Indigenous children weren’t given a choice

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following letter, addressed to Senator Lynn Beyak, was submitted to the Truro Daily News for publication.

Dear Senator Beyak, What you refer to as the “mistakes” made at Indian residential schools were in fact willful and intentional acts of abuse and neglect perpetrated on Indigenous children. These were not misjudgments; this was not mere inadvertence.

More than that, the principles underpinning the establishment and maintenance of the residential school system were wrong. Residential schools were wrong. It was wrong to forcibly remove children from Indigenous communities. It was wrong to break children’s bonds with their parents, families and culture.

The legacy of that system has been easy to see, and for too many of us, easy to ignore. It has manifested as over-representation in the criminal justice system, as lagging educational and economic outcomes and in many other ways.

It has been compounded by racist policies and racism in all its more subtle forms.

It is this for which Canada, and all Canadians, must reconcile with our Indigenous peoples. I am a descendant of two well-intentioned people who worked in a residential school, not unlike those you intended to praise in your speech to the Senate. My grandmother Harriet was a teacher, and my grandfather Gordon worked as a caretaker, at a residential school in Saskatchewan.

Their contribution was marginal, insignificant. No, not everyone who worked in the residential school system was a monster. But it took a lot of marginal contributions to keep the system on its feet, along with a lot of indifference and ignorance by other Canadians.

My grandparents told me, before they died, that they had seen none of the abuse with which residential schools are now synonymous. Their time there was really unremarkable to them. They left after a year and returned to Nova Scotia. The residential school life wasn’t for them.

But the children did not have that choice. They had to stay and endure humiliation, intimidation and abuse. Many did not make it out alive.

As a Canadian, and especially as a Senator, you have to decide what role you will play in reconciliation. Your lifetime appointment as a legislator vests in you special responsibility to demonstrate leadership in the reconciliation process. You ought to show us how you will answer the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

But, if leadership in this crucial national project is not for you, then I respectfully suggest you give up your seat in the Senate of Canada for someone who can.

Joel D. Henderson,

Truro