I woke at 7:00am today. Feeling rested, I thought I would get a head-start on Sunday School readings for class with my mother Arta Blanche Johnson. I headed down to my office in the basement and picked up my copy of Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, Volume One: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.
Last Sunday I was reading pp 50 - 76. The book summarized facts about residential schools in Canada pre-Confederation (early 1600s at the future site of Quebec City) and post-confederation (1867 - 1997). I will use the structure Miranda got to use in the Blanket Exercise (rock, stick, leaf).
What rocked me was learning that the Canadian government forced children to be separated from their parents, their culture, their siblings, their belongings, and then expected them to provide the labour for school maintenance and upkeep to compensate for their discriminatory "pre capita grant" per child that was 1/3 of what they spent at non-indigenous child-welfare institutions. These forced child-labour camps are a horrific historical fact.
What stuck with me was the event in 1970 when over 1,000 first-nations parents participated in a sit-in in Blue Quills, Alberta, and it took 17 days but eventually Jean Chretien agreed to transfer operation of the school to Blue Quill's Native Education Council. I was four years old and First Nations parents of children my age were having to actively protest against the Canadian government's policies. The resistance in 1970 by the First Nations peoples and the slow, moving denial of there being a problem is echoed in 2019 with Jody Wilson-Raybould standing up to Justin Trudeau and him denying any wrong-doing on his part and the part of those acting on his behalf.
What I will leave with from the reading last week combined with this weeks (pp.77-80 and 37-41) is the knowledge that I am privileged to read the quotes from residential school survivors about their childhood. I reaffirm my commitment to honouring the past by learning about it.
I must have been reading in the same places that you read. I had to stop when that deep feeling of sorrow about the past comes to me. I know that the best practise about that feeling is to accept it and then move forward to a brighter day. I found I couldn't even make marks on the pages I was so sad. I have just opened the book up again at page 84 where I left off. I find that I wrote on the bottom of the page this question: What is a serious offense? And I wrote the answer: speaking your primary language. Mary Angus reported that the punishment for speaking her own language was a close haircut, "All the hair cut to be as a man, that what they do, for us not to talk. We were afraid of that, to have our hair cut." How could people have done that? So demeaning. These children were isolated with no one as their advocates. It is so horrifying when I think about it.
ReplyDeleteThanks for joining me in reading this. I wondered where you got the term "Honouring the Truth". I see it now on the front page. I think that is where my deep sorrow comes from, knowing that a person has to learn this first before they can honour its truth.
Like you, I am honouring Jody Wilson Raybould and Jane Philpott as well.
The times are sorry when the Liberals are bad and the Conservatives even more frightening from their past performance.
Just to finish off, I don't think you would have seen the front page of the Globe and Mail, I think yesterday. They had a big picture of "connect the dots". It was simple to see that when you connected them you would get a profile of Jody Wilson-Rabould.
What a metaphor! Connect the dots, folks, and that includes me.