Sunday June 27, 2010
Not the way to achieve reconciliation
By Jim Taylor
Last Monday was National Aboriginal Day in Canada. Although started in 1996, this was the first time I’d heard of it – and then probably only because it was preceded by the first Truth and Reconciliation Commission gathering in Winnipeg.
The concept of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, of course, comes from South Africa. Generations of racial discrimination – justified, in white eyes, by their rationale of apartheid, of separate cultures – left a bitter legacy when black South Africans finally gained the right to vote.
Since then, according to Wikipedia, 16 other countries have imitated South Africa’s example. None have been as successful. And I doubt that Canada’s Commission, launched two years ago with a $60 million budget, will prove an exception to the rule.
First, it has no one with the status or charisma of Desmond Tutu to lead it.
With no disrespect to Commission Chair Justice Murray Sinclair and Commissioners Chief Wilton Littlechild and Marie Wilson, they are hardly household names. By contrast, Tutu was widely known, admired, even revered, throughout South Africa. For his sake, angry people spoke civilly to each other.
Second, the Canadian commission has a narrower mandate. It focuses only on Indian residential schools. The broader issue, of how European immigrants treated the continent’s original inhabitants, remains out of bounds.
Different tactics
Third, the Canadian Commission has chosen a dramatically different approach to hearing the stories of suffering and injustice.
The South African Commission, from what I can gather, met people anywhere and everywhere. In remote rural villages. In urban slums. In the shade of a spreading fig tree…
Canada, by contrast, will hold seven “national events” over the next five years. The first, in Winnipeg last week, featured four days of speakers, celebrity guests like Governor General Michaëlle Jean, dancers, singers, artists…
It may have raised awareness. But it sounds more like a media circus than a venue for reconciliation.
The commissioners did hear stories from 475 people. They had hoped for 600. Significantly, 275 of those stories were told privately.
While I feel for the pain of those who suffered abuse, private truth-telling is not the way to achieve reconciliation. Aboriginal and white populations need to tell their stories to each other – face to face, heart to heart.
Reconciliation is more than therapy. We whites need to hear how the unholy combination of good intentions, prejudice, and apathy destroyed aboriginal culture. And – dare I say this? – aboriginal people need to hear white resentment at being blamed for actions they had no hand in.
Majorities and minorities
The fourth difference is the power imbalance. In South Africa, a small minority oppressed a huge majority. When the tables turned, the oppressors had no choice but to listen to the grievances of their former servants and labourers. Or to flee the country.
In Canada, the opposite holds. Aboriginal victims were – and still are — a tiny minority. The majority feels little pressure to crack the shell of its complacency.
Published reports will not do it.
Yet the tragedy itself is all too real. Until 1996, when the last of 139 federally-funded residential schools closed, an estimated 150,000 aboriginal youth were ruthlessly removed from home and family and incarcerated in residential schools – supposedly for their own good.
Governments of the time felt that unless they did something radical, aboriginal people would be wiped out by poverty, ignorance, and alcohol. Their solution was to force aboriginal children to get an education. In English or French, of course.
And since the government contracted religious denominations to run the schools, aboriginal children also got Christian indoctrination.
Wholesale condemnation
But neither governments nor churches were trying to exterminate aboriginal people, as some critics fumed, “no different from how Hitler treated Jews.”
Canadian governments and churches sought to eradicate aboriginal culture, true. But not aboriginal people. They may have been wrong – good intentions often are – but they tried to save aboriginal people from extinction.
And many very good people dedicated their lives to that ideal. Nurses and doctors, teachers and administrators, travelled to remote places and worked for pathetic wages. Because they cared deeply – about the cause and the children.
A few aboriginal voices acknowledge that sacrifice, that love. But they are immediately shouted down by the chorus that automatically condemns anything related to residential schools.
Yes, there was abuse – physical, emotional, and sexual. There’s no excuse for it. But abuse is almost inevitable in any institution where a few people wield nearly unlimited power.
I’m not convinced the goal of the schools was wholly wrong. Last Sunday, I chanced upon a program called Bold Eagle, on the Aboriginal People’s Television Network. Young aboriginals went to Wainright, Alberta, for a week of cultural orientation and five weeks of military training.
The program showed young people learning to obey orders. Accepting discipline. Studying. Developing technical skills.
At graduation, parents watched proudly as sons and daughters marched in regimented ranks.
