Thursday, September 30, 2021

Truth and Reconciliation

We have a new National Holiday in Canada, Truth and Reconciliation Day, but like Remembrance Day, its not a party day but a day for reflection.


Now, I was born in Montreal, as were my parents, but all of my grandparents were born across the ocean. Growing up, most of my friends were the same, except one whose ancestors were United Empire Loyalists who had come north after failing to suppress the rebellion in the American colonies. When I got to college though, I met friends whose families had come to Quebec nearly 500 years earlier. 

I was of course aware of the original inhabitants but had never actually met one until my navy days in the 70's on the West Coast, at a little place called Gibson's Landing.   That meeting started as a confrontation with some rather angry and possibly under the influence, young men who were looking for revenge for some friends who had been beaten up a week ago. Once we'd explained that it hadn't been us and shared a few beers with them while chatting, they invited a couple of us to come along to a public celebration they were having and it was a great evening.  

Now I live on the East Coast where first contact came over a thousand years ago with Viking settlements and trading coasts followed later by Basque fishing stations for salting cod and one of the the oldest permanent European settlements (Port Royal on the Bay of Fundy 1605) but it was only when I relocated to the shores of the Minas Basin that I started to meet some Mi'kmaq as individuals and members of my community. Even more surprising was when it came to light that the Mi'kmaq and Abenaki had never fully ceded Nova Scotia to the crown but had signed a treaty of friendship in 1752 in which they essentially agreed to share the land while maintaining their rights to hunt and fish and trade. 

However, that's distant history. The main trigger for this day of reconciliation came late in the 19thC when our Federal Government passed a law requiring all Indian children to attend residential schools, paid for by the Federal government but run by various Christian churches. The intention appears to have been a desire to bring the first nations people more closely into Canadian society but whatever the intention was, the result was essentially an exercise in cultural genocide which also led to the deaths of  thousands of children from disease aided by inadequate diets and abuse not to mention many long lasting mental and emotional problems. The stories that have started coming out from some of the survivors of the improved 20th C schools are at times horrific.     

Sometime we forget how good some of us have it, or what harm people with good intentions can do.   


8 comments:

  1. I haven't been a religious man since my parents were kind enough to me to allow me (and my brother) to make up my own minds on that. It is a matter of wonderment how org'ns can pave roads with the best intentions that ultimately leead to...
    ..*Somewhere*.

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  2. Trust me. Some of us never forget the harm sufficient power can do. Good intentions scarcely enter into it. But that's a hard lesson: the world seems sometimes to be full of people convinced that when THEY have great power, it will be different.

    No, it won't.

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  3. A wonderfully introspective and thoughtful post, Ross. Very much in the spirit of the day as intended.

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    1. I'm only 2nd generation Canadian and it could be tempting to throw up ones hands and say it wasn't me or my ancestors but I have lived my life here while doing little to right things and it is today's world that needs balance.

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  4. Beautifully constructed and written Ross. That sort of objectivity and frankness will get us all a long way. The recent news regarding the schools in Canada was shocking indeed. There is a similar history of massacres, displacement (sometimes well-intentioned in the ideas of the day) and outright abuse in all of the former European colonies. Fortunately, slowly but surely we are getting to mature discussion and acknowledgement of history. It will take time.
    On a visit to your lovely country in 1990 we met and spent time with some local, first nations people in New Hazelton, BC. Lovely people, gorgeous place. I would have loved to have stayed with them. Such short-lived encounters is one of the reasons that I do not like touristic travel.
    Regards, James

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    1. Thanks James.

      New Hazelton? Had to look it up, now that is one of the wild and remote areas of this land!

      It does seem to be the way of our species from current days to the earliest record on early man that as societies, there is often a strong preference for subjugating and absorbing our neighbours over mutual respect and cooperation though it cooperation and respect does seem to work better when we get there.

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