Mural of Bishop Opens Old Wounds, by Todd Babiak, Edmonton Journal, March 19, 2011

Mural of Bishop Opens Old Wounds

By Todd Babiak
Edmonton Journal
March 19, 2011

http://www.edmontonjournal.com/business/Mural+bishop+opens+wounds/4470472/story.html

The Grandin LRT station's mural of Bishop Grandin hits a sore spot with area First Nations.
Photograph by: Bruce Edwards, The Journal, Edmonton Journal

Between Winnipeg and Calgary, a boulevard, several schools, an apartment building, a medical clinic, a bakery, a cinema complex and a marching band have been named after Vital-Justin Grandin.

An LRT station in Edmonton was named after the bishop of St. Albert, and artist Sylvie Nadeau designed a mural for the platform; it was donated by the Francophone Jeunesse de l'Alberta in 1989.

"I look at that panel of (Bishop Grandin) standing there, and the nun with the aboriginal baby, and I feel pain," Elizabeth Lightning, a First Nations historian and educator in Edmonton, said on the phone this week. She was going to meet me at the mural, to discuss it in person, and decided against it.

"Kids were taken away by nuns back then and today they're taken away by children's aid. I'm a survival of residential schools, of colonialism. When we came out of those schools we were so confused, brainwashed. We were damaged psychologically."

Grandin was officially remembered, for most of the 20th century, as an uncommonly gentle missionary. Hudson Bay traders thought the "Indian Bishop" was too gentle, too compassionate. But his job was to save the souls of the First Nations people, to convert them to Christianity, not hurt them.

Of course, we're learning to regard the process of conversion somewhat differently. The term "residential schools" now carries connotations of abuse and horror.

Last month, in the letters page of The Journal, Lightning and others engaged in a fascinating and moving debate about the meaning of Nadeau's mural. "The late Bishop Grandin deserves respect," wrote Nadeau, in defence of her art. "So do the Grey Nuns and so does every indigenous person depicted in this mural.

"This mural is about love, compassion, learning to live and build in harmony together, through mistakes if we must, a future that respects us all."

An orientation toward a better future is all we can manage.

In 2008, in the House of Commons, Prime Minister Harper offered an apology to First Nations people, on behalf of all Canadians, for residential schools.

"Today, we recognize that this process of assimilation was wrong," he said. It "has caused great harm, and has no place in our country."

While it feels good to apologize, we're still struggling with "harmony." Where Nadeau sees love, Lightning sees malevolence. Neither of them are wrong.

This week, Jason Kenney, the federal minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, visited the Edmonton Journal to share some of his successes. He contrasted Canada with countries of Western Europe that struggle so miserably with integrating new citizens, encouraging them to live in ghettos and "ethnic enclaves" in big-city suburbs.

Economic integration is most important, Kenney said, but "social and cultural integration are essential. Integration was a politically incorrect word only a few years ago. It was considered synonymous with forced assimilation."

Succeeding in Canada without recognizing and absorbing Canadian values, the values of a liberal democratic western society, is impossible. Kenney proudly displayed the new citizenship study guide and spoke of one of his favourite initiatives -a Somali-Jewish mentorship program, where Jewish business leaders work with young Somali men and women to build careers and layers of cultural understanding.Generation after generation of Canadians have arrived here fleeing poverty, persecution, war and terror. But no one has an innate knack for integration; it's difficult to leave languages, traditions, families and lands behind.

Economic integration might be the easiest to accomplish but it can't be separated from social and cultural elements, all of which require great sensitivity.

We have an advantage over France and Holland because, here in Canada, we don't have a coherent culture. Multiculturalism is an essential part of our evolving sort-of-culture, and it's only controversial in some political science departments and certain regions of Quebec.

We were all feeling pretty good about ourselves, discussing Canada's brilliant success as an engine of smooth integration -until we put it in the context of First Nations people.

Kenney became somewhat flustered.

"New immigrants make a conscious choice to come to Canada, to do better for their families, to integrate," he said. "This is a multigenerational problem that can't be turned around overnight. We're spending in the neighbourhood of $10 billion a year on this. There's not a lack of money. There's a lack of results. We're focusing on economic development and we're seeing some encouraging progress."

No one blamed Kenney for his discomfort. Any group of six nonaboriginal Canadians discussing the plight of aboriginal Canadians will tend to feel confused, embarrassed and guilty, walloped by statistics, by images and stories in the media, by a jaunt through the downtown of any prairie city. It's the zone where the most boastfully politically incorrect policy-maker becomes politically correct.

The debate about the mural in the Grandin/Government Centre LRT station demonstrates the profound complexity of an issue that many of us would prefer to avoid discussing. We don't even have a vocabulary for it. How do you ask a founding people, wounded and haunted by forced assimilation, to take part in the ongoing Canadian masterpiece of mutual integration?

tbabiak@edmontonjournal.com www.twitter.com/babiak