Track reconciliation progress, senators urge

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This article was published 20/02/2018 (2256 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Manitoba senators want Ottawa to implement an independent body to track progress on tasks outlined by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools, with its former chairman suggesting too much consultation is causing delay.

“Canada just doesn’t care enough to make the change,” Sen. Murray Sinclair told his Senate colleagues in testimony last week, while urging them not to lose faith in reconciliation.

The upper chamber’s Aboriginal-issues committee is conducting a sweeping study into Canada’s relationship with Indigenous people.

Sinclair and fellow TRC commissioner Marie Wilson urged the committee to find concrete ways they, as legislators, can help with that process, instead of reinventing the wheel with more consultation.

“Consultation, after this process that we have engaged in, in my view, is just an excuse for delay. You don’t need to consult when a report that is based upon consultation is presented to you,” Sinclair said.

Sinclair and Wilson said one of the most important of the 94 calls-to-action was the creation of a national council that would monitor the rest of them by crafting both action plans and recurring reports.

“Our concern with the calls to action generally is that governments, and parties who are looking at the calls to action, will pick and choose,” Sinclair said. “If you only do half of them, then you won’t get anywhere near reconciliation. That’s my concern.”

Sinclair said the Canadian public and politicians manage to surmount challenges faced by business and industry, but don’t have the same focus on reconciliation.

“That isn’t to say that they don’t care. We have met thousands of people who care.”

Manitoba’s newest senator, Mary Jane McCallum, told the committee she fights her own cynicism around making progress in both First Nations autonomy and reconciliation.

The next day, McCallum publicly shared her personal experience as “a residential school inmate of 11 years,” in the hopes of sparking better understanding.

“No amount of good memories can override the negative experiences I have gone through in the past 60 years due to the ‘teachings’ of residential school,” she wrote.

McCallum made her comments in an open letter to fellow Sen. Lynn Beyak of Ontario, who, last spring, said residential schools provided an “abundance of good” to pupils.

Those comments opened up old wounds, wrote McCallum, and “inflamed attitudes against Indigenous citizens,” witnessed by racist comments in letters of support that Beyak posted online.

“The Canada I have known is not the Canada you know,” she wrote.

McCallum said she had a happy, enriching childhood with good parents and a firm cultural connection to Barren Lands First Nation, in Manitoba’s far northwest.

She recalls that all ending at age five, “when I walked through the doors of that immense, cold and sterile residential school building, where I was met by strangers in black dresses who spoke a foreign language.”

McCallum said her later success as a dentist came not from her imposed education, but the values instilled by her community.

“My community had given me the foundation of spirituality that allowed me the ability to deal with the effects of genocide,” she wrote, a journey she described as taking a lifetime.

“It has taken me 60 years to get back to that little girl of five and restart my journey towards healing. In many of those years, I sought ways to stop remembering, which were self-destructive,” she said, alluding to being a teenage “one-dimensional” that “made me ill-equipped to enter Canadian society.

“At times I, myself, still wonder what I did to be treated and judged so harshly at such a young age. I had not asked to be placed there. I, nor anybody, belonged in residential school.”

She said Beyak’s characterization of “remarkable” work by “kindly and well-intentioned men and women” in the schools doesn’t capture the nuance that sexual assault and human-rights abuse often took place, sometimes even in the same building.

McCallum recalls in 2013 personally thanking roughly 50 nuns who worked at the school, and she has “good relationships” with some of the staff.

“Stories like this do not make headlines because they rightly belong in survivors’ private lives,” she wrote.

“The claim was never made that everyone related to the institution was bad, but the question sparks important dialogue.”

McCallum said the majority of Canadians “are genuinely interested in gaining knowledge” about “often-misunderstood” First Nations people, whom they rarely know well enough to discuss heavy topics.

“With the goal of a strengthened Canada, it is integral that we work together to reframe the Canada-First Nations narrative from one steeped in negativity and division to one based on healing and togetherness.

“This is not about blaming or shaming. Rather, I simply ask for compassion and for restraint from the judgment that has typically come swiftly and harshly.”

During Sinclair’s appearance, fellow Manitoba Sen. Marilou McPhedran asked him about what legal documents can bind the governments to the principles of reconciliation and the TRC calls-to-action.

Sinclair said they span multiple agreements, from the Royal Proclamation of 1763 to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which Parliament is currently debating adopting.

dylan.robertson@freepress.mb.ca

Senator Mary Jane McCallum's open letter on residential schools