 When I met Harry Wilson on the bus yesterday, he was
barely conscious, inebriated and heading in the wrong direction. He could
barely open his eyes when I sat next to him. It had been a month or so
since our last encounter, but in that time Harry had suffered a heart
attack and been evicted from his tiny bug-filled hovel in the Brandiz
Hotel on Vancouver's skid row. Now, he's yet another of the homeless army
who wander, and wander.
-
- Harry is fifty four years old and a "survivor"
of the United Church's Alberni Indian Residential School.
-
- As I tried to arouse Harry and get him home on the right
bus, I suddenly wished that Prime Minister Stephen Harper could be with
us at that moment, and help me steady Harry and encourage him somehow.
I wonder what Stephen would think of Harry, or his story.
-
- Harry Wilson was taken from his mother when he was five
years old and incarcerated in the Alberni residential school. He was held
there for twelve years and was routinely beaten and sodomized by a network
of staff and fellow students, including the infamous Arthur Plint and
Principal John Andrews. Their preferred method was to use a bathroom plunger
on Harry.
-
- One morning, evading his torturers, thirteen-year-old
Harry escaped from the dormitory and stumbled across the body of a young
girl from the school, on the playground, as he recounted to me in 1998,
-
- "She was from way up north, a Haida girl. She was
naked and all covered in blood, maybe sixteen. I told Andrews later that
day and he told me not to tell anyone. She just disappeared. Then the
Mounties came and shipped me over to the Indian hospital in Nanaimo ...
They held me there in a padded room, all strapped down. Stuck needles
in me. I was in there for months, past Christmas ... They kept telling
me I never saw the girl's body."
-
- Harry was one of the first Alberni survivors to ever
sue the United Church, and they quickly silenced him with a gag-order
settlement of nearly $100,000. The money was gone within a year, burned
through by Harry's lawyer, white social workers and all Harry's sudden
"friends". Harry survives now by picking cans and bottles out
of the trash along Hastings street, and he is rarely sober.
-
- As I got Harry safely aboard a bus bound for his "home",
I imagined turning to Stephen Harper and asking him what he thought could
be done for Harry.
-
- An apology was the last thing that occurred to me to
suggest to Stephen. After all, what good will mere words do for Harry?
-
- After all, is Stephen Harper actually sorry? And if he
is, how much is he sorry for?
-
- His lawyers and advisers, I'm sure, have answered that
question for him, as they have for the United Church: We regret in general
what happened to you, Harry - and a quarter million like you - but not
enough to condemn the system that caused it; not enough to hold those
responsible accountable by charging them with murder; and not enough to
find that slaughtered girl's remains and bring her home for a proper burial.
-
- After all, that kind of regret could cause Stephen himself
to go to jail, if we actually lived in a world of justice for all. For
he is, after all, the head fiduciary officer of the corporation called
Canada that is responsible, with the churches, for Harry's fate - and
that unknown girl's.
-
- So, instead, this June 11 Stephen will stand up in Parliament
to a great media fanfare and say a lot of words that will do nothing for
Harry, or that girl. Just like the residential school, or the "court
settlement", Stephen's "apology" will be something done
by and for white people - not their aboriginal victims.
-
- As in the residential school, there will be enough collaborating
natives on hand to applaud Stephen's words as passionately as they ignore
Harry Wilson's life. But none of it will save Harry from a daily torture
and an early death.
-
- I've been told that I am too hard on my fellow white
folks and their paid aboriginal lackeys, that I am impeding their attempt
at "reconciliation", even that I am "exaggerating"
stories from people like Harry Wilson. But such accusations come from
those who have not sat with me alongside Harry and tried to hold back
the tide.
-
- The truth stands as solidly as does Harry's suffering,
and in that sense both it and he are a mirror in which we can see who
we actually are, as "Christian Canada". Perhaps that's why Harry,
and I, are so detested by that culture.
-
- None of that matters to me anymore. There can be no apology,
ever, for what has happened, and for the continuing crimes. But maybe,
if Stephen and those like him sat with Harry for a day, saying nothing,
just watching, and listening, and learning - perhaps, they would be changed.
And then, Stephen's apology, like all our wealthy pretenses, would shrivel
and fade in the light of a terrible and glorious ending.
-
- I hope for all that, today, as I seek out Harry Wilson
once more, realizing, finally, that the "Christian churches"
have it all wrong, for they are blind to what they have done to Harry,
and to who Harry actually is:
-
- "one who had no beauty that we should desire him,
a man of sorrows, despised and rejected by us ... for surely he has borne
our sins and been stricken for our iniquities, and yet by his suffering
are we healed."
-
- 3 June, 2008
-
- Kevin Annett
- 260 Kennedy St.
- Nanaimo, BC Canada V9R 2H8
- 250-753-3345 or 1-888-265-1007
- www.hiddenfromhistory.org
-
- Kevin Annett is a community minister in the downtown
east side of Vancouver and the author of two books and a documentary film
on genocide in Canada.
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