Long trek toward healing
Saskatchewan-to-Edmonton ‘Honour Walk’ a symbolic remembrance of residential school students /
‘Honour Walk’ recalls Indian residential schools On the other side of the rumble strips, Brad Langendoen is regularly reminded that symbolic acts don’t always translate well.
“I think the multiple honks are the good honks,” Langendoen chuckles, differentiating the responses of motorists passing him as he treks along the highway shoulder. “The really long honks are maybe not the positive honks.”
Along with three other “white, non-indigenous” Mennonites clad in safety vests, the 27-year-old Winnipegger has spent the last three weeks walking a 500-kilometre stretch of road between Stoney Knoll, Sask., and Edmonton. The Honour Walk, as Langendoen and his colleagues have named their mission, is a physical way of remembering former students of Canada’s Indian residential schools.
On Thursday, they’ll arrive at the Shaw Conference Centre for the seventh and final national event of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. For four days, they’ll hear stories of how church-run, federally funded boarding schools deprived aboriginal Canadians of their language and families, subjecting them instead to hunger, humiliation and abuse.
Hundreds of Christians will attend the TRC sessions. In the months leading up to the event, dozens of congregations and parachurch organizations have hosted special services, workshops and film screenings. Representatives from the Anglican, Presbyterian, Catholic and United Church — the churches that ran the bulk of the schools — will be on hand each day to meet and offer personal apologies to survivors. Church members will staff booths with archival photographs and displays. Survivors will be given prayer blankets, knit by church volunteers throughout the Edmonton area. And since birthdays weren’t marked in most residential schools, church groups have baked cupcakes for a birthday party on Sunday afternoon.
It’s only natural to look to the future when faced with an uncomfortable past, particularly one as difficult, challenging and abhorrent as Canada’s residential schools.
Terry LeBlanc warns that skipping to the future is a surefire way to miss the present. In a sense, residential schools aren’t fundamentally different than personal relationships or economic and environmental problems. If you’re waiting for the problem to go away, you’re likely headed for more trouble.
“It’s a symptom of western society thinking somehow Starting Thursday, Edmonton will host the seventh and final national event of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, an exploration of Canada’s failed historic policy to place aboriginal children in church-run residential schools. Hundreds are expected to testify. Tuesday: Will healing lead to reconciliation? A look at the Edmonton Indian Residential school in St. Albert, now the site of the Poundmaker’s Lodge Treatment Centre, and the difficulty of moving beyond a troubled history. Today: Will truth change the church? How some Christians and organizations are using a shameful part of their history to re-examine their relationships with their aboriginal neighbours. Thursday: Will truth trump reconciliation? Even sympathetic critics question whether a truth commission will succeed in its mandate or open wounds. A look at how the commission is trying to incorporate untold stories and what they may miss. that the problems we find ourselves in today will be solved by some future, unfolding discovery,” said LeBlanc, a Mi’kmaq-Acadian and Christian theologian who lives west of Edmonton.
For over 30 years, LeBlanc has ministered to aboriginal Christians around the world. He is chair and director of Indigenous Pathways, an umbrella organization which works in North America, the Philippines and Australia.
LeBlanc bristles at the assumption that Christian and aboriginal identities need be at odds, pointing to a 400-year, 17-generation history of Mi’kmaq followers of Jesus and a wider Christian history that began far from Alberta. Having worked with evangelical organizations such as World Vision and Tyndale Seminary, he also helps educate non-aboriginal Canadians about their own place in that complicated history. He’s hopeful for change, to see less of an attitude he describes as “it didn’t happen on my watch, so it’s irrelevant.”
LeBlanc encourages nonaboriginal Christians to attend TRC sessions, and if not, research the history and engage with aboriginals. He also warns that looking blindly to the future may be one mistake, but looking back with guilt is another.
“Guilt is not a good motivator of change,” LeBlanc said. “What you do want to create is an environment in which they can experience conviction. Conviction something was wrong, that it created a problem we now live within, and conviction that we could and should do better.”
Symbols stand in for deeper truths. Like most faiths, Christianity can’t be separated from ceremonies or sacraments, simple acts which point beyond themselves. LeBlanc sees positives in the symbolic acts leading up to the TRC, but warns that they can also be manipulated.
“If that substance behind them isn’t what you’re actually intending or meaning, then they don’t mean much,” he said. “If they mean that I want to change my behaviour with respect to this issue, then that’s great.”
A ceremonial apology is what started Roy Berkenbosch on the path of truth and reconciliation. The King’s University professor admittedly knew little about residential schools on June 11, 2008, when Prime Minister Stephen Harper gave an official apology before the House of Commons. The words nudged Berkenbosch to look deeper into the history. He reached out to people who could tell him more.
Berkenbosch’s job at the small Christian Reformed school is to promote awareness of and action on global poverty and injustice. He saw the announcement of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission as an opportunity.
“I thought that this was an important time in Canadian history,” Berkenbosch said. “This was something that was especially important for the generation of students I work with.”
In January 2009, King’s held it’s first campus-wide conference on truth and reconciliation. In 2012, the school put on a three-week evening spring class on the topic, cotaught by Berkenbosch and open to the public.
This year, the class has been stretched into a full semester leading up to the TRC. In addition to 15 students from the school, there are up to 75 regulars who come to a wide array of guest lectures: survivors, historians, even a government lawyer who negotiated the settlement. Last week, the TRC’s Willie Littlechild was the guest.
Knowing that the $2-million national event was coming to town, Berkenbosch used it for an interdisciplinary conference, a half-credit course that’s mandatory for nearly all of King’s 700 students. Thursday lectures will prepare students for what they’ll hear. On Friday, they’ll be attending sessions at the Shaw Conference Centre, with a debriefing after.
The Christian Reformed Church didn’t operate any residential schools in Canada, but Berkenbosch doesn’t think historic culpability is the point. Christians are commanded to be “agents of reconciliation,” he said, and Canada’s settler-indigenous relationship is fractured.
“The hearings themselves are no culmination of anything. It’s a moment in time,” said Berkenbosch.
Reconciliation begins, he said, only if students “discard stereotypes, if they become acquainted with members of the aboriginal community and form friendships, if they find avenues for renewed conversations, if it inspires people to volunteer.”
On the way to Edmonton, Langendoen and his fellow walkers have experienced exhaustion, blisters and sore joints. They have also enjoyed moments of communion at the Poundmaker Cree Nation near Cut Knife, Sask., and the Mannville Community Church near Vermillion. Aboriginal women have stopped along the highway to offer the walkers a large jug of Tim Hortons coffee. Others have joined in the trek and brought meals.
Langendoen sees the TRC sessions as a step on a personal pilgrimage that began when he first learned about the schools while studying conflict resolution at Canadian Mennonite University.
The idea for this walk came from a group of seven James Bay Cree teens who hiked 1,600 km from Quebec and Ottawa last year to draw attention to aboriginal issues.
It’s hard to understand how a Gospel built upon the idea of God’s reconciliation could lead to something as misguided and abusive as the residential schools. But Langendeon has been trying to understand. In his life back in Winnipeg, he’s built connections with Idle No More protesters and former residential school survivors.
“To know that the church had participated in that kind of harm was incredibly disheartening,” he said. “If we can’t hear the truth, if we can’t know the truth, it’s hard to ever get to the point of reconciliation.”