I grew up thinking my grandfather let his kids go without much of a fight. That when my grandmother died, he had placed several of them in orphanages or boarding schools because he was unable to take care of them.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
It’s only recently that I realized it wasn’t a choice. That when you were Indian in the 1950s or 1960s, you didn’t have a say, even when you were “civilized enough” in the eyes of the government, even about the fate of your own children. Before either, residential schools for Aboriginals being proof of this. Embedded in a Indian Act dictatorial for the First Nations or in the links of a federal father showing the way to the Inuit and Métis, residential schools or federal homes have left their mark.
But all this, all these hidden truths and these twisted and assimilationist ways of doing “bringing the Indian to the rank of civilized”, it has been a normality for so many years that we have perhaps come to forget that was not normal. And to suffer it in silence while the shame of being, simply of being, gnawed at us.
I cannot and will not appropriate the suffering of residential school survivors. But I have witnessed wasted lives, the discomfort of living, the shame of being too much or too little, or at best, a quest for meaning. The little girl at boarding school who gets her hair cut, who calls herself by the number she’s been given, who gets her fingers slapped with a wooden ruler for being just herself, without talking about psychological, spiritual, sexual and physical abuse, that could have been me too. And maybe it was, in a way.
A “me” like in all those who have experienced the effects of the uprooting of their families and the forced implosion of their visions of the world and their cultures. For these broken communities that mend themselves with small steps and small victories.
I so wish this was the last time I had to talk about residential schools. But it won’t.
This week, Métis, Inuit and First Nations people met with Pope Francis at the Vatican. This Friday morning, the pope is to deliver a speech expected by more than one. Some hope for an apology, others for concrete actions such as access to Church archives related to residential schools. The Inuit are asking the Church to respect the legal obligations of the Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement of 2006 and the resulting financial compensation, which the survivors have still not received.
Worse, the Catholic Church claimed last fall to have paid more than what had been agreed in “kind” to the Aboriginals. I will pass over the choice of word. In fact, ordinary religious work and nothing more. Some initiatives to try to evangelize the Aboriginals, again. Far from compensation.
And there are the others, indigenous survivors too, who do not understand what their people are doing in Rome begging for excuses.
I have already said this often in these same chronicles. Before the arrival of the Europeans, in many Aboriginal languages, there were no words to say “I apologize”. Rather than apologizing, we repaired the gaffe, the error, the injustice. The more I think about it, the more I tell myself that even in French, English, Italian or even Latin — since sometimes you have to speak the other’s language to be understood — there is, in certain situations , no words strong enough to apologize, the simple and too easy excuse not being commensurate with the abuse inflicted. Especially when talking about repeated abuse of such violence.
However, this is not the first time that Aboriginal people from Canada have met with the Pope in the Vatican on the issue of residential schools. In 2009, two days after the apology pronounced by Stephen Harper in this matter, Pope Benedict XVI received a delegation of some Aboriginal people linked to the residential schools. Although the pope expressed regret at the time, his commitment was limited to praying that those affected by these tragedies experience healing.
All this raises a question: can healing be fully realized if the other does not recognize his responsibility, the facts, the abuses and the sufferings he has inflicted?
Come to think of it, maybe that’s what we’re looking for in hoping for an apology: a path to acknowledging the truth. It is all the same to give a lot of power to the other.
I remember my visit to the Vatican like it was yesterday. Endless corridors of displays containing treasures, precious objects, a gold ceiling, money and precious stones everywhere before finally arriving at the Sistine Chapel. A heartache growing throughout the journey. So much wealth! So much power!
When I see the indigenous delegations who come to the Vatican with a gift for the Pope, the great unease, the one I felt along the corridors that I no longer wanted to see, returns.
There are times when healing may come through condemnation. Times when praying will not be enough. Like today.