Edmonton Church Leaders Engage Legacy of Residential Schools
By Brent Wittmeier
Rick Chapman has seen it in childlike whimpers, afflictions hidden under heavy-duty addictions to alcohol, drugs and solvents. An Anglican pastor with Edmonton’s ecumenical Inner City Pastoral Ministry, Chapman’s work puts him in full view of the brutal daily effects of residential schools. Roughly 60 per cent of Edmonton’s homeless have an aboriginal or Metis background, Chapman said, many directly touched — or a generation removed — from the trauma they experienced there. “They tremble, they shake, they cry when they have to talk about what actually happened to them,” Chapman said. “The person may be 40 years old, but you’re really talking to a person who’s engaged in a history that happened to them when they’re young. And this history has not been resolved yet.” About 100 Edmonton pastors and church leaders gathered at Trinity Lutheran Church on Friday to listen to Marie Wilson, a former journalist with CBC and one of three commissioners with the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In a lunchtime session, Wilson stressed the need for education, for conversation, for grassroots efforts from regular Canadians to reach out and engage with the Truth and Reconciliation process. Easy answers? There aren’t any. “I cannot tell you the number of times people have come forward to our commission and said, ‘Thank God for alcohol, it saved my life. Otherwise I would have killed myself a long time ago,’ ” Wilson told the group. “We have to dig deep and we have to allow ourselves to become very vulnerable and raw.” Between 1870 and 1996 churches ran over 130 government-funded boarding schools — predominantly in Western and Northern Canada — seeking to transform more than 150,000 aboriginals into English-speaking Christians. Alberta had about 24 of the schools, run mostly by the Roman Catholic Church, Anglican Church and United Church, the last of which closed in 1990. In 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a formal government apology to residential school students dislocated from their families. The commission was established as part of a settlement package. In the past three and a half years, the commission has visited over 500 communities to record stories of the schools. Along with an evening lecture, Friday’s sessions were organized by the Social Justice Institute, an ecumenical Christian group mostly comprised of the city’s faith-based social justice workers. Bob McKeon, who works with the Edmonton Catholic Archdiocese, said the group hopes to piggyback on public meetings of the commissions to encourage churches and non-aboriginals to become involved in the conversation and build relationships. “It’s really important for the churches to get engaged with the issue,” said McKeon. “Once the commission’s over, once the events are finished in Edmonton, the basic reconciliation conversations continue.” As part of the conversation on Friday, tables huddled and talked about how to engage the legacy of residential schools in their churches, outside their churches, and throughout the province. In addition with meetings throughout Alberta in June and July, the commission will return to return to Edmonton’s Shaw Conference Centre for an Alberta-wide event on March 27-30, 2014. While institutional questions intrigue Chapman — like how his church could proclaim its message in such a racist way — he thinks reconciliation ultimately comes down to direct engagement. The lessons learned from residential schools could help churches reach out to others battling the legacy of abuse. “It’s the individuals we’re doing this for,” he said. “It has to boil down to community care for people who’ve been traumatized by serious childhood abuse.” Contact: bwittmeier@edmontonjournal.com
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