We Don’t Know What to Say; But We’ve Been Told What We Should Do

The TRC made 94 ‘Calls to Action’; there are 84 outstanding

One of the contradictions of the new era of rapid, omnidirectional, horizontal electronic personal communications is the injunction or compulsion to say something, anything, even if the words fall so short of what’s required as to be obscene. The only thing that feels more obscene than those feeble, flailing words are certain kinds of silence: callous silence, or the silence of evasion. But leaving room for a certain kind of abysmal silence before nightmares of a certain magnitude can be a first gesture towards some kind of human response — particularly to a nightmare inflicted against others, on one’s behalf.

When Canadians talk about local genocide, there is a cultural and psychological tic which adds a silent asterisk or quotation marks to the word. Even earnest, public radio-listening types who genuinely feel that there are things of which Canada ought to be deeply ashamed tend to mean, if you prod them, things that are shameful by Canadian standards, and those standards, invariably, are higher than, first, those of our southern neighbours and second, it goes without saying, the humid and benighted war zones and authoritarian killing fields around the globe. Whatever one may think of how the railways went in, or the pandemics which were allowed to decimate large majorities of some Indigenous nations, we aren’t the kind of country where people are disappeared. We don’t do mass, unmarked graves. Well, as it happens, we are, and we do.

Last week’s announcement was a discovery for many of us, and, to many others, a grim confirmation; for all of us, it was apocalyptic, in the original sense of the Greek roots of the word: an unveiling, or uncovering. A seeing things for the way in which they really were and are. Bodies amounting to more than four times the number of official, recorded deaths — already an excruciating number to begin with. A revelation which came with something close to a promise, from anyone in any position to offer informed counsel on the subject, that many more such discoveries are to come. This first announcement cast light into the shadows of a residential school run by the Roman Catholic Church, which has, to its eternal shame and discredit, failed even before now to formally apologize for its role in the program of mass kidnapping, brainwashing, abuses physical, emotional, spiritual, and sexual which was in force across this country for decades. But even churches which have recognized and apologized for their leading roles in the residential school system, such as the United Church of Canada and my own Anglican Church of Canada, will be forced to face new depths of our world-historic (in the sense of immensity) and not-too-historic (in the sense of being a very long time ago) depravity; be offered, we hope, the opportunity to apologize again, this time with restitution offered with the proper sense of urgency and alacrity.

All we know, right now, is that the very worst thing that ever happened in this country, by this country — the vastness of the evil of which makes it unfathomable to any of us who didn’t experience its ravages and almost impossible to process as a society — was many times worse than we were told it was.

And that is, ultimately, in non-Indigenous communities, the most significant way in which it will have to be processed: socially, as a society, one with a slightly choppy and perhaps a little bent and distended but otherwise unbroken continuity with the society that allowed all this to happen. The sad, sputtering “But I wasn’t there man, I wasn’t even born!” — often coming from the same person who’ll otherwise beam with pride about his generationally proximate role in, say, the liberation of Holland — are, firstly, mostly just tragic attempts to break the circuit of a guilt otherwise too massive to process at an individual level and, secondly, besides the point. This is something that our country — and, for mainline Christians, our churches — did, and so that’s how we’ll have to start slouching towards the impossible goal of making amends.

Here, perversely, is where our country’s near-total stasis, the willingness never to settle for constructive action when bromides or empty rhetoric would do, actually makes the work in front of us as Canadians easier, at least to start.

Up to this point in our history, Canada’s historical compromise between those who want justice for Indigenous dispossession and those who want to do nothing, has typically worked this way: empower a commission to study the questions in detail and propose actionable sets of solutions; that part’s for the first group. Then, you do nothing, and that’s how you keep the second group (along with the entire politico-economic thrust of the nation) happy.

The template for this two-step was the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, submitted in 1996. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), convened with the much more concentrated focus on the Indian Residential Schools (IRS), submitted their final report in 2015 and included 94 calls to action in order to meaningfully begin to accommodate personal and collective healing from the abomination. Six years later, 10 of those calls to action have been enacted.

Former chair of the TRC, retired senator Murray Sinclair — one of the vanishingly few national political figures in Canada possessing of genuine wisdom, pathos, and courage — has recently explained the limitations then placed on the commission in terms of investigating the questions of mass graves and murders, which were a shocking and disturbing surprise when they arose in the course of the TRC’s work: “We had no expectation that this would be a part of the work we were doing. We asked the government to allow us to conduct a fuller inquiry to that part of the work of the TRC, to explore that on behalf of the survivors and Canadian public. We submitted a proposal, as it was not within the mandate of the TRC, and that request was denied. So largely we did what we could, but it was not anywhere near what we needed to investigate. Now we are seeing evidence of the large number of children who died,” explains Sinclair. So it is quite possible, and appropriate, that as new revelations emerge, new demands and calls to actions will be made. We should support those calls then, as we should now be supporting the demands to fund full investigations of IRS sites, and to provide culturally appropriate counselling and mental health supports for those dealing with the refreshed trauma that this uncovering is causing.

But in the dark, nighttime hours of the coming weeks and months, when we non-Indigenous citizens of Canada find ourselves asking, at least semi-rhetorically, in the face of the new evidence of perfidy, cruelty, murderousness, of genocide, ’What can we do?’ — we’ll do well to remember that we’ve already been told, with painstaking specificity, 94 things we can do. There are 84 of them left. Right alongside those are the various political, economic, and cultural clauses of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (Article 8 of which states that “Indigenous peoples and individuals have the right not to be subjected to forced assimilation or destruction of their culture”), which need to be enacted at every level of government in cities, provinces, territories, and across the country.

If, understandably, you are moved to offer help as an individual, the Indian Residential School Survivor Society is, to say the very least, eminently worthy of your moral and financial support.

The darkness is overwhelming. But we’ve already been told where to start.