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	The Shame of Residential Schools Is a Stain That All Canadians Share By Janice Kennedy Ottawa Citizen May 4, 2008 http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=02e741b2-8a74-45cd-a86d-a6b4ea251efd 'Assimilation" is such an antiseptic word. "Policy of assimilation" suggests little more than bloodless bureaucracy. Which goes to show how neatly and tidily language can camouflage bloody reality. To see behind this particular camouflage, try some imagery on for size.Conjure up a child, say six or seven years old, taken far, far away from his home, parents and family. Plunk him down in a foreign setting filled with strangers, including adult outsiders who teach him things but who also punish him for sins he didn't even know were sins. When he speaks the language he's known since birth, they stick a needle in his tongue. When he doesn't finish what's on his plate, he's forced to eat rotten food, sometimes with maggots. When he has an accident, he has to walk around with his dirty underwear on his head, or wet bedsheets around his body, humiliated. Any number of other infractions — it's hard to remember what's forbidden and what isn't — will earn him a beating, an electric shock, a shoeless walk in the snow or confinement in a dark closet. Now imagine this little boy (who could just as easily be a little girl) facing the terror-filled possibility of sexual abuse. Let the situation continue for years, through to adolescence. Then multiply it by untold thousands of cases, generation after generation. And that is why Canada, finally, is about to have a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Announced last week and led by Justice Harry LaForme of the Ontario Court of Appeal, himself aboriginal, the commission will try to come to grips with the terrible legacy of Canada's native residential school system. Although it operated for nearly 150 years, it was in the 20th century that it hit full stride, after Duncan Campbell Scott (the poet who was also a senior bureaucrat with Indian Affairs) ensured in 1920 that attendance at residential schools would be compulsory for all aboriginal children up to age 15. With the best of intentions, no doubt, Scott vowed to "get rid of the Indian problem" through assimilation. "Our objective," he declared in 1920, "is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian Question and no Indian Department." You can understand native leader Georges Erasmus's wry observation, at a 2004 conference on the legacy of residential schools, that Scott's "Indian problem," then and now, "consists in the fact that aboriginal people, given the choice, prefer to be aboriginal people, and not something else." And so we have the Truth and Reconciliation Commission — necessary, overdue, crucial. And, for non-natives, easy to ignore. Interviewed on a CBC-TV feature report, residential school survivor Robert Joseph spoke eloquently about the need not only for healing within native communities, but for understanding from non-natives. "If they don't listen," he said, "it'll be a tragedy." Indeed. The commission is a rapprochement opportunity for the rest of the country, and to squander it would certainly be tragic. But that may happen, and for several reasons. Many non-natives have stopped paying attention to media stories about native issues, repetitive treatments of problems that never seem to disappear. When it's not sweetgrass, drumming and the signing of some deal, or else a protest blockade, it's emotionally exhausting tales of despair and catastrophe on reserves. The same old storyline plays to the same old soundtrack on the nightly news, and people have stopped listening. The media's aboriginal coverage is nothing if not shopworn. As well, many non-aboriginals are convinced that residential schools, for all their evils, are a thing of the past. Like the classroom discipline of "the strap" some of us received long ago (on four occasions, actually), they represent different times, different sensibilities. Why dredge it up? The reason, of course — and you don't have to be an expert in anthropological psychology to get it — is that the attitudes and deeds of those different times, spread out across entire communities for generations, created a sickening impact that has lasted into the present. Many non-natives will also ignore the commission because of the "I personally" perspective — as in "I personally have never harboured racist views, so why should this affect me?" The fact is, we all live with legacies. Consider the following from the eminently respectable Encyclopedia of Canada, published in 1936. Its "Indians" entry describes the missionary education system as successful, noting that "many of the Indians are adapting themselves to the ways of modern Canadian life" — adding, with breathtaking condescension, "although it is probable that all of these contained much white blood in their veins." That's not so long ago. You can see what sort of attitudinal legacy native peoples have had to face over the decades. Such casual contempt has seeped out from non-native fellow Canadians who may not even have realized they harboured it. And while it has shifted shapes, it continues in countless ways to poison today's relationship — especially if non-aboriginals choose to respond to the heartbreaking revelations of the new commission with a roll of the eyes. The Truth and Reconciliation initiative will be a challenge to all Canadians, native and non-native alike. Survivors and their communities carry a tragically heavy burden. But the need for healing crosses all our boundaries. Janice Kennedy's column appears here on Sundays.
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