Addressing racism in Canada

"I am white." begins an article by Baynard Woods of South Carolina in the Washington Post.  Woods makes the point that the only way race can be addressed in America is if whites stop denying racism and act to stop it.  Other American commentators, including Jon Stewart, make similar points.  Take a moment to listen to Stewart.  It's well worth your time.

Jon Stewart

Like many of you, I have been pondering the Charleston, S.C. shooting and thinking about the issues of hatred and violence.  We have had shootings in Canada.  Montréal's École Polytechnique always comes to my mind -- 14 women students were gunned down by Marc Lépine for simply being who they were, women.  In Lépine's twisted mind, women attending the school were the embodiment of feminism and he saw the women students as usurping his entitled spot.  The engineering school and its women became a target for Lépine's hatred.

Similarly the Charleston shooter, Dylann Roof, has a sense of entitlement but for Roof, it springs from deep-seated racism rather than sexism.   South Carolina is a state that reeks of racism, from the Confederate flag flying over its legislature to the streets named for Confederate Civil War generals.  It shouldn't surprise anyone that in such a society, an alienated young man would blame his troubles on blacks or that he would act out his hatred in a building that helped launch the modern Civil Rights Movement, the Emanuel AME Church.

Why do I care?  After all, you might say, this is just in America.  Well not quite.  In Canada, our racism is directed toward aboriginal people.  Our police and army go after Native people -- think Ipperwash and Oka.  Even after the federal government's apology for residential schools, the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now Manitoba's apology for the "Sixties Scoop", there are many First Nations children in foster care.  According to the 2011 National Household Survey, over ten times as many aboriginal children go into foster care compared to non-aboriginal children.  The reasons for this are complex but the discriminatory lack of educational resources and social service support in aboriginal communities and on reserves plays a large role.   Listen to the words of Dr. Cindy Blackstock.

If humanity is going to survive through the climate change crisis, we have to learn to put aside our differences.  It will take all of us, all of our hard work and creativity. Here are seven suggestions from the First Nations Child & Family Caring Society of Canada to help you get started.

Earlier this week, I had an opportunity to spend some time talking with two First Nations elders.  I took away two lessons from our conversation.  One is that First Nations people have a lot to teach us about living sustainably on this earth.  We all need to listen and learn this before it is too late.  The other is that we have much in common.  We love our children.  We want a good future for them.  We want to see our grandchildren grow up to become caring, healthy and happy adults.  If you live in Ottawa, you have an opportunity to begin a similar conversation today.  Go to the Summer Solstice Aboriginal Arts Festival in Vincent Massey Park.  It's free.

I rather like this photo of Pope Francis.  It seems wholly human yet inspirational and he appears to be suggesting that we can do it.  Perhaps I'll give the last word to His Holiness who recently said in his encyclical, Laudato Si´:

His Holiness, Pope Francis

"I urgently appeal, then, for a new dialogue about how we are shaping the future of our planet.  We need a conversation which includes everyone, since the environmental challenge we are undergoing, and its human roots, concern and affect us all."

The meaning of reconciliation

There's a perverse logic to Indian residential schools.  Settlers' farming methods are incompatible with hunting tradition as farming requires that animals be kept out of the fields.  There's a need to fence land, which means that it was no longer available to wild animals or hunters, and it was probably inevitable that disagreements would develop between settler communities and First Nations over land use.  The American Indian Wars of the late 18th and 19th centuries highlighted these conflicts.  For close to 100 years, the Canadian governing elite had seen the effects of these wars.

If you are going to take over land, why not do it through those who are most vulnerable and unable to defend it?   At the request of Sir John A. Macdonald, Conservative MP Nicholas Flood Davin wrote a report on residential schools.  He had toured schools that had been designed to assimilate American Indian children. We can credit these two politicians, Sir John A. and Davin, for this brilliant strategy -- first send First Nations and Metis children to industrial (residential) schools to assimilate them to a different way of life and then claim their traditional lands while avoiding the cost of war.  I am no expert and I know I am over-simplifying the situation but the logic of this rationale seems obvious.

The stories of the survivors of residential schools are truly heart-wrenching -- beatings, physical and psychological torture, sexual abuse, starvation, general deprivation, disease, loss of language and culture, loss of love and parenting skills, and soul-numbing loneliness.  According to CBC's The National, during the early years of residential schools, 50% of the children died.  DIED!  Perhaps the original intent hadn't been to wipe out aboriginal children, but how can it not be considered an act of genocide when the number of deaths in the schools became apparent and yet the programme continued?

Perhaps the term cultural genocide is a kindness that reduces the edge.  June Callwood, a hero of mine, died eight years ago this spring.  She called kindness her religion.  I have also found kindness to be typical of the First Nations people I have come to know over the last few years.

On Monday, I volunteered at the Commission's student activity day and I'm pleased to say that thousands of students participated.  The lunches were packed in brown bags decorated with drawings made by First Nations children. It's one example of a simple act of kindness.  My lunch bag said, "My mom, aunts and uncles are residential school survivors."  I get teary each time I look at it.  It moves me that survivors and their children made the effort to reach out to us through this very human gesture.

In an earlier post, A rabbit on the doorstep, I told the story of my mother's grandmother and her hardships in homesteading in Saskatchewan.  It was based on a history written by my great-grandmother that recounted how the kindness of nearby First Nations people kept her family alive.  But my great-grandmother's story was likely not unusual.  Perhaps you are here today because of the generosity of your ancestors' aboriginal neighbours?

My father's side is of Irish descent.  My grandfather carried coal to wealthier homes on Montreal's Mount Royal to help support his younger siblings.  And my father told me about signs in Montreal restaurant windows that stated, "No dogs or Irish here." I'm sure many of you identify with my story; life wasn't easy for immigrant families who came to Canada, still they could make a living.  Was it simply hard work that allowed my relatives and yours to prosper?   Hard work was a part of it but they had worked hard in the old country too.  What was different here?

The land on this side of the Atlantic was very fertile and not depleted by continuous cultivation. It had not been logged or mined and it was plentiful in resources.  The wealth of this land gave our ancestors an edge.  Much of it has not been ceded by treaty. Ethically perhaps even legally, it still belongs to the First Nations.  Our relatives may not have played a direct role in creating residential schools or in taking First Nations lands but they profited unknowingly from the proceeds of crime.  We have benefitted from this system of stolen land.

Unknowing no more!  I wept in the safe, comfortable confines of my home as I watched Justice Murray Sinclair present the Commission's recommendations.  I cannot choose to forget the pain I heard from residential school survivors.  Reconciliation is not something we do to simply make amends for residential schools. It's a gift we give ourselves, our children and future generations.  It's the opportunity to live together in common understanding and harmony.  It's not only the right thing to do, it's simply smart to look toward a common future by acknowledging both the history of wrongdoing and the many kindnesses given to our ancestors in times past.