Canada, Truth and Reconciliation
Yvonne Owens, B.A., M.A., M.Phil., Ph.D.
(Image: Residential School survivor Myrtle Calahasin, 81, tells her experiences to the TRC Commissioners)
In 2014, the national Truth and Reconciliation events came to a finish in Edmonton, with the final one held March 27–30 at the Shaw Conference Centre. “Thousands of survivors of residential schools came to tells their stories to clergy, TRC commissioners, and the general public. These experiences were recorded for purposes of history and education, and the event was live-streamed online for those who could not make it down in person.” (Paula Kirman, ‘Final Truth and Reconciliation Commission Canadian event,’ Digital Journal, APR 2, 2014.)
(Image: Truth and Reconciliation National Event in Edmonton. Healing Walk)
It was my honor and my privilege to attend the first Truth and Reconciliation conference, Gathering and Community Event, at the University of Victoria, First People’s House, December 3–5, 2011, on behalf of two organizations: St, Mary the Virgin Anglican Church and 13th House Mystery School, both based in Victoria, BC. Open Hearts, Clear Minds: A Road to Reconciliation was co-hosted by the new Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the Anglican Diocese, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation, the Quaker Friends Society, and a host of other churches and community organizers. The conference and Journey Toward Healing was to recognize Residential Schools Survivors, their families, cultures and communities.
The three-day spiritual journey was modelled upon the social and spiritual reconciliation process inaugurated in South Africa by Bishop Desmond Tutu and Nelson Mandela. Sharing and respect traditions from Native heritage, Quaker tradition, and Compassionate Listening protocols were also observed. The beautifully organized event at First People’s House focused on groups and individuals beginning to reconcile the grievous harm caused individuals, families, communities and villages by the more than 130 Residential Schools, running from 1867 to 1996 across Canada. Bishop James Cowan spoke with honour, honesty, responsibility and passion, from the heart, to the many survivors of Residential School abuses who were present, their families, and their communities — owning responsibility for the role the Christian Church played in the long-running tragedy.
Those otherwise impacted by past, harmful policies of the Church toward vulnerable children, parents, sacred values, life values, and Indigenous cultures were also treated to compassion and respect. Native and Church Elders, and all those present, functioned as a spiritual family. The weekend event welded a great unity of spirit and intent, hearts and minds, toward reconciling the egregious wrongs of past abuses.
(Image: First Peoples House, University of Victoria campus)
The Catholic bishop, who along with Rev. Cowan, was in my smaller working circle (I had both of the bishops who were in attendance at the event in my healing circle, in other words) was not so fortunate. He spouted denial, dogma, doctrine and ideology in response to people’s exposed, raw and bleeding hearts, and was the only speaker I saw the normatively deeply courteous Native Elders and participants leave the circle and walk out on. (They came back when he was done spouting inauthentic dogma and denial.) Nearly all of them were survivors of the Christian Church-run Residential Schools Programme, and they simply couldn’t listen to more toxic falsity being spewed at them in sacred space. Bishop Cowan, in contrast, was humble, admitted fault, apologized for the historic actions, misconceptions and mistakes of his faith. In full humility and with a palpable, great and sincere respect for others’ sufferings, he bore open-hearted witness to the stories and accounts — the pain — of survivors’ and others’ raw accounts, who have been touched by the long-term atrocity of religious and ideological colonialism — and we all have been, one way or another. “As late as 1975, First Nations children were removed from the homes of their parents and forced to live in residential schools for ten months of the year. The purpose of these schools was to remove the cultural identity and language from Aboriginal children to try to assimilate them.” (Paula Kirman, Digital Journal)
The Truth
Thousands of Native children who died in mysterious circumstances and from unacknowledged causes, are buried on the grounds of Residential Schools in unmarked graves. This reveals a dark reality long kept secret by the Church, a tale not unlike that of the many hundreds of children’s corpses found in the Convent Home for unwed mothers (in reality, a stigmatizing prison and workhouse for slave labourers) that have recently been uncovered and (in this case) acknowledged by the Church in Ireland. This atrocity has been recognized, owned, and apologized for by Church officials as yet another shameful chapter in its two-millennia-long record of cultural and physical genocides, institutionalized slavery, and human disasters. But in Canada, Indigenous women and children continue to go missing, and remain lost to their families for decades, with little or no dedicated investigations into their cases.
(E-PANA Billboard attempting to protect Indigenous women and children)
The infamous ‘Highway of Tears’ is one such inadequately investigated site of uncounted abductions and murders of Indigenous women and children, over a period of many years, in northern British Columbia. The ‘Highway of Tears murders’ is the police name for this series of crimes, perpetrated along the 720 km (450 mi) section of Highway 16, between Prince George and Prince Rupert, from 1969 until 2011. A decade after the launch of the RCMP’s high-profile Highway of Tears investigation into missing and murdered women in Northern B.C., police admit they may never find the killers or make more arrests. “I’ve been honest with our [victims’] families and I say perhaps they’ll never be solved,” RCMP Staff Sgt. Wayne Clary of the E-PANA unit told CBC host Anna Maria Tremonti during a town hall meeting on missing and murdered women packed with several hundred people in Prince George Thursday night.” For a decade, E-PANA investigated the cold case deaths and disappearances of the 18 young women along a 720-kilometre stretch of the highway dubbed the Highway of Tears in Northern B.C. “Pana” is an Inuit word for the god who cared for souls in the underworld. (Betsy Trumpener, ‘RCMP say Highway of Tears killers may never be caught,’ CBC News, Oct 17, 2016.)
