The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents to be taught at religious schools where they'd be beaten if they spoke their indigenous language. The goal was literal cultural genocide and to erase indigenous nations and cultures from the continent.
This was not "inevitable" but instead an active policy goal the government persued.
> The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents....
By the time a Canadian government even existed, most of the damage had already been done.
One might question why this policy was undertaken in Canada but not the African colonies. Perhaps because Canada’s indigenous population was already a minority. But how did that happen?
If Canada's First Nations had been less susceptible to disease things probably would have played out differently though things would have played out quite a bit differently.
Things also would have played out differently if the Canadian government and/or colonial precursors hadn't engaged in active genocide.
Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice.
> Engaging in genocidal polices is of course not inevitable but an active policy choice.
It was an active policy choice, and an abominable one at that, but it was not the primary cause of the destruction of indigenous cultures. If it weren’t for the residential schools, Canada’s First Nations would still be a marginalized minority in their own homeland, displaced by English and French-speaking settlers. Without the wholesale depopulation of North America via infectious disease, English and French-speaking settlers would have never been able to come here in great numbers at the time they did in the first place.
Absolutely First Nations were to varying degrees shrunk massively from pre-contact highs, there's no debate, but the loss of cultural memory, art, music, and language really only happened very recently, in the last 100 years, and was directly related to government and religious orders imposing residential schools and literal government bans on cultural activity and organization (eg. Potlatch).
This is not ancient history. The potlatch ban only came into effect in 1885 and was only removed in 1951. Residential schools were only closed in the 1970s.
You can see evidence of this in NW Coast art, where post contact, pre 1900s, there was actually a renaissance in art production and development, as superior iron tooling made it easier than ever to make art, and creation of carvings for the tourist market opened up all sorts of new economic opportunities for First Nations people.
Then in the late 1800s the government imposes literal bans on cultural activity and brings in residential schools. Enormous loss of cultural memory occurs.
By 1969 no one on Haida Gwaii had raised a totem pole in living memory, but Robert Davidson carved one and raised it. He couldn't speak Haida. No one even knew what to do at a totem raising. Luckily there were a handful of old timers that vaguely knew enough to kick start this cultural revitalization.
If indigenous art and culture was already dead due "inevitable" disease, then why would the government feel any need to actively try to ban it, police it and arrest indigenous people for taking part? So you can see here that no, despite population decreases, indigenous customs were quite alive and well. The destruction required a brutal government clamp down to try to snuff it out.
I’m not denying or minimizing these policies. But your argument relies on a survivorship bias. You think, “well, I know that potlatches and totem poles are indigenous cultural practices, and the Canadian government banned those around the turn of the 20th century, so 100% of the lost cultural practices are due to the Canadian government”. But we don’t even know the cultural practices of the majority of indigenous people who were killed by infectious disease between 1492 and maybe 1800 or so. And we barely know how the cultural practices of their survivors were fundamentally altered by those changes.
When you think about potlatches and totem poles, you should consider that these are the culture of a remnant of survivors of a vast cultural collapse that utterly eradicated entire civilizations across two continents. That doesn’t minimize their value; if anything, it makes them more rare and precious, and hence makes it even more fundamentally evil, if such a thing is possible, for the Canadian government to have attempted to destroy these things.
The Canadian government forcibly took indigenous children away from their parents to be taught at religious schools where they'd be beaten if they spoke their indigenous language. The goal was literal cultural genocide and to erase indigenous nations and cultures from the continent.
This was not "inevitable" but instead an active policy goal the government persued.