No indigenous truth or reconciliation, 10 years later

Ten years later, the question facing Canada is as stark as it is worrying: what has happened to both truth and reconciliation?

There has been plenty of reconciliation given the billions of taxpayer dollars transferred to indigenous leaders and activists over the past few decades, more recently augmented by extraordinarily unprecedented transfers of Crown lands to various bands across the country. But the truth underlying claims to money and land has largely been ignored, buried, or distorted by these same people and their non-indigenous government and legal system enablers.

One of these aboriginal activists is Tanya Talaga, the Globe & Mail’s habitually overwrought indigenous issues columnist.

As the joyful Christmas holiday season is upon us, I couldn’t help recalling the contents of her joyless, unchristian like December 6 piece titled Truth and Reconciliation, 10 years later.

In her rant, Talaga claims:

“Some Canadians may want us to move on from the dark residential-school chapter of this country’s history. But a decade after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s final report was published, its lessons have not yet been absorbed.”

By this, she means that few of the 94 Calls to Action in the 2015 final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission have been enacted. This slow pace has occurred despite Justin Trudeau’s sweeping pre-election promise that his Liberal government would enact them all, a rash and reckless statement, if there ever was one.

Instead, 10 years ago this month, “only 14 of the Calls to Action have been fulfilled. As for the remainder, 16 have not started, while 22 have stalled,” Tagala complains.

Tagala blames this lollygagging on the unwillingness of Canadians and elected leaders to accept the “horror story” of the Indian Residential Schools, namely that:

“More than 150,000 children were sent to these institutions run by the Christian churches and funded by the federal government; for decades, under the Indian Act, parents would be fined or jailed if they refused to send their children to these so-called schools. The goal was to turn Indigenous kids into good Canadians who could contribute to the national project being built by invaders on their lands, who had disrupted tens of thousands of years of Indigenous existence.”

“It must have been terrifying: children ripped away from their parents by foreigners in strange clothes, only to be put in schools that in some cases resembled work camps. These forces came from across the sea, stole children, and assimilated them into their laws and practices. If you did not obey, punishment could be harsh, violent, and in some cases, deadly…. [N]eglect, starvation, bullying, and woefully inadequate medical care and severe corporal punishment were commonplace.”

Keep in mind that most of these indigenous boarding schools were operated in remote regions by dedicated missionaries from four leading Christian denominations: the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of England, the Presbyterian Church, and the Methodist Church. The remainder were directly administered from Ottawa and by regional governments.

If truth be told, no children were “stolen” and forced attends these boarding schools, contrary to the wishes of the parents; school uniforms replaced indigenous dress; being at a “work camp” meant learning useful skills and trades like gardening and sewing; there was no starvation because the nutritious meals served at the school were better than those received at home; assimilation consisted of learning to read, write, and master arithmetic; there was no Western medical care at home while all schools contained a small medical facility dispensing modern remedies and treatment.

Although many children, nearly all from abusive, dysfunctional, criminal, or orphaned households, entered their residential schools badly damaged by their home experience, thousands more were eagerly sent to these boarding schools by their long-converted Christian parents who willingly signed an application form to ensure their children’s acceptance in a school operated by members of their own denomination.

Also keep in mind that corporal punishment — “the strap, the lash, whippings” — that Tagala mentions was routine in all schools, boarding or otherwise, across the globe, many also managed by Christian denominations, during the same historical era, 1883-1996.

As for “deadly punishment,” there is not a single documented case of a child murdered by a residential school employee or overseer. Conversely, the chronic rape and occasional murder of children were as commonplace in their home communities then as they are today.

Indeed, rather than being a “dark chapter” in their lives, many of the successful students, most of them God-fearing Christians, have testified that their residential school experience was happy and beneficial.

For example, Tomson Highway, a celebrated Cree storyteller, playwright, novelist, classical pianist, and Order of Canada recipient, has written:

“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. I learned your language, for God’s sake. Have you learned my language? No, so who’s the privileged one and who is underprivileged?”