Ironically, it seemed to me, they were celebrating their children’s assimilation into an alien culture that inculcated many of the same values as the former despised residential schools.
But where residential schools failed, the army succeeded.
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Copyright © 2009 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups permitted; all other rights reserved.
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Your Turn
The first two responses to last week’s column, about the example that judges should set, were completely contradictory.
Art Hebbeler wrote, “You are sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. Americans don’t try to tell Canadians what to believe or how to act in your secular government, and I also don’t see anything in your resume that leads me to believe you are an expert on American social history, American government, or the American religious experience.”
Pat Magdamo wrote, “I am interested in your views, especially of the issues in U.S. that affect us, sometimes noisily and unreasonably blocking off the kinds of debate and discussion we should be having. The churches don’t do much better!”
Along the same line, Jim Watson commented, “And to think that the United Church of Canada still shuts out Evangelistic Preachers.”
Oh, well…
Fortunately for my ego, most other comments were positive. For example, Connie St. Hilaire wrote, “Thanks for sending me your column on judges. It is rational and compassionate at the same time.”
Claudia Genung wrote from Tokyo, “I agree with your views on abortion; a woman should not be denied a choice no matter how hard that may be. It is also interesting for you to have noted how religion has become so much an issue for U.S. politics these days. Jim, you can comment on US politics all you want and people who don’t want to read it can always use the delete button.”
Joy McPhee also supported my digression on abortion: “Thank goodness someone has finally said that men, until they are able to become pregnant themselves, do NOT have the right to make decisions for those of us who sometimes, by no fault of our own, become pregnant. Its time men took some responsibility of keeping (you know what) in their pants and be aware that they too are responsible for pregnancy. Maybe if those same men would help out when a baby is born to an unwed mother, by giving support and respite for the care of that baby and not spend time walking the streets with signs opposing abortion. Men have no idea how it feels to be having a baby when you don’t want one even when you are happily married and will not abort this baby.”
Steve Roney opposed my views on abortion. “Granted that, just because something is immoral, does not mean it should be legislated against. But abortion is the classic example of an immoral act that should be legislated against, because it involves clear victims. It is therefore a matter in which the state is morally obliged to intervene, to protect the rights of one individual against intended violation by another.”
I had quoted John Spong’s take on the intention of separation of state and church: “the ability to worship without prejudice in any religious tradition, or not to worship at all…."
“That’s an interesting falsification of early American history,” Steve replied. “The truth is that all the original colonies except Maryland had established churches. In Massachusetts, for example, failing to appear at the designated correct church on Sunday mornings was a criminal offense.”
Cliff Boldt offered this: “Dogma seems to be overcoming informed discussion these days.”
Art Gans questioned my description of Roger Taney, the first Roman Catholic appointed to the Supreme Court, as “undistinguished.” Art drew attention to a fairly long article on Taney in Wikipedia. It noted, among other things, that Taney emancipated his own slaves, but upheld and reinforced the rights of slaveowners. Wikipedia describes the reaction to Taney’s support for slavery: “[His[ intemperate language only added to the fury of those who opposed the decision. As he explained the Court’s ruling, African-Americans, free or slave, could not be citizens of any state, because the drafters of the Constitution had viewed them as ‘beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.’”
I take back my original description – Taney distinguished himself, but not in ways I would applaud.
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NEW PARAPHRASE AVAILABLE
I write paraphrases so that I can understand the Bible. And one of the most bewildering books, for me, has been Revelation.
Then one day my minister suggested that I was reading it wrong. I was concentrating on the prophecies, the interpretations of the visions, the explanations of the symbols. I should be reading it as a verbal painting.
Without most of the speeches and proclamations, Revelation turns into a massive visual tapestry, an epic narrative. In most of my paraphrases, I have tried to replace archaic metaphors and images with more modern ones, and to replace desert based illustrations with some that we who live in more northern climes might find more familiar. I have not done that this time. I have simply excised the blather that gets in the way of John’s magnificent panorama of rebellion and victory.
I’m offering this paraphrase of Revelation on the honour system, the same way as my other paraphrases (except for Psalms, which you have to order through the publisher). If you want to examine my paraphrase of Revelation, just write me. I will send it to you as a Microsoft Word file. If you decide you want to keep the paraphrase, you send me a cheque for $5 Canadian; if you decide it’s not worth that much, just delete the file and send nothing.
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