My childhood — call it Castle Keep — is a bricked-up place I do not visit. But occasionally I kick a few bricks out of the wall, peek inside if it might assist someone else, and mortar it up again.

We hear very little of the residential schools set up by churches and the federal government under the 1951 Indian Act, mainly because urban white Canadians don’t often meet native Canadians and frankly don’t care to.

I have yet to meet an aboriginal person in a newsroom. Most of them live on the reserves in a state of either taut misery or sagging misery. Occasionally we haul them off the reserve because of E. coli in the water, but it’s hardly a vote-winning issue.

I honestly believe that, aside from individuals like Jean Chrétien who cared deeply about native Canadians, we offer help because it’s an international embarrassment on the level of baby-seal smashing.

I spent my childhood in the late sixties in Sioux Lookout, Ont., pop. 2,500, where my father ran the federal hospital that served that particular zone. Each year, there would be a dozen or so native students in my grade school class. They lived in a huge white building in the bush and I assumed they were orphans. Sometimes they would all come to school in new identical clothes, as if Oliver Twist had had a good day.

I had a friend, Eva, who was pretty but had a constant wary look always about to veer into terror. Another boy, Ronald, was a loud gangly hellion. He scared me.

One day, I sat down in my wooden desk and my dress caught on the back of the chair. There I sat with my ragged white cotton underpants exposed. (My underwear was full of holes because my mother was seriously Scottish, meaning I wouldn’t get new knickers until the holes were big enough to accommodate a third leg.)

Ronald, who always teased me, leaned over. I noticed, and froze in humiliation, waiting for public torment. Instead, Ronald quietly gestured and looked away. I released the skirt of my dress. I have never forgotten his kindness.

They were bewildered kids. I remember a boy who was mouthy, the kind of kid who would now be regarded as annoying but basically okay. But he was an Indian and teachers tormented him. One day, he was told to stand up in class and sing the musical scale. Other white students had done it, hating it. But for him, it was one humiliation too far. He wouldn’t do it. The teacher made him lie on her desk. He was beaten publicly by the principal. He then wept silently at his desk

Haven’t forgotten that, either.

If this bothers you, it doesn’t bother the Supreme Court of Canada, headed by Beverley McLachlin and recently joined, to my joy, by human-rights activist Rosie Abella, much honoured for her work in the Jewish community. But Judge Abella wasn’t too active in the Barney case, which the court unanimously dismissed last week.

Those Indian kids I grew up with weren’t orphans after all. They were children stolen by the federal government from their parents and sent to residential schools to achieve cultural genocide, i.e. act white. They lost their language, culture, family and friends.

Frederick Barney, now 59, lost more than that. As a child, he was sodomized by a dorm supervisor. He made a game attempt at suicide by trying to drown himself in the bathtub. A teacher discovered Fred and punished him by strapping him, naked, in front of the other students.

Mr. Barney’s case was taken up by LEAF, the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund. It told the court that his suffering was “indivisible.” (If this helps to explain, pedophile-rapist Roman Polanski’s reputation was ruled “divisible,” meaning other parts of his reputation could still be defended. Figure that one out.)

LEAF said the normal statute of limitations on lawsuits for childhood torture did not apply here because Mr. Barney’s torment was the result of racism. For Mr. Barney, who had already received $125,000 in general damages, had been kidnapped and brutalized because he was an aboriginal child. Racism caused his torture.

This argument didn’t impress Chief Justice McLachlin, the much-heralded Judge Abella or any other Supreme Court judge. They unanimously smacked down Mr. Barney. The Chief Justice wrote, “Compensation for the impact of attending residential schools is fraught with controversy and difficulty.”

The profoundly conservative Chief Justice McLachlin often rules against the oppressed in favour of the powerful. Her court has previously ruled that pay equity is controversial and difficult.

Where’s the controversy? What’s the difficulty?

Mr. Barney is owed much more than the $120,000 he previously received for being raped courtesy of the government or the contemptibly small $20,000 for loss of future earnings. No self-regarding typist with RSI would settle for 20 grand. My own mother has given me more than that in compensation for having dressed me in ratty clothes as a kid. (I think that’s why. We love each other profoundly, but wouldn’t discuss that even if guns were held to our heads and we were issued with hand puppets.)

Our Supreme Court is a rubber stamp for cruelty, much like the U.S. version. I have no words for the extent of my contempt.

I do have a word for Samuel Alito, the new U.S. Supreme Court nominee who believes that the right to bear arms includes machine guns, and that women must notify husbands before seeking abortions, presumably even if the husband has a machine gun. I have a word for Judge Alito. It’s Backpfeifengesicht, German for “a face that cries out for a fist in it.”

Does it apply to Canada’s Supreme Court? I find that question controversial and difficult.