Canadians ‘comfortably Blind’ about Residential Schools’ Damage
By Michelle Lalonde
Canadians have a blind spot when it comes to facing, and responding to, the extensive damage done to this country’s native people through the residential school system, a commissioner with Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission said Thursday. “Canadians have good hearts,” commissioner Marie Wilson told The Gazette in an interview. “We are the first to jump up to help in places like Haiti and other places around the world where there are tragedies. But we have been taught to be comfortably blind to need when it is in our midst.” Wilson was in Montreal to announce and invite the public to a “national event” to be held April 24-27 at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. This will be the fifth of seven such national events the commission has held across Canada since it was created in 2008 as a result of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, the largest class-action settlement in Canadian history. Wilson, a former journalist and director with CBC North, was appointed to the commission in 2009 after its original three commissioners resigned. She said she has been dismayed by the lack of attention paid to the commission’s work thus far. “The media uptake has been limited,” she said. “In fact, the coverage of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada was much more extensive than the coverage here of the Canadian TRC, even though this is the first time in history a nation has established a commission to look not at post-conflict reconciliation, but at systematic harm done by a policy that specifically targeted little children.” And the public and the media need to pay attention, Wilson said, because the commission’s $60-million budget is insufficient for it to carry out its court-ordered, five-year mandate on its own. That mandate is to educate all Canadians about what really happened at residential schools and the profound extent to which they harmed and continue to harm aboriginal peoples, and to foster reconciliation. Canada’s residential school system existed for more than 100 years, right up until the early 1990s. About 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were placed in these schools, run by the federal government in partnership with several Christian churches. The stated goal of the schools was to assimilate aboriginal people into mainstream Canadian society. Aboriginal children were taken, often forcibly, from their homes, and sent a great distance away to schools where they were forbidden to speak their own languages. Many did not see or communicate with their parents for years. Former students have told the commission they were given new names at the schools, or simply referred to by a number. Many said they were beaten or sexually abused by teachers, staff members or other students, and many died at the schools due to illness or unexplained causes. An estimated 80,000 Indian Residential School survivors are still living in Canada, about 6,000 of them in Quebec. Several of the churches that managed residential schools in Quebec are participating actively in commission events. “We, as Christians, recognize our duty to participate in this process toward healing and reconciliation,” Brian McDonough, director of the Social Action Office of the Catholic Diocese of Montreal, said at Thursday’s news conference. “We have to go beyond apologies and requests for forgiveness. We cannot change the past, but we can and must work with native peoples to build a future founded on mutual respect.” The commission has already held two regional events in Quebec, one in Mani-Utenam near Sept-Iles and another in Val d’Or. Two more regional events will be held before the national event in Montreal, one in La Tuque on March 5 and 6 and one in Chisasibi on March 19-20. Also Thursday, the commission identified two prominent Quebecers who will act as “honorary witnesses” at the Montreal event: Eloge Butera, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide and now a human-rights activist, and Charles-Mathieu Brunelle, director general of Montreal’s Space for Life. Madeleine Basile, from the Atikamekw Nation in Wemotaci, Que., closed Thursday’s news conference with a prayer. A survivor of the Pointe Bleue Indian Residential School, Basile wept as she spoke of the pain caused to her own mother, one of thousands of “parents left behind,” as well as the pain felt by her own children and all the survivors. She concluded by asking the creator to bless all aboriginal nations. For more information on the Quebec national event, go to www.trc.ca Contact: mlalonde@montrealgazette.com
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