Official apologies to First Nations aren’t enough
Education, policy change are the best ways forward
The last federally operated residential school in Canada was closed in 1996. 1996. The year Margaret Atwood won the Giller Prize for Alias Grace. The year the Tragically Hip released Trouble at the Henhouse. The year the Kings traded Gretzky to St. Louis. It was 20 years ago, but some of us likely remember it like it was yesterday.
The residential school system in Canada was a peculiar horror.
The history reads like something out of fiction. In fact, it reads like something from the early days of pulp science fiction: A race of conquerors lands on alien soil, depends on the residents for a while, then turns on them and spends the next few centuries isolating, subjugating and acculturating them. The process includes forcibly removing more than 150,000 children from their homes and families, educating them that their identity is shameful, sometimes starving and raping them, then sending them home to spread the good news. Along the way, up to 6,000 of those children die of disease and neglect. The story ends with the original inhabitants, now thoroughly separated from their own land and their own ways, realizing that they themselves have become the aliens.
Ontario Premier Kathleen Wynne’s official apology for the province’s role in that story is but one of many.
Canada has been trying to apologize (and in some ways, atone) for its sins since roughly the 1980s. That is when Canadian church groups began making their formal apologies. In 1998, the federal government offered a Statement of Reconciliation. Multiple measures followed,
Until there is change, Canada will just have to keep apologizing.
including compensation packages as part of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement. In 2008, then-prime minister Stephen Harper offered a formal apology.
It remains a distinctly Canadian irony that the nation has not quite figured out the right apology yet. Of course, it would help if the problems caused by residential schools and other polices toward Aboriginal and Indigenous Peoples were actually resolved. But they’re not.
As the Attawapiskat suicide crisis can attest, something is gravely wrong with life on First Nations reserves. Meanwhile, the fate of more than 1,200 missing or murdered indigenous women remains unknown, and their killers continue to evade justice. In the past decade, two-thirds of all First Nations communities in Canada have been under at least one drinking water advisory. The Neskantaga First Nation has had to boil its water for 20 years.
In the face of that injustice, and that deprivation and that annihilation, no one apology can ever be enough. No single gesture, grand and sweeping as it might be, can make up for all the smaller ones: the grotesque mascots, the cigar stand statues, the actors in redface, the death and disease and dehumanization. Apologies are nothing without action, and action is what creates long-term change.
There is a fine line between autonomy and abandonment. In grudgingly granting aboriginal people some small measure of what was theirs to start with, the rest of Canada also assuaged some of its own conscience: Aboriginal people went out of sight, but they also went out of mind. In forgetting them, Canada forgot its misdeeds. Apologies such as Wynne’s (and the prime minister’s, and the Pope’s and others) are a way of acknowledging and remembering what happened.
Reconciliation requires truth. But we would be wise to include that truth at all levels, to make visible what was once invisible, to not merely educate but enlighten. The Shingwauk Residential Schools Centre and other museum spaces are a good start. And Historica Canada recently requested proposals for “Heritage Minutes” on the topic of residential schools. But until there is change, Canada will just have to keep apologizing.