Reckoning with Canada’s Crimes Against Humanity
[Trigger warning — genocide, child abuse, murder.]
I’m not a crier. It’s seldom the news makes me cry. I remember being a mess after 227,000 perished in the Indian Ocean Tsunami, for instance.
But, today, I’ve cried several times, the cause being far closer to home. Just 335 kilometres from here, 215 children were found in a mass grave, finally shattering Canada’s delusions about who we are as a nation.
The mass grave in Kamloops, British Columbia, held First Nations children as young as three, all buried beneath the truth and horror of whatever it was they endured.
Now, First Nations leaders seem to feel this may finally be the moment the dam breaks and Canadians reckon with the horrific reality we’ve long tried to ignore.
It’ll be a long road, though, because that’s only one of well over 130 schools where we will certainly find more graves.
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But ignoring that legacy of Residential School evil has been easy, and I’ve been trying to understand why, especially given how informed I’ve always felt I was.
We Canadians — I’m 47 but know this to be true for people 15 years younger than me too — never got taught anything about the Indian Residential School System when I grew up. I barely learned anything about First Nations people in what is now called Canada at all, to be honest.
It wasn’t till my twenties that I began hearing things about the Indian Residental Schools. Even then, things sounded “bad” but I never processed what it really was.
It was genocide. It is genocide.
And what’s compounding all this evilness, and making it so difficult to process, is knowing they were children. Children.
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(Spoiler alert.)
There’s a scene in the Matthew McConaughey/Samuel L Jackson movie A Time to Kill, where McConaughey defends his client (Jackson) for killing his daughter’s rapists as a kind of righteous retribution. McConaughey’s coming apart in his summary as he describes the horrific crimes, sobbing and struggling to stay on point as he goes into detail.
Then he pauses this terrible long pause, then says “Now imagine she is white.”
The jury and the gallery are jarred into a reckoning, that rare moment when our privilege is kicked out from under us, where we realize our skin colour tempers our perspective, as much as we like to pretend it doesn’t.
What if she was white?
I’ve always, always remembered that line. “Imagine she is white.”
And I wonder how many people have done that of late — imagined those 215 kids in that grave to be white?
Does that finally make it hit home? And, if so, why is that the difference-maker?
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But that didn’t make the difference for me. I think travelling so recently, for four years, through cultures of all kinds, was why this revelation is hitting me so much harder than it might have a decade ago. I’ve seen so much exploitation of children now. I think it’s a gateway to understanding humanity’s propensity for evil when you have that soul-crushing awakening of recognizing unending despair in a kid’s eyes.
There are places darkness doesn’t belong, and it certainly doesn’t belong in a child’s eyes.
Something about knowing life can be that bad, that painful for a kid becomes transformative when you finally click with that reality. It’s that moment you realize how evil circumstance and humans can be. Once you’ve realized that, there’s no coming back from any innocent delusions you once had about humanity.
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We humans are faulty in that we can hear of a story or a situation, yet still fail to understand the magnanimity of it. I think it’s because we’re built with an emotional circuit-breaker that prevents us from really “going there” to grasp what we’re being told.
(Let’s be gracious and call it a survival mechanism.)
It so happens that this is the week I finally decided to watch The Eichmann Show, a drama about the struggles the television documentary team had in capturing the Nazi Adolf Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem in 1961.
It was the first time such an event was broadcast globally — and it was also the first time the world really saw footage of the horrors in concentration camps like Auschwitz. Once you see those skin-and-bones bodies being bulldozed, it’s an image you’ll never forget — but that was the first time such images ever entered the collective human consciousness.
The world realized they had been dismissive of first-hand accounts of Nazi concentration camps, and that not only were the stories true — but the stories didn’t even crack the surface of the horrors that had occurred.
So, there’s this scene in the movie where the Jewish innkeeper tells documentarian Leo Hurwitz that she’d spent the previous 15+ years telling people what they’d endured under the Nazis, how lucky it was she survived. But no one ever believed her, or they didn’t care to believe her and other Jews.
That is, until the daily coverage of the trials began and over 100 witnesses got to tell their stories on the air.
But, at the time, the trial was groundbreaking television — and a global reckoning. People were transfixed. As a fledgling medium, television was still “truth” — there was no CGI or SFX. These images of those horrors were unlike anything anyone could have imagined.
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Today, we’re a cynical “deep fake” society reared on CGI and violence as entertainment. And we’ve seen so many trials.
So, even when there have been witness testimonials about the Indian Residential School crimes, they’ve never registered with us emotionally.
We had word of mouth only — I’ve never seen photos of the horrors in those schools.
I believe EVERY WORD from survivors, but it’s not there in black-and-white imagery.
The vast veil of secrecy around these horrors is jarring for me.
Think about it. There are photos of African-American lynchings, of warriors’ heads on pikes in the Belgian rubber trade genocide in the Congo, of killings under so many regimes and dictators.
There are so many horrific photos of so many crimes internationally.
But have I ever seen ones taken of the Indian Residential School System? No. I’ve only ever seen all the “look how pretty the civilized Indians are sitting” propaganda photos used to try to perpuate funding for those horrific schools.
And yet, I don’t doubt a word of these survivors’ stories. I never have, but those benign sitting-pretty photos seem all the more evil to me now.
What a well-oiled machine of hatred and evil the IRSS was.
