Rough road to redemption, past native children’s graves

The day after the news broke, I was checking the international media as usual, my heart slowly sinking. It was everywhere: 215 children's secret graves at a residential school in Canada. Canada as a dark force, a shocking new role.

But after the news cycle, nothing. An editorial in the New York Daily News entitled “Canada's crime” gave a clue as to why: the graves should be taken as a “powerful reminder to Americans who whistle past the uncomfortable parts of our past.” This, in short, is not unique and not something everyone elsewhere in the complicit Western world wants to think about.

As it turns out, as this news broke, U.S. President Joe Biden was in Tulsa for the 100th anniversary of an infamous massacre of a thenprosperous Black community, also done in the name of what we now call white supremacy.

The Kamloops graves — with no doubt more to come elsewhere — are cast as the grim side of Canada's colonial history, part of what has made us what we are. Yes — that, too. But Canada is only a small part of it. If we are to go to the root of what we have to atone for, we'll find ourselves where the rising European powers unleash untold misery on the vulnerable populations of the world.

And although the Roman Catholic Church is the entity now pinned to the wall, it was always a secondary player. English Protestantism — the force behind British democracy, the industrial revolution, even Western capitalism itself by some accounts, and that largely made the world what it is — was also the most brutal colonizer.

Those who have contemplated this point out that the next worst, Spanish Catholicism, at least acknowledged that the people they were murdering were fellow human beings. The English Protestant made no such concession — the native populations, whether here, in the U.S. or Australia (New Zealand, miraculously, is partially excluded) — were merely flora and fauna to be cleared from the land.

Mi'kmaw historian Dan Paul has told me of instances where French men who married Mi'kmaw women were accused of “bestiality” by the English. So when Edward Cornwallis, the founder of Halifax, tries to exterminate “that abominable race,” he's not just one brutal guy talking for himself.

Jump a century and with the founding of Canada comes a subtler plan — residential schools, and the creation of a racist bureaucracy that will recruit the churches to do the job. Caught up in the “civilizing” spirit of the age (which included “scientific proof” of the inferiority/ superiority of races) and apparently believing that this is the right thing, the churches jump right to it.

By now Protestant and Catholic establishments seem to be on the same page, at least with regard to this: put away those pesky Gospels (“Jesus called to his side a little child ... and said ... if anyone hurts the conscience of one of these little ones, that believe in me, he had better have been drowned in the depths of the sea, with a millstone hung about his neck” — Matthew 18:6) and cosy up to Caesar.

Meanwhile, the true work of the churches, as always, would be left to rogue pastors and saints and their contrarian movements of social justice, usually straining against their own church establishments.

So where do we go from here?

Obviously, every last bit of this atrocity must be revealed and admitted — every grave, every document identified, every family connection made. The Roman Catholic Church in particular, even in its slow and convoluted way, must step up.

Acknowledging the wrong is the first step towards healing. The better news is that this is actually happening. The shock is deep, and after many previous traumas to native people that only partly registered with the broader public, this injury extends to the society as a whole. From the shocked comments I'm hearing, the little shoes piling up, these are seen as everybody's children.

One of the first Aboriginal voices I heard after the news broke fretted that this would be just another news-cycle thing. The news did quickly die internationally, but here, I'd say this is it.

For one thing there are other things evolving. There are now — and more all the time — Aboriginal lawyers, judges, professors, entrepreneurs, journalists and others. The Aboriginal voice is now there permanently, and will not be stilled. And it joins up with other minorities standing up, notably Blacks in the United States.

Not that the game is won. Violent white supremacists and other heirs to the original racism — as the murder of a Muslim family in London, Ont. just reminded us of — will assault any identifiable minority.

The healing will indeed be a daunting task, but making it a national priority would itself count as progress. May these tormented little spirits end up changing the country.