Seeking, and sharing, the truth about Indigenous history

Kanien’kehá:ka raonatswa’táhtshera ne tewaá.raton. Tsi tiothsáwen ne tsi lohontsá:te tiotahsáwen ne tewaá:raton ahóntswa’te, ratina’tónhkhwa Shonkwaia’tí:son raotswa’táhtshera …

OKA, Quebec — Pause for a moment at a heritage marker here, 100 miles from Ottawa, to read the history of the game of lacrosse in the Mohawk language, printed along with the French and English versions. Then, pause to consider what Canadians did last week and what Americans will do this week.

Last Friday Canadians coast to coast marked a National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, gathering for hours of drumming and singing, marching in solidarity with those called First Canadians, and meditating on the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. They wore orange shirts to commemorate the garment taken from Phyllis Webstad of the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem band at age 6 on her first day in a residential school in 1973.

Monday Americans will mark what President Joe Biden has declared Indigenous Peoples Day. The similarities end there.

Many Americans still will regard Monday as Columbus Day, marking the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ 1492 “discovery” of America and the claiming of a Bahamian island for the Spanish crown. The price paid by Indigenous peoples after the “encounter” — as the collision of Europeans and Native Americans is called by scholars — is known in college classrooms and on Indian reservations. But it is seldom discussed in the United States and is played down as the intellectual and moral second cousin of critical race theory.

Canada has spent recent years in a kind of national seminar about the Aboriginals whose lives were disrupted, and often ended, by the flood of Europeans into the New World. Its Truth and Reconciliation Committee jolted the country into grief, embarrassment and remorse over the discovery of the bodies of more than a thousand native peoples, mostly children, buried on the grounds of residential schools that sought to Christianize and, in the word often employed in this effort, “civilize” those then known as Indians. Pope Francis made a pilgrimage here in July to confront the damage the church had wreaked among the more than 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Métis children forced into these schools, but the pontiff disappointed large groups of Canadians who complained he did not show sufficient penitence.

“The Indigenous leadership in Quebec and Canada organized itself, pushed forward its concerns about the past, and made clear the retribution that needs to be addressed,” said Geoffrey Kelley, the former native-affairs minister in the Quebec provincial government. “Everything hasn’t been fixed, but at least there’s a greater degree of empowerment of Indigenous people here than in the United States. The cup may not be half full, but at least itis not empty anymore.”

Much of the progress in Canada has come from a series of Supreme Court rulings that have provided explicit instructions about how to handle past wrongs and how to correct them.

A half-century ago, the Canadian high court affirmed the existence of Aboriginal rights that it said could not be extinguished unilaterally by the federal government. In 1975, the Quebec and Canadian governments signed the James Bay and Northern Quebec Agreement with the Cree and Inuit as part of a settlement of a dispute over hydroelectric development in their territories. The result was the establishment of Native school and health boards, Indigenous policing and procedures for decisions on environmental matters. Seven years later, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms asserted that “the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights are recognizedand affirmed.”

That’s more than what has occurred south of the border. “Canada has done a far better job of recognizing these problems, but there’s governmental ineptness in both countries,” said Mike Delisle, one of 12 chiefs of the Mohawk Council of Kahnawà:ke. “For generations we’ve known about the abuses here, and the big shock for the rest of the country came in the last year with the discovery of the bodies at the residential schools. That hasn’t happened to that degree, if at all, in the States. And you can only imagine the kinds of abuses that happened there.”

Nine-tenths of Canadians agree the Catholic Church and the religious organizations that ran residential schools need to play a bigger role in addressing these abuses, with 81% — up 19 points in eight years — believing Ottawa must raise the quality of life of Canada’s Indigenous people, according to a 2021 Ipsos Poll.

The emphasis here is largely in bringing the country’s traditional narrativein line with what has been discovered in past years. Last Friday, the day Canadians donned orange jerseys, the Hudson’s Bay Co. redirected the profits from the sale of its famous “point blankets” — the bedcovers with their signature stripes, symbols both of Canada’s fur-trading heritage and of the role the company played in trading dishonestly with Aboriginal peoples and maneuvering them out of their lands — to a new fund called “Oshki Wupoowane,” Ojibwe language for “new blanket.” The money will be directed to cultural, arts and educational efforts.

Even so, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report stated that “too many Canadians know little or nothing about the deep historical roots of these conflicts,” adding, “This lack of knowledge has serious consequences for First Nations, Inuit and Metis peoples and for Canada.”

Americans are slowly enhancing their knowledge of Native affairs. Just as Bob Joseph’s “21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act” is a bestseller in Canada, David Maraniss’ “Path Lit by Lightning,” the biography of the athlete Jim Thorpe, is a bestseller south of the border.

In declaring Indigenous Peoples Day, Mr. Biden said that the holiday “celebrates the invaluable contributions and resilience of Indigenous peoples, recognizes their inherent sovereignty, and commits to honoring the Federal Government’s trust and treaty obligations to Tribal Nations..” That is the strongest language from the White House in 52 years.

But on July 8, 1970, an American president broke from the doctrine of encouraging Indians to assimilate and delivered a message to Congress that said, “From the time of their first contact with European settlers, the American Indians have been oppressed and brutalized, deprived of their ancestral lands and denied the opportunity to control their own destiny. Even the federal programs which are intended to meet their needs have frequently proven to be ineffective and demanding.”

Here’s a sentence I never thought I would type: It’s time to follow the leadership of Richard Nixon.