectively allowed the government to do just that. This is further perplexed by also noting that at these schools children were also subjected to unpaid, involuntary labor. This is in part due to lack of funding, and also to teach the children practical, domestic, non-traditional ways of life. This can actually be classified as child labor, since these practices strongly interfered with their actual education- an education which is, as the propaganda video would suggest, the reason this schooling system was implemented to begin with.

A realization of being a Canadian citizen is how easily it can be to be consumed under the thin veil of ignorance to racial and cultural discrimination in Canada. This not only shows how Propaganda was effective in the past, but how the long term effects of the residential schools are a very real, ongoing issue, facing First Nations in Canada.

http://www.un.org/en/preventgenocide/adviser/pdf/osapg_booklet_eng.pdf