Coping

Reconciliation

Ever had a piece of news hit you in the guts hard enough that, not only did it feel like someone punched you — but you would have preferred to be slugged if offered the choice?

Yeah...

Oh, this chapter is heavy stuff, addressing the discovery of 215 unrecorded deaths at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Further than 'your discretion is advised', I will consider if a point of wisdom if you choose to delay or avoid reading this at all.

Unless you're Canadian. We ought to know about this one.

(Also, no doodles for this chapter)

In May of 2021, using underground radar imaging technology, the Tk'emlúps te Secwépemc — a part of the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council — located the previously undisclosed and possibly undocumented graves of two hundred and fifteen children buried on a nearby hill, near the site that once housed the Kamloops Indian Residential School.

Two hundred and fifteen children. Buried in unmarked graves.

If there is any metric by which to judge a parent, a marriage, a community, a people, a civilization, a set of beliefs, a culture, or even every life on this planet, it is by the treatment of their children. Having a child should not be taken up lightly; they are completely and utterly dependent on their parents, their families, their communities, for years. And not just for food and shelter — their mental state, how they will confront the world when they grow up, how they love and interact with their community and their world, is clay in their guardian's hands. And parents are already amateurs, making harmful mistakes even with good hearts and the best of intentions. How much worse would it be, if the people a child relied on most were set on doing them harm?

By that metric, judge this: Canada's Residential School System used children as the battlefield to wage a campaign of genocide.

Genocide. No other word so completely conjures horror, brutality, systematic cruelty — the inhumanity that only humans can manage. Within that word you can find the gas chambers of Auschwitz, the roving bands of child-soldiers turning machetes on entire villages, the death camps and mass graves of the Khmer Rouge, the hundreds of thousands of refugees that fled ISIS, the ongoing atrocities labelled as genocides by the International Criminal Court in Darfur and Myanmar. Within that word there is a litany of horror, made up of stories so tragic to call them heartbreaking would cheapen their anguish.

Knowing what that word means, we call the Residential School System a genocide. I might flinch when I do it, but there's no denial. Just a sense of what that means for my country.

The Kamloops Indian Residential School was set up in 1890. It still stands today, though it was taken over from the Catholic Church in 1969, and turned into a day school. It closed in 1978. The Secwepemc used it as the first site for the local museum after, but the building has sat empty since 1989. It's a fairly innocuous looking red-brick building, four storeys high, and close enough to the highway that nearly everyone who drives into Kamloops from the north has to see it.

By all accounts, the building also had absurdly narrow and steep stairs, poor attic ventilation, insulation that made it hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and was chronically overcrowded. Which should say something, considering it was at one point the largest residential school in Canada.

The purpose of this — and every — residential school in the system was to assimilate generations of young first-nations people from across Canada into western life. The original name for this sort of school system was an 'Industrial School', where pupils were taught vocational skills along with the basics of a public school curriculum, and would practice those industry skills. Depressingly enough, and likely contributing to the deaths the authorities at the time failed to record, the schools were chronically under-funded, and often subsisted in part on the revenue the children's labour brought to the school. Between being on a ration-like diet, poor facilities, and the emotional and physical trauma of being pulled from their parents, home, and people, diseases like tuberculosis and influenza ended up running rampant. Which means —in a depressing paradox  — these children were victims of both a deliberate campaign of cultural genocide, and neglect.

The idea was the brainchild of, among others, Egert Ryerson, though I would hesitate to rest too much of the trauma those children experienced on his lap alone. The residential school program was first implemented fifty years after he proposed the idea, and sixteen years after he died.

It's important to note here, that distancing his role in the Residential School program isn't to absolve him.It's a personal reminder to me as I write, to not attempt to shrug off the guilt my country deserves, which as a citizen I bear. Being a citizen is being able to face the legacy of the place you live in, good and bad, and to not turn away from it. Take blaming the dead too far, divorce them too much from who we are now, and we don't learn from their failings.

The Residential School system was a long-term boarding school, and attendance was compulsory with passage of 'The Indian Act' in 1920. That these schools were commissioned and sponsored by Canada's federal government, and run by various churches, lent them a legal and moral weight that obfuscated true impact the school had on the children and the nations they were forced from. Part of the reason the Catholic Church's child abuse was so easy to cover up, for such a long time, was partially because of the cultural weight the church had as a moral authority. Combine that with the legal weight of a government institution, and then add on how sanitized any public demonstration of the schools were, and understand that part of our guilt is that this cultural genocide and rampant child neglect could persist for nearly a century without any real public accounting.

We've begun that accounting. The Truth And Reconciliation Commission was put in place in 2008, as an inspired demand made by the survivors of the school program during an earlier legal settlement. That demand — and there is no understatement in saying this — was an enormous civic service and a gift to the country. Though the commission finished in 2015, it also involved the foundation of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation, now headquartered in the University of Manitoba.

The Centre's website has two statements I'd like to share, and serve as good last words to this garbled mess. (And by the way, thanks for essentially helping me sort through my thoughts and feelings on the subject) The first is halfway down the front page of their website, in the section titled 'Your Records'.

This is just the beginning.

And I'll give the last word to what the Centre decided should be the first word, a statement from The Honourable Murray Sinclair, who served as chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It's not just part of who we are as survivors — it's a part of who we are as a nation.