Crimes we did (and didn’t) commit
Ilike truth and reconciliation, which is more than I can say for Truth and Reconciliation Commissions. Much as I like truth and reconciliation, I can’t help noting that they are often a contradiction in terms. Truth isn’t necessarily what Truth and Reconciliation Commissions bring to the table, fearing that if they did, reconciliation would become impossible.
Such commissions are set up only after the spirit of the times, a.k.a. the Zeitgeist, has spoken, and once the Zeitgeist speaks, everything is likely to be its echo. What usually happens is that TRC’s immerse past events and policies in the acid bath of hindsight, scour them, cleanse them, surgically remove their outdated falsehoods, errors and injustices, and replace them with falsehoods, errors and injustices of contemporary manufacture.
Does doing so lead to the truth? No, but it makes some people feel virtuous, and that soothes troubled souls — but there are exceptions. One is when we accuse our societies and heritage of nonexistent sins or crimes we didn’t commit. Such as cultural genocide. Justice Murray Sinclair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission has found that “what took place in residential schools amounts to nothing short of cultural genocide — a systematic and concerted attempt to extinguish the spirit of aboriginal peoples.”
I have always had a dim view of the residential school program. Well before there were any commissions, I had written such lines as “the residential school programs were disgraceful not just from the perspective of our times, but from the perspective of their own.”
I specifically wrote that forcibly removing children from their families to place them in an alien, loveless, institutional environment and deliberately deprive them of their language and culture, even without subjecting them to routine humiliation and frequent physical or sexual abuse, would have been viewed as cruel, inexcusable, and very possibly criminal in the late 19th and early 20th centuries no less than in our times.
Cruel, inexcusable and possibly criminal are bad things — but they aren’ t genocide. Not even with the adjective “cultural” preceding it.
You don’t commit genocide to assist people. You don’t commit genocide out of concern for their survival or salvation. You don’t commit genocide out of the goodness of your heart. You may do many terrible things, but not genocide.
The reason we didn’t view our own conduct in the abominable light it deserved at the time was due to civilizational arrogance, combined with a type of social engineering fallacy that gives people a license to do evil when they think they’re doing good. One might call it a missionary’s license to do the devil’s work or a do-gooder’s exemption from common decency. The very names we used to give some of our legislation, such as the 1857 Gradual Civilization Act (it included, among other measures, gifting 50 acres of arable Crown land to indigenous males who completed elementary schooling) reflected this smug fallacy. We wanted our “Indians,” as we called them, to be more like us, little understanding how flawed we were as role models.
The roots of the problem go deep. As I have written before, not all of history occurs in the same time zone. The European infiltration and eventual conquest of North America wasn’ t a clash between contemporaneous people. The indigenous population lived in the hunting-gathering upper Paleolithic or Mesolithic period of mankind, harsh but idyllic at the same time, while the European arrivals, rooted in the agricultural late Neolithic, weren’t only past antiquity and the Middle Ages by the time they landed on North America’s shores, but had reached the early edges of the industrial age. It was history encountering pre-history, with neither side realizing what was about to occur. If the Europeans had been Martians, little green people with antennae growing out of their heads, the aborigines might have been forewarned. As it was, natives and newcomers looked too similar to realize how different they were.
This is a factor that has made both integration and the possibility of an i ndependent e xis tence f or First Nations more difficult. A First Nation may exist in separation from Canada on the map, but it’s harder for it to exist in separation from the 21st century. Even if it were possible, it may not be enough. A time machine may have to go back to 10,000 B.C. to address the problems First Nations face in the modern world.
Governments have spent billions to maintain remote communities in dysfunction and despair. No one can make up for the hurt of residential schools, but we tried. In 2005 the Liberals offered a 1.9 billion compensation package; in 2008 the Conservatives came up with a public apology. Neither solved the problem, and neither will a selfabasing judicial finding of cultural genocide.
In truth, it was the despicable residential schools that asked the right questions, even if they gave hideously wrong answers. The ultimate solution, if there is one, is to end special status and unite Canada with its aboriginal inhabitants. The alternative, which is having the government maintain a sort of Paleolithic Garden of Eden for natives in post-industrial Canada, isn’t just unaffordable but unworkable. Unless people join the century in which they live, they will be alienated and displaced. The residential schools, far from being genocidal, culturally or otherwise, tried connecting people with their times; they just went about it the wrong way. Let’s not make the same mistake the other way around.
The ultimate solution, if there is one, is to end special status