Residential school survivors

will testify in Montreal next week. Christopher Curtis looks at the emotional burden of speaking at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

S ometimes

the light goes on. It happened one day not long ago while discussing the forthcoming Truth and Reconciliation Commission event in Montreal.

“You know,” I said, “I have Indian friends and I’m pretty sympathetic to the tough times they’re having in some places, but I don’t understand all this guilt about residential schools. It was years ago. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I wasn’t there. What’s this got to do with me?”

“I notice that you stand proud on Remembrance Day,” my friend replied. “You applaud when the vets march by, sometimes with a tear in your eye. You weren’t there for the world wars or Korea, either.”

That’s when the light went on. Residential schools are part of my history, too, along with Vimy Ridge and the Holland liberation. A dark chapter, to be sure, but a thread of my Canadian heritage that I’ve failed to see in our country’s rich tapestry.

Although missionaries had established residential schools for aboriginal children as long ago as 1620, the concept really took hold with Confederation.

In the 1876 Indian Act, Ottawa assumed control of aboriginal “governments, economy, religion, land, education, and even their personal lives,” TRC commissioners write in their powerful and depressing book They Came for the Children.

John A. Macdonald added to the loose network of church-run, of f-reserve schools.

“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents,” he said in 1883. “He is simply a savage who can read and write.”

Churches seeking to save souls were eager partners. In 1879, Toronto journalist Nicholas Flood Davin cited two reasons for a formal partnership with them in a report to the federal government. Residential schools, he hoped, would turn children into reliable citizens, their aboriginal faith replaced by a better one — Christianity — and motivated missionaries could be hired more cheaply than qualified teachers.

This was not just a reflec-

SIR JOHN A. MACDONALD, PRIME MINISTER

tion of the Dark Ages of the 19th century; it carried into the “modern” era.

In 1920, the Indian Affairs Department’s deputy minister Duncan Campbell Scott wrote that the government would “continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada that has not been absorbed in- to the body politic, and there is no Indian question, and no Indian department.”

One hundred and forty one residential schools have been recognized by the TRC, and others await judicial rulings. In the last decades of the 20th century, government and churches began to recognize both the ineffectiveness and the injustice of a system that had endured for seven generations, robbing 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children of their culture, herit-

“When the school is on the reserve, the child lives with his parents, He is simply

a savage who can read and write.””

age and families.

Untold numbers were mistreated physically, psychologically and sexually, leaving them in a cycle of abuse and addiction.

Early research suggests that at least 3,000 lie in unidentified graves near the former schools.

Were there dedicated teachers who worked diligently within a flawed, underfunded system and warned of impending disaster? Of course.

Were there aboriginal children who survived unscathed and went on to lives fulfilled? Yes, again.

Aren’t there examples of child abuse in other Canadian institutions? Indeed there are, but none within a system under the formal sanction of the government and participating churches.

In 2008, the government and the Roman Catholic, Anglican, United and Presbyterian churches settled the largest Canadian class action suit of its kind, an agreement that created the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

The TRC is mandated to record the history and impact of residential schools, promote public awareness through national and local events, and to foster sharing and healing between aboriginal peoples and the rest of us.

The fifth of seven major national events will be held at Montreal’s Queen Elizabeth Hotel from Wednesday to April 27. Highlights will include a Sacred Fire in Place du Canada burning throughout the four days, an education day for local students, films, a variety show and a series of often heartbreaking testimonies by residential school survivors either publicly or in confidence before the commissioners and in listening areas established by the churches.

We have recently read startling, depressing and often puzzling headlines about protests and blockades, treaty claims, resources, reserve management and political grandstanding.

This TRC event offers us a unique opportunity to begin learning about just one element of the complex maze of issues rooted deep in our past that will play out in our future to a conclusion that’s still very much uncertain.

The public is invited to the Queen E. I hope we pack the place.