Reflections: Canadian History

By Barb Nahwegahbow

Last Sunday I went to see the most recent play by Drew Hayden Taylor at Native Earth here in Toronto. It’s about a homeless Cree woman, a survivor of residential school who confronts her attacker who is now a bishop with the Anglican church.

It’s a one-act 80-minute play. I found it dragged at the beginning and could easily have been reduced to just over an hour I think. At the same time I found the writing and acting pretty good.

Many of the 40-45 people in the audience were non-Aboriginal women. In fact, my guest, a non-Aboriginal friend commented on this. There was a panel discussion following the play which included a First Nations woman who teaches indigenous studies at Humber College, and a non-Native woman from the Anglican Church who has some sort of role regarding residential school apologies and reconciliation. The discussion and comments got me thinking about a few things:

1)    Why are the Indians the ones who are labelled sick and need healing? Yes, we need to heal, and we are healing but the churches and other institutions like Children's Aid societies and the various government agencies that deal with us are just as sick. And what are they doing to rehabilitate and heal themselves? The Anglican church woman was beaming proudly when she talked about a woman from the east coast who translated the apology into a Native language and how the process healed her, started the community healing, etc. That's the kind of thing I am thinking about. The churches number among those who inflicted the sickness upon us to begin with. No reason for pride or smiles there.

2)    The focus on residential schools distracts from the overall, overarching and evil problem of colonization, historical and present-day. Residential School is just one piece of it, a horrible piece, yes, but only one. The whole object of the colonial project was and is a grab for lands and resources and making it easier by assimilating and killing the Indian - so many examples of this with tar sands, pipelines, clear cutting, water poisoning with mercury, CAS’s, etc.
    There was a woman from the Toronto School Board who was very proud to say that TDSB has decreed that their curriculum will now include a piece about residential schools. She was kind of smug and I got up and said the two points above, and that the big colonization picture is what needs to be taught in schools. To treat/teach residential schools as an anomaly (I didn’t say this but something like this), is to do us a disservice and doesn’t address the problem.
    It also needs to be taught in the schools as part of Canadian History, not as something separate from this country’s history and as something that happened a long time ago, but a dynamic that continues on today. There was no real response to, or discussion on my comment which I thought was a worthwhile point, though one panelist mentioned a quote from Vine Deloria – something about how there is ‘no post-colonial’. Indeed there is not.

There was discussion about how educators are reluctant to teach about residential schools because ‘it is not their story’. But in fact, it is a story that belongs to everyone, not just us Indians  – it’s the history of Canada, and part of the continuing Canadian experience. To say otherwise is just denial. And if teachers want someone to speak about personal experience at residential school (which the teachers cannot do unless they are survivors themselves), there are people who will do this in the schools.

3)    The Humber professor said that often non-Native students accuse her of blaming white people. Well, historically, who were the colonizers? It wasn’t Asians or Africans. And today, who heads up the RC Church? This country? The banks? The multinational corporations, energy companies, lumber companies, etc. (All these groups oppress everybody, not just Indians.) But the whole accusation leveled at the professor needs careful analysis and dissection/separation and discussion – I think one could also discuss Caledonia and the Mohawk battle there, and the Oka Crisis because who were the Caledonians, and who wanted to build the golf course on traditional sacred Mohawk territory? Maybe we need to define ‘white people’. I’m not trying to offend anyone and maybe it’s that sentiment – fear of offending - that gags us and prevents discussion. Maybe the next time someone levels that accusation at me, that we are blaming white people, maybe I will say, yes, we are or at least I am and engage in a discussion about the identities of past and current colonizers. The panel moderator on Sunday said a few times, ‘remember, these are individuals working for particular organizations. They are not the organization.’

4)    One person in the audience said her young nieces and nephews are 1-2 generations removed from RS. They are afraid to react when they hear someone make a racist remark about Indians and aren’t sure what to say. Here, I was tempted to get up and say, all they have to do is remember The Holocaust and the death of 6 million Jews which happened, in part, because people were afraid to speak up or didn’t know what to say or were afraid to offend someone or of being attacked themselves. This bit of recent horrific history alone should prompt people to speak up. I couldn’t think of another example as vivid or contemporary or that looks at the big picture.

One last thought, I did sense a general air of disapproval when I said my piece at panel discussion – almost like I was ungrateful for the goodwill of people who gave up a sunny Sunday afternoon to come to the play to learn, like I was throwing it in their faces.  After my comments I sat quiet.