The Frontier Centre for Public Policy has just released the second edition of “From Truth Comes Reconciliation,” a compilation of essays on the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) report, written by career-long scholars of the Indian residential school (IRS) system. Editors Rodney A. Clifton and Mark DeWolf, though non-Indigenous, passed years of lived experience in residential schools. Each contributed critical stakeholder testimony to this exhaustive anthology.
Most of the essayists — notably Prof. Frances Widdowson, now battling for reinstatement at Mount Royal University, which dismissed her in 2022 for her heterodox opinions about the IRS — have endured years of calumny as “denialists” by activists and their allies in government and academia for dissenting from the politically correct assessment of the IRS as comprehensively harmful. Happily for most of them, they are, unlike Widdowson, retired academics, so they’re well-placed to ignore the slings and arrows of cancel culture with serene indifference.
The TRC report was the outcome of a 2006 legal agreement between the federal government, various Indigenous collectives and a number of IRS-associated churches, whose purpose was to bring “a fair and lasting resolution to the legacy of the Indian residential schools.” Any student of Canadian history, amateur or professional, will find the rich content in the Frontier Centre’s essay compilation deeply informative, and not at all dry, leavened as they are by pleasantly surprising anecdotal material about life in the schools.
But I would in particular recommend it to journalists. I presume many of my colleagues, like me, found reading the 1.5-million words amassed in the TRC report’s seven volumes, 3,500 pages in all, without the vital aid of a comprehensive index — an astonishing omission in a $60-million federal project of this magnitude — simply too daunting.
I assumed the TRC report’s “Summary” and “Legacy” volumes would reliably convey the essence of the whole. That, I learned from the Frontier Centre’s book, was not the case. Clifton and DeWolf, who devoted four years to assessing the TRC in its entirety, disclose at the outset their “grave concern” is that the “Summary” and “Legacy” volumes don’t “adequately or even-handedly summarize the material that is found in the other five volumes.”
The mandate of the TRC was to create as complete an historical record as possible of the IRS system and its legacy. Thus, the most troubling discrepancy discovered by the editors was that positive testimonies by IRS staff, students and administrators in the body of the report were absent from the summarizing volumes. “As a result,” they write, “any news reports, policies or legislation based on these two crucial volumes are not likely to reflect the entire truth about the schools and hostels.”
There is no mention in the “Summary” or “Legacy” volumes, for example, of “trips to Disneyland, Expo 67 and Europe; musical bands, sports teams … fine arts, radio and newspaper clubs … chess clubs, gymnastics and square-dancing groups, choir, Boy Scouts and Cadets … life-long friendships and inspirational teaching.” Or of the Firth twins, Sharon and Shirley, who were encouraged by a priest to learn cross-country skiing on the trails behind Grollier Hall in Inuvik, N.W.T., and went on to represent Canada at four Winter Olympic Games.
Many children experienced serious harms and no one should try to dispute that. But that’s not the whole story. By focusing exclusively on the bad aspects of the IRS system, Canadians get a distorted view of history.
Another concern that comes up often in the book is the relentless linkage of IRS with the incendiary terms “genocide” and “cultural genocide.” Widdowson draws attention to the insistence that all children in the IRS experienced suffering, “dominant to the point of excluding or overshadowing other forms of remembered experience,” which has led to a “protective orthodoxy” that inhibited more positive voices. (In her essay, Widdowson reports that when an oblate priest testified that his school provided a good education and nurturing environment, “the audience became incensed.”)
The word “genocide” cannot be applied to any situation, however harsh, that does not involve intent to kill and actual killings by the group in power. There is no evidence in this case for either. Witness tales of “50,000 dead Aboriginal children in church-run schools (and) Queen Elizabeth II demanding that residential schoolchildren kiss her white-laced boot and then abducting 10 tots who were never heard of again,” which were included in the TRC report, should not have been accorded legitimacy by the commission. That abuses occurred, both physical and sexual, has never been denied by any IRS scholar, but the book’s editors note that the TRC concedes that in approximately 35 per cent of the abuse claims mentioned in the report, the abuse is said to have been committed by other students.
As for “cultural genocide,” a recently manufactured, emotive trope to replace the more accurate description of the IRS as “forced assimilation” or “misguided paternalism,” as Widdowson points out, the term implies a hatred of Indigenous culture and a wish to eradicate it. If that was the purpose of the IRS — and the essay writers vigorously reject that interpretation of the facts — then it was an utter failure. The TRC report states that, “Despite being subjected to aggressive assimilation policies for nearly 200 years, Aboriginal people have maintained their identity and their communities.” Indeed, according to DeWolf, “reasonably credible studies” have shown that a greater proportion of First Nations adults who attended residential school were able to understand or speak a First Nations language than those who did not.
The point of a “reconciliation” project like the long and costly TRC, it seems to me, should be to examine the pertinent historical record objectively and holistically, acknowledging past torts, but ending with a mutual pledge to a future based in respectful friendship. The writers in “From Truth Comes Reconciliation” conclude that the TRC report’s authors were more inclined to perpetuate grievance and seek rents than cultivate friendship. They make their case in fewer than 250 pages of text. With, thankfully, an index.
National Post
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