Indigenous lives need more than apologies to rise

My parents, relatives and neighbours were invariably hard-working people. My father spent 49 years as a coal miner, while my mother cleaned rich folks’ homes for a pittance.

Like many of their era, holding a job was the vital thing.

That community clung to its pride and those jobs through the economic challenges of the 1970s in the U.K., only to be afforded the killer blow courtesy of Margaret Thatcher.

Yet, that same reviled politician changed their lives for the better, providing something to which humans respond — responsibility and ownership.

She allowed those who’d lived and paid rent in council houses for years to buy those homes for a veritable song. Virtually everyone on the dilapidated street where I’d grown up jumped at the chance.

Years later, returning for my father’s funeral, the place was almost unrecognizable: not quite middle class, but a long way from those ramshackle buildings once lining the street.

Because, despite the hard-working nature of those living there, no one ever picked up a hammer or saw to fix a floorboard or mend a window. It was always someone else’s problem. “They” — in this case, the local borough council — always were to blame.

But then those same people were given ownership, and with it, responsibility. It changed them. Now, if the grass remained uncut, they’d hear about it soon enough from neighbours.

That world is an age away from the focus of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women Inquiry that visited Calgary last week. Yet, when it comes to human nature, we really aren’t too different as those peas in that famous pod.

Only when people can claim ownership of their own lives, can we progress.

Which is why this inquiry needs to become something much more than a place of blame, apology and recriminations if anything is actually going to change in the way Indigenous people live in Canada.

Sooner or later, we need to stop looking backward and instead take a hard look at today’s situation, which entails asking some tough questions of the future, alongside some necessary apologies for the way treatment was meted out to Indigenous people in the past.

Yes, indeed, a much higher percentage of Indigenous women are slain or disappear than the national average. Blame racism, the residential school system and governments of all stripes, by all means, but also ask why it is that 70 per cent of those murders are committed by Indigenous men?

Or why is it, despite last week’s apology for removing children from Indigenous homes in the so-called ’60s Scoop, 67 per cent of youngsters in state care in Alberta today are of Indigenous descent?

Are we to believe social workers do this because they’re cruel? Maybe instead, they are doing it to try to provide help and support for those children.

These are questions that need asking if we are actually going to stop, or at least reduce, such dreadful statistics in future.

The current “we’re sorry” phase suits governments only too well. It allows Ottawa and Edmonton to apologize for sins of their forebears to show how open-minded and thoughtful they are today. Then, after years of hearing dreadful tales of woe, a report will be released with suitable fanfare promising all manner of change.

More money will be thrown at problems for a while until the fuss dies down. Nothing will actually change, no real lessons will be learned. Give it a decade, and we’ll be apologizing for the “Millennial Swoop.”

It’s easier to rename a bridge, tear down a statue and blame the nastiness of an earlier age than face the truth — apologies and promises can only clear the ground on which to build. Ignore that and barren earth is the only outcome.

Only when people can claim ownership of their own lives, can we progress.

It is a hard but universal lesson.