- (This article was submitted to 10 Canadian newspapers.
Not one published or even acknowledged receiving it.)
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- "Rend your hearts, and not your garments."
--Joel 2:17/
-
- *Imagine for a moment* that your own child goes missing
and never comes home. Years pass, and one day, the person responsible
for your child's death is identified, but he evades arrest and imprisonment
simply by issuing to you an "apology" for your loss. He even
speaks of seeking "reconciliation" with you.
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- How would you feel?
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- Hold on to that feeling, and now multiply your loss by
many thousands of children, and make the guilty person the government
and churches of Canada. Do so, and you will have arrived in a human way
at the Indian Residential Schools atrocity.
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- One of my former parishioners put it another way:
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- "What we did to those native children was an abomination,
and abominations aren't resolved with words and money. We need to have
our hearts torn in two and be changed. We've got to stand, ourselves,
under the judgment of God."
-
- I doubt that Stephen Harper would be satisfied with an
apology if his own kids were hauled off and killed for being practicing
Christians. Yet on June 11, he will stand up on our behalf and try to
apologize to other nations for having exterminated their children.
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- The whole effort seems more than ludicrous, or obscene.
One cannot, after all, apologize to the dead. But the truth is, the government's
planned "apology" to native people is an enormous exercise in
deception - primarily self-deception.
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- Do we even know the meaning of that easily uttered term,
"apologize"?
-
- It actually has a double meaning, according to the internet
Dictionary: a) "an acknowledgment of regret for a fault or offense"
and b) "a formal justification, defense or excuse for one's actions".
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- That is, in our vernacular understanding of the term,
an "apology" can be a genuine regret for one's acts; but it
can equally be a way to evade responsibility for one's acts, by justifying
oneself before one's victim.
-
- The legal understanding of the word, however, is more
specific, and has nothing to do with regret: "apology" is defined
simply as "a disclaimer of intentional error or offense".
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- A disclaimer.
-
- Now, I'm assuming that the government of Canada relies
on legal definitions - operating, as it claims, "under the rule of
law" - rather than popularly understood ones. So we must realize
that when the government and its Prime Minister uses the term "apology",
its understanding of the word is the legal one: namely, "a disclaimer
of intentional error or offense".
-
- In other words, on June 11, Stephen Harper will issue
to the world a disclaimer to the effect that the Indian Residential Schools
were not an intentional offense.
-
- It's not surprising that the Prime Minister will be making
such an outrageous and unsupportable claim, since if he ever admitted
that the residential schools were intentional, he'd be the first defendant
in the dock at an international war crimes trial.
-
- But more important, this effort by our government - and
the churches it is protecting - to be absolved of their own crimes is
taking place under the illusory pretense of making amends with native
people, when its purpose is simply to legally exonerate itself of culpability
for the deaths of thousands of children.
-
- This, indeed, has been the norm for both church and state
ever since the first lawsuit was launched by residential school survivors
in February of 1996. An army of court scholars and legal experts has generated
a mountain of "holocaust denial" at every level of Canadian
society during the past dozen years, to convince the world that the daily
death and torture at the residential schools was not intentional at all.
-
- Such an "apologetic" agenda defies logic and
common sense, as in the statements from the government's "Truth and
Reconciliation Commission" scholars that, while evidence shows that
residential school children were being buried "four or five to a
grave", and that the death rate in these schools stayed constant
at fifty percent for over forty years, these deaths were "not intended".
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- To believe that, one has to ignore the evidence of senior
government officials like Dr. Peter Bryce, who found that children were
regularly being "deliberately exposed to communicable diseases"
in residential schools, and left to die untreated. The word Bryce used
was "deliberately". How else, after all, do so many children
die?
-
- All of this legal hoop jumping and evasion of responsibility
might make sense to the government, and pay the salaries of their intellectual
mercenaries, but it does nothing to advance the cause of truth telling
and humanity in Canada, and makes the lives of our victims ever more difficult.
-
- I know this all too well, having spent most of my waking
hours for years as a counselor, advocate and chronicler for many aboriginal
survivors of the death camps we like to call residential schools. And
what I've learned from such work is that we cannot come to grips with
something that we don't understand.