“You may have heard stories from 7,000 witnesses in the process that were negative,” he adds. “But what you haven’t heard are the 7,000 reports that were positive stories. There are many very successful people today that went to those schools and have brilliant careers and are very functional people, very happy people like myself. I have a thriving international career, and it wouldn’t have happened without that school.”

“You have to remember that I came from so far north and there were no schools up there.”

He says that by the time he was 18, he was playing Brahms, Chopin, and Beethoven: “How many white boys can get to do that? And they grew up with grand pianos in their living rooms!”

While she would never celebrate stories like this, Talaga also applauds pre-residential pagan lifeways by saying they were based on the:

“Seven Grandfather Teachings: seven truths to which the Anishinaabeg hold dear, and which many try to structure their lives to lead a good life, or mino-bimaadiziwin. Those truths are, in English, best summed up by these words: love, honesty, bravery, wisdom, respect, humility, and truth.”

All these also sound like traditional Judeo-Christian values.

Suppose, however, that love, honesty, truth, and other Christian values also count for something in Indian country. In that case, the seven Grandfather Teachings need to be finally and thoroughly exposed as playing no ancient part in indigenous ideology or folklore. Instead, they were created out of whole cloth by Edward Benton-Banai, an Ojibwe Anishinaabe academic and activist, in his children’s novel The Mishomis Book: The Voice of the Ojibway, first published in 1979.

As an anthropologist with a six-decade interest in indigenous lifeways, I make this claim based on the fact that my search of the relevant literature showed that these so-called sacred teachings were never mentioned, even in passing, in the extensive ethnographic body of writing on indigenous religion, folklore, or belief systems, central areas of ethnographic research across North America, indeed around the world, until at least the 1950s.

What struck me most about Benton-Banai’s fairy tale was not its absence of Biblical allusions, as one might expect after centuries of Western contact, but how much it read like a pseudo-indigenous version of Homer’s Odyssey, a classic Greek fable, an educated man of his generation would surely have familiarity with.

As for the 94 calls to action, Tagala correctly argues:

“Those that have been completed were important but relatively easy to achieve, such as creating a National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, acknowledging that Indigenous rights include language rights, and appointing an Indigenous language commissioner.”

But others she refers to, “such as national education reform, or informing the families whose children died at Indian Residential School of where their children are buried — seem to be taking an unreasonable amount of time to get around to,” conveniently omit the elementary fact that there are no missing or murdered indigenous Indian Residential School children secretly buried in unmarked graves all across the country, a truth carefully documented over and over by skilled and unbiased researchers here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Equally important, almost all the calls to action are as vague, open-ended, and one-sided as they are unrealistic.

As for the unfortunate contemporary educational inequities between indigenous and non-indigenous students that Tagala points out, these are a product of isolation in scattered Indian Reserves whose tiny populations prohibit the presence of secondary schools, exacerbated by the continuation of incompetent parenting and unchristian serial fornication, resulting in chaotic single-mother indigenous households, rather than a legacy of the Indian Residential Schools, especially its Christian teachings, as she would have readers believe.

Assuming that Tagala’s emotion-logged diatribe is well-intentioned, it is still coming from an activist with little indigenous ancestry and even less enculturation to indigenous lifeways: like many other well educated indigenous activists, Tagala is mainly an extra-reserve resident whose mixed heritage is mostly non-aboriginal. She describes her ancestry as one-fourth Ojibwe (Anishinaabe) and half Polish. Yes, Polish, as in Eastern European. This makes her only one-eighth indigenous, just like the treasonous Metis leader Louis Riel.

As for the Globe & Mail, it has long posted the following warning when it comes to Tagala’s writing: “We have closed [i.e., prohibited] comments on this story for legal reasons or for abuse,” implying that exposing this author’s falsehoods, as I have done here, may be abusive, even illegal in our increasingly woke and Christian-hating country.