Pope Francis sells his own good people down the river

Pope Francis’s pilgrimage to Canada for so-called healing and reconciliation starts on July 24. Along with a gullible public, he’s swallowed the calumny that residential schools for Indians and Inuit were all hell-holes of iniquity that perpetrated cultural genocide. That’s understandable given his background in Marxist and anti-capitalist liberation-theology in South America. The facts are more complex.

There are no credible reports of mass or unmarked graves or disappearances

I don’t doubt that bad things happened in some schools, as in all boarding schools. A good friend told me a janitor tried to fondle her at her convent school in England. But this evidently memorable experience didn’t induce life-long trauma let alone an expectation of an apology from the pope. In 2010 and five years before publication of the Truth and Reconciliation report (TRC), Commissioner Murray Sinclair, an Indian from Manitoba, wrote this in a letter published on August 5, 2010 in the Calgary Herald: “While [we] heard many experiences of unspeakable abuse, we have been heartened by testimonies which affirm the dedication and compassion of committed educators who sought to nurture the children in their care. These experiences must also be heard.” But the experience of those educators, some of them Indigenous, was not heard. The budget for their investigation was close to zero and the few who testified were treated with such disdain and humiliation that others stayed away. Apart from that crucial omission, and contradicting balanced research in six volumes of the full report, TRC’s Summary asserted the libel of cultural genocide. This narrative has evolved like a claim for compensation from an insurance company where only the claimants had representation, and there was no independent testing of evidence. Before the introduction of antibiotics around 1945 students died because of tuberculosis, Spanish flu and epidemics that struck everywhere. There are no credible reports of mass or unmarked graves or disappearances. And it’s simply not true that children were snatched from the arms of loving families. As the full TRC report acknowledges, the schools took in orphans and those that families were unable to support. Many parents wanted their children to go to residential schools. In later years welfare officers removed children from homes that were shockingly abusive.

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Generosity of the welfare state has destroyed the work ethic

Yes, today there’s a real Third World underclass of multigenerational welfare recipients, unemployed and all but unemployable. They live in violence-wracked settlements having no economic reason to exist and in urban slums. But with such small numbers relative to the total population, attribution of today’s societal dysfunction to the legacy of residential schools is obviously wrong. The 1967 Hawthorn Report said they enrolled just 6 percent of all Indigenous students, with a quarter of those in hostels attending provincial and territorial schools. Today, there are more Indigenous prison inmates, about 15,000, than at peak enrolment in residential schools. Causation for societal dysfunction is multi-faceted. A foundational problem is that neither the government nor Indigenous leadership has resolved whether to educate and train next generations for the high-tech economy or for a life based on some version of the traditional lifestyle. Despite the demise of the fur trade decades ago, the Garden-of-Eden iconography is currently ascendant. Another foundational problem, acknowledged for example by anthropologist Colin Turnbull, is that the hunter-gatherer-trapper’s free-spirited mindset and culture are flat-out incompatible with modern trade and commerce. A third foundational problem is that, for a burgeoning underclass, the generosity of the welfare state has destroyed the work ethic that once existed.

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Canada having the world’s highest male youth suicide rate among the Indigenous

These problems leave Canada having the world’s highest male youth suicide rate among the Indigenous. Conditions have not improved since the 1995 Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples’ report on suicide, Choosing Life: Aboriginal youth described both exclusion from the dominant society and alienation from the now-idealized but once-real “life on the land” that is stereotypically associated with aboriginality. The terrible emptiness of feeling strung between two cultures and psychologically at home in neither has been described in fiction and in art, as well as in testimony given before the Commission. If they have few positive role models or clear paths to follow, Aboriginal youth may be forced to turn to one another, building tight bonds against a hostile world. This inward-looking subculture may reinforce hopelessness and self-hate, and their exits may appear to be the oblivion of drugs and alcohol—or death. For all the horrors of residential schools, real or invented, there were also successes, with notable ones attributable to Roman Catholics. As an antidote to community mayhem, Father Jean-Marc Mouchet developed the cross-country ski program at Inuvik. His protégés represented Canada in four consecutive Winter Olympics. As long as the program lasted, parents bought into the program and the community stabilized. After rigorous training, students went home and did their homework. They got up early, had a real breakfast and went to school on time. Many went on to university. At a reunion celebrating the 80th birthday of Father Jean Pochat-Cotilloux, the school's founding director, alumni described Grandin College in Fort Smith as “the school we all loved.” Two former territorial premiers came from this leadership factory, as did the first aboriginal woman to sit in the House of Commons.

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Pope joins Canada’s Indigenous grievance industry

Tomson Highway is an accomplished playwright, novelist, classical pianist, and an Order of Canada recipient. In 2015 he said this in an interview with Huffington Post: “All we hear is the negative stuff; nobody's interested in the positive, the joy in that school. Nine of the happiest years of my life, I spent at that school. . .” Instead of the backward-looking blame game, TRC Commissioner Sinclair could have copied available templates for delivering education and skills training that have raised some Third World peoples into the First in a single generation. In sum, I view the pope’s expected apology as an exercise in selling his own good people down the river. Far from pointing a direction for next generations, he joins Canada’s Indigenous grievance industry in living off the saying that people believe you if you tell big enough lies often enough.