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All of this is to say that I’m starting to understand, I guess, how we Canadians have lived in denial for so long, despite always hearing the stories, always knowing “bad things” happened.
But there can be no debate any longer.
This was never a “cultural genocide,” as they’ve called it for so long.
It was flat-out genocide.
Canada, with an outsized hand from the Catholic Church, did everything it could to “kill the Indian in the child” but they committed the military parlance of “overkill.”
In literally thousands of instances, THOUSANDS, they didn’t just kill the Indian in the child, they killed the child.
These kids were stolen in life, and by burying them anonymously in mass graves, to deflect blame for abuses and neglect that killed them, they were stolen again in death.
Anyone who’s studied history knows how vile the British Empire was. The British East India company was arguably the world’s most sinister private militia ever assembled, and the stories from India and China are horrific.
That’s not even including the slave trade or the arrogance of several so-called Christian churches in their quests to make a believer out of every “savage.”
Like it or not, Canada was born under the British system. Their values were ours for so many years.
Canada has only been finding its identity as a fledgling nation in the last 50 years or so — yet the last residential school never closed until 1996. So, as much as we’d prefer to, we can’t blame the Queen or the Union Jack for these crimes against humanity.
It’s all on us. (And that’s what they are: Crimes against humanity.)
While the Truth and Reconciliation Commission here in Canada outlined 94 steps for the Canadian government to take, there has been nearly no progress at all.
In my personal life, anyone who acknowledges they’ve harmed me but then does nothing to atone for those harms, they are never forgiven.
After all, acknowledgement isn’t making amends, it’s lip service. Every abusive spouse or parent does it — they acknowledge their violence, but the violence never goes away, it’s just paused or delivered in a different form.
No wonder First Nations peoples remain so angry and distrustful toward the rest of us. Deservedly so.
And yet, there they are — out there at the Fairy Creek Blockade as I type, being arrested and harassed by the RCMP, fighting to protect our island’s old-growth forests, demanding better environmental stewardship, advocating for Canada’s wild for all Canadians’ sakes.
They’ve never given up on the vision of a better future we all benefit from, yet we long ago forsook them.
We never held our government to accountability for crimes we’ve committed against them — against their children, generation after generation.
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Did you know that the first news stories about the horrors happening behind closed doors in Indian Residential Schools first hit the newsstands in 1907?
Yet here we are, only truly beginning to accept and acknowledge those truths of genocide now, in 2021.
Today, the Toronto Star published an article calling for searches of at the very least the 130+ schools acknowledged in the TRC’s report. I gasped when I saw one school listed — Brantford, Ontario’s Mohawk Institute Residential School — in operation from 1829 to 1970.
That’s 141 years, or about six generations in each family that went through that hellhole.
Imagine that. Six generations of children in the same family, decade after decade after decade, being raised and abused through that school system created solely to teach them that they and their culture were inferior. Abusing them day after day, abusing their souls and their bodies, beating their culture and pride, dignity and trust out of them.
It’s terrible enough when it’s one child in one generation, but when it’s multi-generational trauma like that — with a country of white folks surrounding them, who never send anyone to help, never hold anyone to account for those crimes, and never, ever say those simple-but-profound words, “We believe you. We’re sorry.”
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And these racist motherfuckers still among us who talk about First Nations people as being “lazy” or “taking advantage of the system,” I’d like to dropkick them into an alternate space-time continuum, because they sure as fuck aren’t living in reality.
I can’t imagine how resentful I would be if six generations of my family endured that kind of horror. I can’t imagine the rage I’d feel after welcoming the dogged and determined pursuit of truth by the Truth & Reconciliation Committee, but — years on — seeing absolutely NOTHING done in the wake of that report’s recommendations for Canada in making amends for that century and a half of genocide.
The last school closed in 1996. There are people just a few years older than me who still wrestle with seeing the perpetrators of those abuses walking the streets around them. They have never atoned for the crimes they committed, the cruelties they inflicted on these children.
I don’t know how we reconcile the Canada beloved by immigrants when we’ve done this to the people whose land this is.
But somehow, we’re THAT but we’re also THIS. We are indeed a great nation to emigrate to, but we also stood by while our government facilitated the slow, multi-generational slaughter of children whose only crime was to be born in different skin.
Still, First Nations leaders are telling us: We can move forward from this.
They’re giving us a roadmap so that all of us — our First Nations brethren and ourselves — can move forward to be the Canada we’d always hoped we were.
To get there, we must accept what our nation has been, the crimes we wrought against our people. We can tell them we hear their stories and we see — and share — their pain.
Together, we can protect their children, so these things never happen again. That means helping their parents — those carrying the weight of generational trauma and lifetimes of being disbelieved and devalued by the society around them.
We can work them to secure safe drinking water, further empower their communities for self-governing in ways that celebrate their cultures we once tried to end through genocide.
We can listen to their concerns about our environmental stewardship and learn from them.
We can hold the government encountable until every single step of that Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s report is enacted. We can fight to ensure we do not disproportionately jail First Nations’ people, or unduly funnel their children into foster care rather than providing resources and assistance their multi-generationally traumatized parents so desperately require.
But first, we must believe them.
However we get there, it will take decades to walk back from this.
But let’s start by helping them bring their children home. Every single one. Whatever it costs, however long it takes. Bring the children home.
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Psst. And don’t kid yourselves down there in America, New Zealand, and Australia — you have similar skeletons waiting for their reckoning too.
