Oh...Canada

This past Canada Day may have been one of the strangest and least comfortable in my memory.

It wasn't due to the fact that we shared a meal with friends for the first time in well over a year (thank you Pete!).

It wasn't due to the fact that our city (and much of western Canada) was undergoing an absolutely unprecedented heatwave, nor the haunting notion that it was just a peek into a hotter drier future for all of us.

No, it was due to calls not to celebrate Canada Day whatsoever, in the light of the discoveries of unmarked graves of children at several Indian Residential School sites across the nation, with hundreds, if not thousands more to follow. Many municipalities did, in fact, cancel their planned observances in favour of reflection, while #CancelCanadaDay and arguments to do away with regular July 1 traditions like fireworks blossomed all across social media.

So when we left our friend's house a little before 8:00 on July 1 and saw that the tiny Canadian flags he had put in the ground by his driveway and sidewalk had been trampled flat, it wasn't altogether surprising.

I like to think I understand. I mean, I recognize that whatever else they might have purported to teach, these schools were intended to eliminate Indigenous culture in our country. Not only by taking children away from their homes and families but by punishing them for speaking their own language or following their own customs. 

It took me a long while and some patient education by excellent people before I came to accept the idea that the I.R.S. program was, in fact, cultural genocide. That there was really no difference between this program and the "ethnic cleansing" we've heard about in other parts of the world.

So, yeah - my country has a lot to answer for in the way it has treated Indigenous peoples. And to be clear, this is not ancient history. The last residential school did not close until 1996. The so-called "Sixties Scoop," where Indigenous children were put into foster care with white families, persisted through the 1980s.

Pretty much every single Indigenous person you encounter is either a residential school survivor, or a child or grandchild of one. Generations of people who have not only been brutalized, but who also have absolutely no picture of what "normal" family life might look like, from either a settler or Aboriginal perspective.

At Audrey's elementary school, which has Cree language and culture programs, they have elders come in who share cultural lessons with the students. In talking with one of them, the full horror of the challenges facing First Nations children - mental and physical health, unemployment, access to education, addiction, and incarceration - really came into focus for her (and later me). And all of it stemming from a paternalistic attempt of European colonizers to make the people here less like themselves and more like 'us'.

Audrey asked the elder how long it would take for real healing to take place, and she answered "seven generations." 

I have no idea if that healing has even started yet.

But even in the midst of the horror stories of these unmarked graves (graves that school survivors had talked about, and that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 asked the federal government of the day to pay for their location and repatriation, but were denied), I am hopeful.

Almost every developed nation has a rocky history with the people who were there first, but not all of them have had a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

And even before the TRC, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in 2008 for not only the excesses and abuses committed at the schools, but for the creation of the residential school system itself, and its part in a government policy of assimilation. Four years earlier than that, the RCMP formally apologized for their participation in the I.R.S.

My own church, which was one of the religious entities that operated the schools at the behest of the Canadian government, apologized in 1986, saying: 

We imposed our civilization as a condition of accepting the gospel. We tried to make you be like us and in so doing we helped to destroy the vision that made you what you were. As a result, you, and we, are poorer and the image of the Creator in us is twisted, blurred, and we are not what we are meant by God to be. We ask you to forgive us and to walk together with us in the Spirit of Christ so that our peoples may be blessed and God's creation healed.

It is important to note, however, that this apology was not accepted by the Indigenous elders it was presented to, who felt it was incomplete, and much work was still needed.

That work still needs to be done, and for every person who comes around to perceiving the bitter harvest of racist seeds sown by previous generations, there is another who feels Indigenous people have it pretty easy and should "get over it already."

And meanwhile, here in the middle, is a middle-aged white guy who is ashamed of how his country has behaved, but proud of the small steps it has taken to get better. Present Canadian governments have now apologized and are trying to undo some of the damage caused by former ones. A country that, at the same time it did unconscionable things at home, did laudable things abroad, including defending freedom, keeping the peace and feeding the hungry.

Can Canada be ashamed of its racist past but appreciative of its other accomplishments, including the solemn recognition of that past? I think maybe, yes. I am not ready to give up on either Canada or Canada Day just yet.

It is right that Canada Day 2021 should be different though. This is the year when attention really started to be paid to the fallout of the residential school system, because this is the year when the unmarked graves of unnamed children were found, beginning with the 215 in Kamloops. 

I think more subdued observances and calls for reflection on our national relationship with all Indigenous peoples were a good idea. I don't know that cancelling the day outright or pretending there is no Canada is a solid way forward, although I certainly appreciate the communities that did so out of respect, like St. Albert, whose firework display normally takes place on Mission Hill, the former site of Youville Residential School.

The horrific tally of unmarked graves will continue to rise between now and next Canada Day. Will there be calls to cancel festivities again next year? Possibly. Probably, actually.

But I hope that somehow we, Indigenous and non-Indigenous inhabitants of Turtle Island alike, can find a way forward together that will use the shame and sadness of these discoveries to make real changes. Changes we sorely need so that Canada can realize its promise and potential for everyone who lives here, whether their ancestors started out here or arrived later.

In the meantime, a few paper flags crushed by someone expressing their anger and disappointment in the Canada that was, and far too often continues to be, seems a small price to pay.