(A photograph of Summer “CJ” Morningstar Fowler, of the Gitanmaax First Nation near Hazelton, B.C., is displayed as her mother Matilda Fowler weeps during a news conference in Vancouver, B.C., on Dec. 12, 2012. Darryl Dyck/CP)
The Church, Religious Imperialism, and Slavery
It isn’t commonly known that Jesuits and Dominicans pioneered institutionalized slavery in the Early Modern Period. Jesuits and Dominicans have long served as the self-proclaimed ideological ‘watchdogs’ for the Church. The Dominicans and their more radical sub-sect of Jesuits, had developed the skills and disciplines of Logics, Ethics, Rhetoric, Dogma, Polemics, Apologetics, and the complex Aristotelian Natural Philosophy taught by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. They rationalized the practice and institution of slavery as an ideologically justified proposition and an economic boon for imperialistic, European, Christian nation states setting up and maintaining colonies in the New World. Inaugurated primarily in the Latinized (Central and South) Americas, the slave-taking, slave breeding, slave trading and slavery-supported industries of sugar plantations and other crops was principally founded and maintained by these operatives of the Church.
These were the top skilled discourses of the hierarchy of learning, the Roman-sourced Trivium and Quadrivium of monastic scholasticism. The Trivium and Quadrivium was adopted from the original seven stages of initiation for the all-male acolytes of Mithraism, also called the Trivium and Quadrivium, for the martial, Persian-sourced, Zoroastrian religion of the Divine Child, Mithras. Mithras was a sort of youthful, vulcan, hero god of metallurgy, war, smith-craft and the forging of weapons, as he was ‘born from the fire in the rock’ and heralded by a burning star in the sky on the eve of his winter solstice birthday as a solar fire deity, observed by Roman devotees on December 25th of the Roman Julian calendar. Mithraism had become the religion of the Roman soldiery by the 1st century BC. The Seven Stages of Initiation of the Trivium and Quadrivium became the Seven Liberal Arts of Monastic Scholasticism, which in turn begat the University as it’s academic brain-child in the 11th century — spawning all-male, clerical institutions of learning in Paris, Heidelberg, Oxford, Edinburgh, and other centres of university education. Early Christian monastic orders saw themselves as ‘soldiers for Christ,’ and their striving for, and preservation of, literacy and learning as a sort of holy battle. With these kinds of ideology-spinning tools and expertise, Jesuits became famous for their ability to argue, spin, justify, sanctify, and ratify just about any proposition, and in fact still are.
In the case of justifying the slavery-supported sugar industry, it was an easy sell to those whose approbation counted. Fancy refined sugar confections had become necessary luxuries, almost staples, of high-ranking Church, aristocratic and royal courts, and copious, steady supply-lines were increasingly sought. For over three centuries, through the 16th to 19th centuries, the Jesuit slave trade thrived, its top-selling justification for sovereign persons’ abduction, enslavement, breeding, trading, torture, murder, cultural annihilation — including the callous separations of spouses from each other, and parents from their children and infants — being that such treatment amounted to their holy salvation in that they were being ‘brought to Christ.’
The Protestant Church’s Bible-based ideological justifications and industries subjugating and trading in abducted Africans for slave labour in North America was a spin-off in the world of Christendom, an opportunistic afterthought on the part of the Protestant Northern European colonial powers. The Indigenous inhabitants of North America would have to withstand the religious, ideological and physical onslaughts of Catholic Spain, Portugal and France, as well as those of Protestant England, Flanders, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Orthodox Russian colonies also had to be contended with, mainly in the vast and remote territories that would become Alaska; European enslavements of Indigenous peoples would have to be borne there as well.
Reconciliation
The Anglican/First Nations-sponsored Truth and Reconciliation weekend ended with an amazingly healing cleansing ceremony for all participants, facilitated by a Native Elder and artist (AMAZING comedienne and storyteller from up island), which brought peace and forgiveness. This forgiveness flew deep into the core of Self, and was profound medicine for the body and soul. It flew, as well, toward the multiple, invisible legions of the traditional transgressors of Human and Indigenous Rights in Canada, in whatever historic or contemporary chapter of the atrocities, genocide and slavery perpetrated by Christian Europe’s colonizing efforts and industries they may lurk. It outed them, witnessed them, accepted and absolved them in one gracious move by a gifted, generous, loving, incredibly dignified Elder and shaman.
But I could not agree more with these commentators in their assessment of the only legitimate and ethical way forward. I challenge Prime Minister Trudeau to hear their words, to bear witness, to act in accordance with his own pledges. and to proceed with all of us in good faith. I likewise call all White, Eurocentric provincial leaders to hear and bear witness to these legitimate grievances and claims by our predecessors here, the Indigenous Peoples, and to honour their Human and Ancestral Rights in this land.
(Image: Elders and Chiefs at Truth and Reconciliation National Event closing ceremonies in Edmonton)