No remedies in report,

“When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages and though he may learn to read and write, his habits and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.”

— Sir John A. Macdonald in 1883, cited in the summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s final report, released Tuesday.

There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth about the blunt assertion by this report’s authors — Alberta chief Wilton Littlechild, former journalist Marie Wilson and Manitoba Justice Murray Sinclair — that Canada perpetrated a cultural genocide on aboriginal people beginning in the 1880s, and lasting well into the past century. There will be, but there shouldn’t be, at least not over those two inflammatory words. The wailing should be that of horror, grief and abject shame.

For cultural genocide is precisely what the residential school policy was, based on the historical record, as evidenced by quotes like the one from Sir John, at left. One can argue whether the policy achieved its frankly racist, assimilationist aims, but not whether it was attempted. The verdict is in, rendered by 7,000 former residential school residents over a period of years.

Some 150,000 children were torn from their parents, siblings, and homes; many deprived of basic necessities of life; often beaten, abused and humiliated; stripped of their language, as their parents and grandparents had been stripped of their land; and reduced to the status of second-class citizens, at best, in their own country. Thousands died. It is, beyond doubt, the most appalling episode in this country’s history, alongside the forced internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Moreover, the rank injustice is still with us. Some among Canada’s 600odd reserves are doing well. Most are not. Grief, suffering and loss are the legacies of residential schools, as this report shows again. Chronic, substantial per-capita underfunding of education, poor drinking water, substandard housing, chronic unemployment, endemic family violence, and the reserve system itself, racist to its core, are the reality today for many aboriginal Canadians. To suggest the abuses are matters of the distant past is to be blind and deaf.

That said, for all the reconciliation commission report’s visceral power, its voluminous recommendations – 94 in total, ranging from sports policy to funding for the CBC – have done aboriginal Canadians a disser- vice, it seems to me. The reason is that, in demanding change just about everywhere, to just about everything, the authors have made it all the easier for politicians and the majority of voters to toss the lot on the shelf with all the previous reports, there to gather dust. A pragmatic, tightly focused set of demands, with a few key priorities uppermost, could have had more lasting impact, particularly in an election year.

Education, for example: can anyone doubt learning and training will be at the heart of any long-term rise in aboriginal Canadian living standards? The best social program is a job, someone once said. It’s true everywhere on earth. So the call for Ottawa to “eliminate the discrepancy in federal education funding for First Nations children being educated on reserves and those First Nations children being educated off reserves,” is well taken. But it’s one line, and lost amid demands for more report-writing, culturally specific early childhood education and a request that new “aboriginal education legislation” be drafted “with the full participation and informed consent of Aboriginal Peoples.” Just how might that happen, practically, when there is no coherent political structure to discern and channel Aboriginal Peoples’ wishes?

There are recommendations about child welfare, health, language and culture, justice, cultural-sensitivity training for public servants, youth programs and museums, some of which are perfectly valid, many of which are too sweeping and aspirational to have any practical effect. Was it necessary in a report about residential schools to demand restored and additional funding for the CBC?

In places where the authors might have pressed hard to good political effect — for example with a renewed call for an effective, timely and wellresourced push on outstanding comprehensive land claims, of which just 26 have been settled during the past 42 years — the recommendations are silent. Yet this is the one area that has the greatest potential to give aboriginal Canadians the tools and resources they need to thrive, independent of federal government aid or meddling.

It’s as though the commissioners, focused on articulating legitimate historic grievances, somehow missed that among the worst aspects of the schools policy was its robbery of Aboriginal Peoples’ autonomy over their own lives. No government can possibly do all that is asked of Ottawa in these recommendations. Given the history, arguably, no government should ever be trusted to.