Canada Must Rebuild Trust, and Make Amends for Residential School Abuse: Editorial

Toronto Star
June 2, 2015

http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2015/06/02/canada-must-rebuild-trust-and-make-amends-for-residential-school-abuse-editorial.html

Swampy Cree children prayed several times a day in 1950s.

Vitaline Elsie Jenner is a Survivor who didn’t go quietly. When they came to tear her from her family at Fort Chipewayan in Alberta, she fought to stay with all the fury a terrified child could muster.

Mama, Mama, kaya nakasin! she called out in Cree, the only language she knew. Mom, Mom, don’t leave me!

But like 150,000 other aboriginal children she soon found herself in a notorious residential school — “a world dominated by fear, loneliness, and lack of affection,” as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission put it in its searing summary report into one of Canada’s darkest, most shameful eras, made public on Tuesday.

It was a world in which children were beaten for speaking Cree and other First Nations, Metis and Inuit languages, as Christian teachers tried to “civilize” their young charges. “They took my language. They took it right out of my mouth,” says Rose Dorothy Charlie. “I never spoke it again.” Some children, forcibly uprooted into an alien culture, were known only by numbers. Gilles Petiquay recalls being 95, then 4, then 56. The schooling they received was substandard. All too often the growing children were hungry; milk and meat were luxuries.

“There was no love, there was no feelings, it was just supervisory,” says Jack Anawak, one of 80,000 living survivors. “We would cry like little puppies or dogs, right into the night, until we go to sleep; longing for our families,” says Betsy Annahatak.

In the eyes of Commission chair Justice Murray Sinclair and of Supreme Court Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, this was nothing short of “cultural genocide.” The federally funded schools, largely operated by churches, ran from 1883 to 1996 and were a linchpin of the Canadian government’s campaign of assimilation to “take the Indian out of the child” in the hope of stamping out the culture.

The aim was “to eliminate Aboriginal people as distinct peoples and to assimilate them into the Canadian mainstream against their will,” the commission concludes. “The Canadian government pursued this policy of cultural genocide because it wished to divest itself of its legal and financial obligations to Aboriginal people and to gain control over their land and resources.”

Sinclair, who has spent six years investigating this tragedy, estimates 6,000 children died in the shoddily built, overcrowded fire-trap schools of tuberculosis, influenza and other scourges. Spotty official records document more than 3,200 deaths. To this day, many lie in unmarked graves. Thousands more were abused emotionally, physically, sexually.

In its monumental, six-volume report that will be released later this year, the commission chronicles their extraordinarily courageous stories through their own stark testimony. Canada will forever bear this as a badge of shame, a stain on the Crown’s honour and a reproach to the nation.

The legacy haunts First Nations to this day, in the form of poverty and unemployment, lack of opportunity, high suicide rates, shabby housing and unclean water, broken families, high incarceration rates, too many children in foster care and missing and murdered indigenous women.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in 2008 for the “great harm” inflicted by a century of abuse, as did the churches involved. But since then relations between his government and the fast-growing aboriginal population of 1.4 million have soured, sparking the youthful Idle No More movement. “The promise of reconciliation, which seemed so imminent back in 2008 … has faded,” the report found. “Without truth, justice and healing, there can be no genuine reconciliation.” And no meeting of the minds on complex issues of implementing treaty rights, settling land claims and sharing resource revenues.

Now, in light of the commission’s expose Canadians can no longer credibly deny the racism that tore First Nations communities apart. But painful as the commission’s work taking statements from some 7,000 survivors has been, this is a watershed moment as Canada looks forward to marking 150 years of Confederation in 2017. It opens the door to a healthier era, if we can muster the courage to move forward.

Canada’s governments must make amends, costly though that will be, and rebuild a broken trust. Canadians must demand no less. Collectively and individually we must reach out to bridge the gulfs of understanding that divide us, and lessen the gaps in the quality of our lives.

Canada has already paid out $1.6 billion to the 80,000 survivors to settle a class-action suit, and another $2.5 billion to nearly 30,000 who suffered serious abuse.

Beyond that, the commission urges a number of measures — both symbolic and practical, and some controversial — to ease the pain and redress the wrongs. Among them:

The Canadian government should issue a Royal Proclamation of Reconciliation, built on the Royal Proclamation of 1763, to reaffirm the nation-to-nation relationship between the Crown and aboriginal peoples.

Ottawa should create a National Council for Reconciliation that would monitor and report annually to Parliament on progress and redress. And the Prime Minister should deliver an annual State of Aboriginal Peoples report on government action plans.

Canada should implement the non-binding United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which affirms the right to self-determination; self-government in matters pertaining to internal and local affairs; the right to land they have traditionally owned or occupied; and the right to exercise “free, prior and informed consent” before governments adopt measures that affect them. The Harper government has endorsed the declaration, but only guardedly as an “aspirational” document.

Additionally the commission proposes changing Canada’s citizenship oath to include a reference to upholding treaties; requiring schools across Canada to teach aboriginal history, treaties and rights; building monuments in Ottawa and elsewhere to residential school students; soliciting an apology from Pope Francis; and holding a public inquiry into murdered and missing women.

Finally, it calls for urgent practical measures (and adequate funding) to preserve aboriginal culture and languages; bolster employment, education and health; reduce the number of people in prison and children in state care; and address other inequities.

At root, this report is a summons to change. This is advice to build on, starting with a push to improve conditions in native communities. Symbolism won’t mean much if people continue to suffer from neglect and want. This report should not be left, as so many previous ones have been, to gather dust on a shelf.

Canadians and their governments must rise to the challenge. Without changing the dynamic of the Canada/First Nations relationship there can be no true reconciliation. And as Justice Sinclair says, “there’s an urgency about this.” For the honour of the Crown, and the good of our nation.