-
- The truth is, Euro-Canadian society still doesn't understand
what these "schools" were, either at a "head" or a
"heart" level. If one believes the officers of the churches
and government, the residential schools "issue" is all about
money and verbal gymnastics. Yet none of these officials, as far as I
know, have broken down and wept in public over the deaths of so many innocent
ones; nor have they even offered to return their remains to their families
for a proper burial.
-
- Oddly enough, the very same officials continually and
glibly speak about "healing the past", without even knowing
their own history, and about "solutions" to the "residential
school problem", as if they understand what that problem is - not
realizing that, to quote William Shakespeare, "The fault, dear Brutus,
is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
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- For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been,
an "Indian problem" in Canada. Rather, the problem is a "white"
one. The problem is with us.
-
- I won't point to collapsing eco-systems or troops in
Afghanistan to prove this point. Nor need I pose the paradox of how educated
men and women, with families of their own and a professed "Christian
morality", could drive needles through infants' tongues at Indian
residential schools, throw three year olds down stairs, sterilize healthy
kids, and deliberately allow children to cough their lives away from tuberculosis,
and then bury them in secret graves.
-
- The evidence of the problem is more immediate, and far
closer to home, in our continued segregation of aboriginal people into
a lower standard of humanity that allows them to die at a rate fifteen
times greater than other people of this country.
-
- After all, if we Canadians are who we imagine ourselves
to be - an enlightened society that "assimilated" native people
into our ranks, and made them our equals - then why has not a single person
ever been brought to trial for the death of a residential school child?
Why is the disappearance of tens of thousands of native children in these
schools not the subject of a major criminal investigation? And why is
there an Indian Act, and not an Irish or an Italian Act?
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- Being, in reality, an unofficially apartheid society
that operates, in practice, with two standards of justice - one for native
people, and one for the rest of us - Canada can no more cure the legacy
of the residential schools than it can stop chewing up the earth for
short-term comfort and profit. At least, not this side of a fundamental
moral and social revolution.
-
- The fact that we are far from such a change struck home
to me a few months ago when the the government announced that, although
criminal acts did indeed occur in the residential schools, there would
be no criminal investigation of these schools: an unbelievably brazen
subversion of justice that evoked not a peep of protest in the media or
among the good citizens and politicians of Canada.
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- Regardless of this, there are things that can be done
to overcome the genocidal residential schools legacy, and do justice,
for once, to the survivors. Rather than issuing verbal and self-serving
"apologies" which change nothing, the government and all of
us could take these kind of bold measures:
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- 1. Declare an Official Nation-wide Day of Mourning for
Residential School Victims, dead and living.
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- 2. Fully disclose what happened in the residential schools
- the crimes, the perpetrators, and the cover-up - by launching an International
War Crimes Tribunal with the power to subpoena, arrest and prosecute those
responsible.
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- 3. Bring home the remains of all children who died in
these schools for a proper burial, and establish public memorial sites
for them.
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- 4. Create a National Aboriginal Holocaust Museum.
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- 5. End federal tax exemption for the Catholic, Anglican
and United Church of Canada, in accordance with the Nuremberg Legal Principles
concerning organizations complicit in crimes against humanity.
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- 6. Abolish the Indian Act and Indian and Northern Affairs.
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- An Irish relative once told me that the way her country
is evolving away from eight centuries of warfare is through a simple formula:
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- "First you remember; then you grieve; then you heal".
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- Instead of skipping the first two steps, as Mr. Harper
and too many of our people are trying to do "apologetically",
it is time that Canadians found the courage to truly remember and admit
to the world what we did to the first peoples of this land, and grieve
our actions in the manner of people who truly rend their own hearts and
want to change.
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- Perhaps then "healing and reconciliation" can
become something more than an overworked political catch-phrase.
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- Rev. Kevin D. Annett
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- hiddenfromhistory@yahoo.ca
- www.hiddenfromhistory.org
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- Kevin Annett is a community minister in Vancouver who
is the author of two books on Indian Residential Schools and an award-winning
film maker.
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