The past week’s news has been filled with discussion of the final report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Even though the truth gathered in the report is hard to hear, I’m glad. It’s time that we as Canadians attempt to grasp the gulf between what we were taught in school about the relationship between our government and aboriginal people and what really happened.
I grew up in a small town in northern Ontario where the racism against aboriginal people was so great, my family never spoke of our aboriginal lineage. In fact, my mother did not reveal our Metis heritage to me until we moved to Vancouver in 1989. The last Canadian residential school remained open for another seven years.
Residential schools operated in Canada from 1883 through to 1996. More than 150,000 children attended these schools that separated them from their families, their culture and even their language. Mortality rates for children in residential schools were higher than that of Canadians fighting in the Second World War.
We learn much during our academic careers about Canada’s losses in the Second World War. But for many Canadians, the light shed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report is the first time they have heard detail of what residential schools were and what effect they had on the children and the fractured communities left behind. Through the seven years of the commission’s work gathering stories from school survivors and even staff of the schools, the commission heard accounts ranging from sexual and physical abuse to torture, neglect and profound loneliness.
They also heard many stories about tears, the kinds of tears that many Canadians have never had to think about before. Survivors told stories of their tears as they were loaded onto bush planes or trains and taken from their remote communities. Survivors told of the tears they tried not to shed at night as they learned a single child crying resulted in punishment for the whole dorm.
For me, the most startling aspect of the report is finally understanding the true intent behind the residential school system. The residential school system was not simply an illustration of a difference in opinion about how best to educate children. This was not an educational theory that hurt by accident. The breaking of aboriginal families and communities was not a side effect of the residential school system; it was the intended outcome.
Each year, we memorialize our involvement in both world wars to ensure that we as a nation never forget, and so that we will not be doomed to repeat our history. We mark the day, we tell our children about it and we promise the survivors that we will be vigilant.
One of the 94 recommendations tied to the TRC report is a call for creation of a statutory holiday, a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation to honour survivors, their families, and communities. Perhaps June 1, one month before Canada Day, could become this day of remembrance. Students in the final weeks of the academic year could be taught the story of how our Canadian government once used school as a weapon of cultural genocide and how we must promise to prevent this from ever happening again.
On the eve of the new national holiday, a simple ceremony could end the school day during which children could take each other’s hands and walk out the school doors together, a simple expression of freedom that was not available to the children who attended residential schools.
Such a ceremony would only be a real act of reconciliation if we pushed our provincial and federal governments to address the high number of aboriginal children currently in our foster care system and enabled policy to keep today’s aboriginal children in their communities of origin in greater numbers.
There are many reasons that Vancouver can be a leading city on the way to reconciliation. Not only do we have a history of leadership in many other social justice movements including women’s reproductive rights, gay and transgendered rights, and environmental justice, but we are privileged to live on the still unceded lands of three strong nations: the Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations, who can help lead the way.
Our first act of reconciliation is to promise to open our eyes and hearts to the truth, and then to never forget.
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