“This is an issue not many Canadians care about,” said Chief Robert Joseph (below), executive director of the Residential Schools Survivor Society, during UBC’s Dialogue on the Legacy of Indian Residential Schools. This event was set up to decide what UBC’s role could be in the healing process of Residential Schools’ survivors, intergenerational survivors, and the decolonization of all aspects of our country, First Nations people and settlers (non-First Nations people) alike. Looking around the Sty-wet-tan Hall in the UBC House of Learning during the gathering of survivors, students, UBC faculty and administrators, there were a lot of nodding to Bobby Joseph’s statement, which to me, got to the core of what is stalling the reconciliation process.
UBC President Stephen Toope’s address which opened the event is a perfect example. Toope compared moving forward from Residential Schools to Remembrance Day, with “lest we forget” as a tag line throughout the speech. While this may seem appropriate to many, it missed the reason for the urgency in dealing with Residential Schools: this is not about remembrance, but dealing with the schools’ ramifications, which continue to cause the deaths and suffering of First Nations people. Toope also missed the opportunity to understand why his speech was inappropriate, firstly by not admitting his unfamiliarity with the subject, and then also by leaving soon after he finished speaking.
In the public sphere, these schools are often referred to as a “sad chapter in our history”, as an anomaly unconnected to the present rather than a crucial step in taking from First Nations people their land and resources, which has led to the enormous poverty, lateral violence, addictions, mental illness and high suicide rates in First Nations communities we see today.
The program of government mandated Residential Schools was begun in 1892; the last school closed in 1996, with some families and nations facing five generations of torture and separation from a way of life practiced for time immemorial. Children were forcibly taken from their families, a practice forbidden by the UN Convention of Genocide Article two, which Canada signed in 1948, which defines genocide in several ways including “forcibly transferring children of [one] group to another group.” Not only were they removed from family, but they were also taught through example that the way to deal with one another was through violence.
At these schools, children were beaten and tortured for speaking their language, with the expressed aim to assimilate First Nations peoples into the lower ranks of Canadian society. These facts are fairly well-known to the mainstream Canadian public; however, what happened to children during their time at Residential Schools was only the beginning of a cycle of violence, abuse, and devaluation of Indigenous people which continues to this day. The government’s response of paying survivors off, and setting up the Truth and Reconciliation Commission can only be a ineffective, given there is little incentive for settlers to attend.
Bev Jacobs, an activist and academic who spoke at the Dialogue, framed the issue using the metaphor of an abusive relationship: a spouse who is being abused cannot reconcile with her abuser until the abuse stops. The abuser needs to know that what they are doing is wrong: we, the mainstream settler public needs to know both what Residential Schools were, how their legacy has been passed down, and how we benefit from the genocide of First Nations people by the dispossession of their lands and resources.
Many settlers respond with guilt and defensiveness when they hear these stories. However, both emotions simply allow us to avoid the work of changing our nation so that it lives up to the standards of goodwill and justice in its image. The action we need to take was clearly outlined by the speakers at the Dialogue: settlers must educate themselves about Residential Schools, try to not consign it to some distant past, and spread it to those who do not know.
