Blog July - August 2021 Reflections on the Residential Schools, and a personal piece

    When I was a kid in elementary school, growing up in a small town north of Toronto, I used to subscribe to a little magazine that contained things like Bible stories and various teachings. A big theme would have been the Christian imperative to love all people. I assume that my school was promoting the magazine, and my parents supported it. My memories of it are positive.

    It also happened that one of the Catholic families in the area had a priest who was a member of a religious community. I knew the family fairly well, but I only knew him from seeing him when he came home for visits from the missions. Members of his Order were among the teachers in the northern residential schools (I am not sure which Province), and that is where he was stationed. I remember talking to him on one occasion about the magazine I had subscribed to, and I offered to save back copies to send to him for the children in the schools. He was grateful, and I did that for probably a couple of years.

    I would have been in grade 7 or 8, and I remember being pleased to have this opportunity to do a little work of charity for kids who I imagined would be happy to receive these magazines.

    This was my personal connection to the Residential School system. When I think back on that time now, I have two horrifying thoughts. The first is that these children did not choose to go there, rather they were taken from their families for the express purpose of removing their native heritage from them. My second thought is please God the priest I knew never did anything to abuse those children physically or sexually. But even if he did not do any of that, surely he was aware that it was taking place. And I feel sick.

    We all know that recently in 2021, 215 and then 771 unmarked graves have been discovered at sites of the Residential Schools. It is not known if all of these contain bodies of children, but most likely do. I read that the mortality rate of the children in the schools was very high. Apart from death caused by illness and atrocious living conditions and mistreatment, what I know about separation leads me to believe that it is possible that most died simply from the heart break of unbearable separation from their parents.

    And then another horrifying thought hits me. We hear that church officials removed the markers from these graves, which is the reason they were not discovered until ground penetrating radar technology came along. This says to me that there was an attempt to remove their identity. (By contrast where I grew up, tombstones have dates as far back as the 1700's). Worse yet, the children were stripped of their humanity. Once you are able to do the mental gymnastics involved in making groups of people less than human, you are able to do whatever you want with them. This is the history of slavery and it is the history of the Jewish people in World War II. It is to weep for, and it is so very hard to relate to unless we find those private little exceptions we make for ourselves in the world we live in. It takes incredible honesty, however, to bring those exceptions to conscious awareness.

    Yet another horrifying thought hits me. When these children died, there probably were no native burial rituals - that would be to give back to the children the heritage that was being taken from them. But did they not hold any funeral services for them at all? Catholic funeral rites are so very beautiful with the theme of trusting the promise of the Resurrection as we send the deceased individual home to the Paradise of heaven. Did no one even do this for those children? Did they just bury them? I do not know the answer to this. Nothing in my preliminary searches has yielded any information about burial services for the children. I would like to find out. Because their absence would mark not only a major betrayal of any honour or dignity a Christian person might bring to bear in this circumstance, it also would mark a betrayal of the most fundamental beliefs that a Catholic missionary lives with at the core of their own person.

    In the home town in which I grew up, I was taught by Sisters of a religious community in different grades. I have no bad memories of them, and many of them were extraordinarily beautiful and kind individuals. Teaching or nursing was how they supported their community, and their salaries went to that purpose. My understanding is that the modern Residential Schools system was initiated at the government level and contracted to the religious orders., But the long history also includes the initiatives of the Orders themselves. (Check out this link, for a good overview of the background and the history of the schools: https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/timeline/residential-schools.)  In any event, it is mind-boggling that the members of religious orders bought into the vision of stripping indigenous children of their heritage and identity, in favour of a white, Christian substitute. And in the process, convincing themselves that they needed to be strict, structured, and punitive.

    You have undoubtedly heard that a priest in the Toronto area recently complained that no one was speaking of the good that teachers and staff in those schools did alongside any harmful things that were done. Needless to say, the public blowback was swift and furious, and he has resigned. Here is the thing. It is hard for me to imagine that there were never any individual kindnesses shown to any of those children. But whether there were or not, the problem is that the whole thing was wrong! The entire enterprise was unkind! (Look up Sir John A.’s words in Parliament on the matter - you never heard these in your history courses!) Native children and their families were dehumanized to permit the cultural genocide that was the purpose of the schools. It is sickening to think that religious communities found a way to buy into that vision, and that an acquaintance of mine could have been a part of it.

    It has just occurred to me that I had a little part in this with my magazine charity. And continue to do so by not speaking up more. Do your own conscience check. For myself, I apologize to Indigenous people everywhere. I apologize to the people of Canada whose values were betrayed by that school system. And I apologize to members of our faith communities who are horrified (finally?) at what we did to those people. Time now for the relevant Governments to continue to step up. Time now for the Church to step up and live what we believe. Apologize. We cannot continue the betrayal. Platitudes are no longer acceptable.