The awful history of Canada’s “residential schools” resurfaced this week when the remains of 215 Indigenous children were discovered at a former school. The bodies were found in the grounds of Kamloops Residential School, 200 miles northeast of Vancouver, British Columbia. The institution was one of more than 100 boarding schools that the Canadian government, and various Catholic and Christian churches, used to “kill the Indian in the child” as part of the forced assimilation of Aboriginal and First Nations communities into the European culture favoured by settler colonialism. Describing the “unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented” Chief Rosanne Casimir of the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation noted that some of the dead children were just 3 years old.
Six years ago, Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission published comprehensive findings on the violence and abuse used to humiliate Canada’s Indigenous peoples. Its final report begins: “For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada.” The Commission concluded that the government’s policies amounted to a “cultural genocide.”
The savage abuse of Indigenous children played a key role in this policy. Up to 6,000 children died from malnutrition, mistreatment and physical and sexual abuse. The Commission noted that despite their traumatic childhoods many survivors “went on to become influential leaders in their communities and in all walks of Canadian life, including politics, government, law, education, medicine, the corporate world, and the arts.”
Two years ago Pope Francis was invited to make a formal apology for the Church’s role in this terrible history. (Sixty percent of Canada’s residential schools were Catholic.) To date, despite further overtures, there has been no apology. Individual dioceses within Canada have issued statements that address this disgraceful part of the Church’s history but these fall far short of what is decent and morally necessary. If an apology is ever made on Canadian soil, it will inevitably prove to be much too little and far too late, underscoring the disparaging attitudes towards Indigenous people which persist in Canada to this day. The continued devaluation of Indigenous lives is noticeable in the lack of progress on accountability for scores of missing and murdered Indigenous women, the lack of urgency in dealing with high rates of depression and suicide, and the general neglect of a whole host of other vulnerabilities.
Canada’s federal government has promised programmes that will tackle some of these issues but a lack of trust is still plainly evident on both sides. Six years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report, only a handful of its 231 calls for justice have been meaningfully implemented. Meanwhile, further evidence of atrocities like what took place at the Kamloops school keeps surfacing and making any progress towards reconciliation more difficult. This festering and still largely unacknowledged wound in Canada’s national psyche is a vivid illustration of William Faulkner’s insight that: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
