The TRC’s road to nowhere
Please do not think me an apologist for modernity. I sincerely believe life was better in medieval Britain
The executive summary of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is difficult to read. It is a harrowing look at past tragedies, the pain that still lingers, and a brilliantly illuminated road to nowhere.
I think the public telling of stories is valuable. There is catharsis for the tellers, their relatives and friends, some kind of voice for the dead, and catharsis for non-aboriginal hearers, because until we are honest we cannot cleanse ourselves.
There is no evading the fact that in Indian policy generally, and the residential school policy in particular, the Canadian government often did the wrong thing for the wrong reason in the wrong way. And while history may explain past choices it cannot excuse some of them. But it also cannot excuse errors in our own time.
Yes, abuse happened in residential schools. Children were ripped from their families by a government engaged in social engineering for reasons, and using language, we find abhorrent today. But the larger history behind the report is false and without truth no reconciliation can happen.
Fundamentally the report asserts, again, that aboriginals lived in Eden until the white serpent showed up. So all we need now is for nonaboriginals to repent, hand over lots of money, and let aboriginals fix all the problems of their shattered culture using their intact culture. Every part of that assertion is wrong.
What r eall y happened from the 15 th through the 20th centuries was a collision between Stone Age and Renaissance cultures laid atop the worst demographic disaster in human history. As Jared Diamond argues in Guns, Germs, and Steel, Europeans showed up with metal, gunpowder, writing, medicine, sailing ships, buttons, compasses, brick houses and smallpox. Indians had none of these things and in short order got them all, a literally overwhelming experience.
Had the Viking settlements in “Vinland” not succumbed to climate change, a more gradual “family reunion” between long-sundered branches of humanity might have avoided much of the resulting tragedy. But it didn’t happen, and the resulting cultural dislocation would have been overwhelming even without the malice so often involved.
In Conquest and Culture, Thomas Sowell disparages “prevailing doctrines about ‘celebrating’ and preserving cultural differences. Cultures are not museum-pieces. They are the working machinery of everyday life… The judgment that matters is not the judgment of observers and theorists, but the judgment implicit in millions of individual decisions.”
When Europeans arrived with metal, medicine, gunpowder and other technologies, aboriginals wanted them. They clearly solved pressing problems in highly effective ways. But for precisely that reason they overturned traditional practices. As Marshall McLuhan argued, literacy alone transforms culture beyond recognition. Yet would any aboriginal activist want young people to be denied the alphabet because “the ancestors” got it from the white man?
Please do not think me an apologist for modernity, let alone Canadian government aboriginal policy then or now. I sincerely believe life was better in medieval Britain. But those days are gone, there and here. The working tools that comprise a culture not only can change as circumstances change, they must.
Biology has nothing to do with it. All men are created equal, in bad ways as well as good. Aboriginal culture was not perfect, and aboriginal youth like the rest of us must not be given a “history” that cannot withstand truth-telling. But for the inhabitants of the Americas, circumstances changed with unmanageable speed and suddenness after 1492 in ways whose after-effects haunt us still but cannot be wished away.
Sir John A. Macdonald gets much criticism for using terms like “savages”. But he was not wrong to think traditional aboriginal culture could not cope, and was not coping, with the Brave New World that had burst upon them and something had to be done.
To say so is not to excuse racism or the coercive educa- tion that tore families apart and often denied the pupils it seized the basic necessities of life let alone proper instruction. But we cannot replace one race-fixated form of social engineering with another, too prone to reject modernity instead of too prone to accept it, and expect better results.
When I call the report’s recommendations a road to nowhere, I don’t primarily mean things like “Providing sufficient funding to close identified educational achievement gaps within one generation,” unworkable as it clearly is. I mean things like, “We call upon post-secondary institutions to create university and college degree and diploma programs in aboriginal languages.”
Before Columbus, t he language of a local aboriginal group was, for its members, the basic container of the social and intellectual universe. Today, a language spoken by a few hundred people is a road to nowhere and a PhD in it like an arrow with a touch screen.
Such tools are no use to anyone, including those seeking truth and reconciliation.
John Robson is a journalist and documentary filmmaker in Ottawa. He teaches history at the University of Ottawa.