My writings - and those of others.
Changing Places
One of the people we need to learn from is recently retired Senator Murray Sinclair. He appeared a few months ago to speak to the law students at UWO but the address that I found stunning was this one he gave as recipient of the Tom Symons Medal lecture series at Confederation Centre in Prince Edward Island.
Unless you like lengthy introductions, you will want to skip forward to the lecture itself entitled, Confederation - We could have done better. Indeed he is right. We could have - and we must - all of us.
Sinclair knows the power of story and tells his own brilliantly. He notes that in legal training, one of the lessons is to lose your imagination and focus solely on facts. He then moves to facts with the audience. He invites them to take out their cell phones and find their favourite picture of a child. He stops the lecture and suggests that the audience share a story about that child with the person seated next to them - and the audience does so with great enthusiasm. He calls them back.
He then says “Delete that picture - after all it’s only a picture”. The room falls silent. He encourages them to do so even more - “Go ahead -You still have the real child after all”. He then asks to have a picture of his own samll granddaughter mounted on a large screen behind him. “I can’t either” - he admits. But Canada did that to our children.”
The point hits home. In this lecture and in so many others he outlines the damage of cultural genocide. In his book, coauthored with the other tribunal leaders, What We have Learned: Principles of the Truth and Reconciliation. he elaborates on the definition:
“Physical genocide is the mass killing of the members of a targeted group and biological genocide is the destruction of a group’s reproductive capacity. Cultural genocide is the destruction of those structures and practices that allow the group to continue as a group. States that engage in cultural genocide set out to destroy the political and social institutions of the targeted group. Land is seized. and populations are forcibly transferred and their movement in restricted. Languages are banned. Spiritual leaders are persecuted, spiritual practices are forbidden, and objects of spiritual value are confiscated or destroyed. And, most significantly to the issue at hand, families are disrupted to prevent the transmissions of cultural values and identity from one generation to the next.
In dealing with Aboriginal people, Canada did all these things”. The stories relating to the schools follow and they tell the stories of the actions of all the schools. There is no excuse. All the religious traditions are implicated in the words of the survivors.
Later in the lecture he made reference to his personal story - which relates well to the announcement yesterday that Cowessess First Nation within the province of Saskatchewan becomes the first to control its child welfare system under Bill C-92; it empowers indigenous communities to reclaim jurisdiction. 83% of children in the province were from first nations as of last fall. The Eagle Woman tribunal there will help settle disputes,
Senator Sinclair’s father was a residential school survivor who suffered trauma from the experience which was increased when his wife died leaving him with four young children. He transferred the responsibility for them - including one year old Murray - to his parents in their sixties. “My grandmother connected every one of us with an auntie, with whom I went everywhere and learned from her. On the basis of long term results my grandmother proved to be an excellent child-welfare administrator.”
He also talked about his own lack of fellunderstanding of indigenous spirituality and the role it must play in his life, until he was counselled by an elder. That part of the video above is also moving and revealing. He told us of the importance of a name - and how his in his own language has prophetically given him direction as to how to live his life. His granddaughter has her own name story and we understand how fearless and true to that spirituality that is forming her. When asked to describe her grandfather’s occupation by a nine year old classmate when he visited her school - Senator Murray was not sure she actually knew - but she still had an answer - “He Sentaizes”
Thank the universe for Senator Sinclair - and even in retirement we hope he continues to Sentatize.
Taking the Heat
On this Canada Day there are two images of life here:
People in Litton, British Columbia, trying to cope with the highest temperature ever recorded in the country and one the hottest places in the world - 49.6 degrees Centigrade and 121 degrees Fahrenheit. Why is this happening in a mountainous region where on a previous visit, I saw snow in the middle of summer on the heights of some of the nearby mountains?
Because - as Scientist Eric Holthaus writes in The Guardian,
“Climate change is not just warming the surface of the planet, it’s warming Earth’s entire troposphere – the lowest layer of the atmosphere where all our weather occurs. That’s particularly true in mountainous areas, where temperatures are rising even faster than elsewhere. When snow and ice recedes or even disappears from mountains, the bare soil beneath can warm unimpeded. A 2015 study found that mountainous areas above 2,000 meters (6,500ft) are warming about 75% faster than places at lower elevations.”
And the other image:
Churches are burning. It’s no accident that they are Roman Catholic Churches near First Nations Reserves. Another story this morning reveals even more unmarked graves of residential schools. The searches are only beginning and the lack of response of one of the perpetrator churches is mounting. It is an answer but not the best one. Mourning will not give way to dancing while The Indian Act is still in place. It prohibited not only dancing but any recognition that the sacred practice of anyone outside the settlers’ cultures was suspect. The result was cultural genocide.
I spent yesterday reading “21 Things you Didn’t know about the Indian Act”. You can watch this video (you can move ahead from the introduction a bit),
This one from TVO is also good - and shorter.
A shameful history
All countries like to celebrate their achievements. So do people on social media these days, who seem to assume that their meals, children’s graduations, hair styles and the like merit interest and praise from the rest of us. I am surprised that some people I know do this so often. We’re much less apt to cite our failures - as individuals or as nations. That would reveal how vulnerable we really are behind these facades of achievement.
But is time to come to terms with reality. As Canadians we thought that people who had been here fourteen thousand years earlier needed to be taught how to live, how to dress, what language to speak and how to worship their creator. We took young children from their parents and placed them in residential schools where we abused them physically and sexually, transmitted our diseases. starved them and buried them in unmarked graves. We left a legacy to the generations that followed them. many who are still among us.
In answer to all the “Buts” and “What Abouts” of Canadian history, the best response is to pause and look at the current realities - as both individuals and institutions where we have connections. What have we to learn from a suffering people? What do they have to teach us now?
The recommendation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission are here. It’s time for temperature taking and further action. Suffering takes time to heal. But denying the changes that need to happen doesn’t even allow healing to start. Not all actions are our personal responsibility - but both as individuals and institutions, some clearly are.