A LONG ROAD TO HEALING
Aboriginals and non-aboriginals have to sort this out together
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. Murray Sinclair, Chair, Truth and Reconciliation Commission It would be wise for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government to carefully and cautiously consider how to proceed, rather than just leap at everything at once.
If you wanted to walk all the way back to the beginning of the road that brought us to the national rituals of remembrance, regret and renewal that culminated with Tuesday’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission verdict on the traumatic legacy of Canada’s Indian residential schools, you’d end up in a British House of Commons committee room, in 1837.
If you wanted to consider that journey as a lesson, what it might teach you is something rather more unsettling than the moral instruction Commission head Justice Murray Sinclair imparted on Tuesday, 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.”
Justice Sinclair did not go too far. But that he did not exaggerate only draws into sharper relief the confounding paradox of the British House of Commons Select Committee on Aborigines in 1837, its sweeping survey of the British Empire’s relations with indigenous peoples, and how it saw the road forward.
The Select Committee concluded that the Indians of Upper Canada were “melting away before the advance of the white population,” and that the only remedy was to “civilize” the remnants: teach them useful trades, make labourers of them, Christianize them. The Select Committee report went on to serve as the foundational tract of the Aborigines Protection Society (APS), led by Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton. The society’s first big policy tangle in Canada was its spirited encounter with Sir Francis Bond Head, the Upper Canada lieutenantgovernor.
“Old Galloping Head” reckoned that the fate of the tribes was to “wither, droop, and vanish before us like the grass of the forest in flames.” Best, he felt, to entice as much of Ontario’s aboriginal population as could be persuaded to abandon the rich farmlands of their reserves and move to Manitoulin Island, where they’d be left to live out the twilight years of their existence in primeval tranquillity.
To Sir Thomas and the APS, this was “perfidious trickery.” With its enlistment of the Colonial Office in the work of convincing Upper Canada to pass laws protecting the aboriginal people in their reserves, the APS had ambushed the cynical Sir Francis and won the day in 1839.
But the Aborigines Protection Society was animated by its own cynicism in the form of a “church-state” alliance, as the historian Michael D. Blackstock has described it. As the Society itself put it, “religious instruction and the influence of the missionaries would be the most likely means of improving their condition, and, eventually, of relieving the Government from the expense of the Indian department.”
That’s the paradox, but the abasement of Canada’s aboriginal culture in residential schools is not so simple a matter of collusion between the Aborigines Protection Society and the forces of colonialism. The Society and like-minded missionaries insisted as well that the Royal Proclamation of 1763 should civilize white-aboriginal relations in Canada. The point of the proclamation was that there should be a reconciliation (there’s that word again) between the Indian title with Crown sovereignty in advance of white settlement.
The proclamation ended up serving as the legal underpinning for the treaties between Canada and the First Nations of the prairies. Those treaties then ushered in the darkest days of the residential-school period.
There’s an even deeper paradox in the implication of the schools in “cultural genocide,” as Justice Sinclair reasonably put it. If we’re to take Sir John A. Macdonald’s 1883 grisly utterance seriously — about the purpose of the schools being to “kill the Indian, but save the man” — the point of the schools was to avert an actual genocide, in the commonly understood meaning of the term.
If you wanted, you could walk back to 1837 by way of another trail through the tangled undergrowth of this history and end up at the consecration of Eugène de Mazenod as the bishop of Marseilles.
Eugène de Mazenod was the founder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the religious order that came to dominate the Catholic residential schools in Canada, and it was those schools that ended up performing the bulk of Ottawa’s sadistic disservice to aboriginal people.
One of the largest of the Oblates’ schools in Western Canada was St. Mary’s, at what is now Mission, British Columbia. At times the place was a nightmare, but the controversy it attracted in its early years was due to the Oblates’ utopian refusal to even administer corporal punishment. In 1995, Eugene de Mazenod was canonized by the Vatican. He is now the patron saint of dysfunctional families.
It was from those early missionaries, mostly Methodists and Anglicans, that the tribes first learned about the Royal Proclamation of 1763. It was with the clergy’s help that the B.C. chiefs began demanding their rights to treaties (the “numbered” treaties of the prairies never crossed the Rockies). In 1913 the Nisga’a people of the Nass Valley hired the London law firm of Fox and Preece to submit their claim of unsurrendered title directly to the Privy Council, which at the time was Canada’s highest court. The Nisga’a petition was shifted back to Ottawa, which prohibited aboriginal title litigation in 1927 — a draconian law that stayed on the books until 1951.
B.C.’s First Nations bided their time, and in 1973 the Nisga’a were back, winning an historic split decision on aboriginal title at the Supreme Court of Canada, which rousted Ottawa enough to set a federal comprehensive claims process in motion. In 1982 the Constitution Act recognized and affirmed aboriginal rights, but left the content of those rights an “empty box” for the courts to fill.
The one thing that courts have insisted, time and again, is that the whole point of aboriginal rights law is reconciliation (again, that word), between Crown sovereignty and aboriginal title, between Canada’s settler cultures and this country’s First Nations.
The thorniest issue was the right of aboriginal self-government.
That right was included in the Charlottetown Accord, which went down to defeat in a 1992 national referendum, which in turn prompted Ottawa to hand the entire matter of federal aboriginal policy to a royal commission.
In 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples turned in a 4,000-page report with 440 recommendations, just one of which was a call for new Royal Proclamation to set out a new relationship between Canada and First Nations.
Ottawa responded with a policy hodgepodge that included the establishment of a $350-million “healing fund” in recompense for the legacy of the concentration camps that so many federal residential schools became.
Over the years, the lawsuits mounted. The largest class action suit in Canadian history produced the 2007 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, and to date, the Agreement has paid out nearly $3 billion in 31,970 claims.
The agreement also provided for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which on Tuesday released its 388-page executive summary (six volumes are yet to come), mostly taken from the evidence of nearly 7,000 witnesses in more than 300 cities, towns and villages across Canada. Just one of the TRC’s 94 recommendations was a reiteration of the 1996 Royal Commission’s call for a new Royal Proclamation.
It would be wise for Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government to carefully and cautiously consider how to proceed, rather than just leap at everything at once. The way forward should not be about just trying to decide what would be best for Canada’s aboriginal people. It has to be about what’s best for all of us.
Aboriginal people have to be involved in deciding that, too. We all have to sort this out together.
If there is any lesson to be learned along the long road from 1837, that would be it.