There is an important lesson to learn from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings, dealing with Indian Residential Schools, held Tuesday in Charlottetown. The commission is holding hearings across Canada to hear from aboriginals who would like to share an experience or perspective about the residential schools, their impact, or about reconciliation.
The session in Charlottetown specifically provided former residents an opportunity to discuss their experiences at the Maritime’s only residential school in Shubenacadie, N.S. That testimony might perhaps allow them to move past the pain many have carried with them for years.
That opportunity is an obvious, important reason for the TRC hearings. The commission says it needs to learn about those experiences as it prepares its final report. Those experiences honour the memory of those who had no voice and could not share. As the commission says, it’s important that future generations know what happened.
The real lesson is for mainstream Canadian society to acknowledge its role in letting such a horror take place, and then allow it to continue for many years. It has only been 20 years or so that churches and governments finally started to accept any responsibility for the cultural genocide that was allowed to happen in our own backyard for many decades.
The reality about residential schools is that they were a state-sponsored attempt to erase the culture, language and history of aboriginal peoples from the historical and future landscape of Canada. Children were taken from their homes at an early age, forced to attend a school far from home, wear uniforms, speak English and were subjected to various degrading forms of abuse. Then somehow, these same youngsters were expected to return home and become model citizens and docilely fit into white society. The idea is mind-boggling.
For too long, society has preferred to turn a blind eye to the plight of our aboriginal fellow citizens. The TRC and many of the attempts to make amends in recent years did not come about because Canadians in general realized what a monstrous mistake was made with native peoples. These attempts at truth and reconciliation are happening only because the Canadian courts have ordered it.
It was only after aboriginals started to speak out publicly about their experiences leading to criminal charges against sexual abusers, and the ensuing lawsuits against churches and the federal government, that Canadians finally started to acknowledge some responsibility in this whole mess. A series of apologies started in the mid-’80s from churches about general abuses at the schools. The cases were finally resolved with the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement, reached in 2006 and which came into effect in 2007.
The agreement provides for a payment to all former students who went to a residential school, additional compensation to those who suffered physical or sexual abuse, commemoration projects, a healing foundation, mental health support and perhaps most importantly, the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The commission will finish Canada-wide hearings, assemble a report and wrap up its work. Its lasting testament will be to recognize the abuse that happened, and to ensure that this horror is never repeated.
There are 43 known survivors of the Shubenacadie residential school living on P.E.I. The exact number of native Islanders who attended that school, and have since died without their story being told, might never be known. The commission’s final report will ensure that no Canadian can conveniently pretend it never happened or that we had nothing to do with it. We all have that shame to shoulder and to share.
