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TWO-HUNDRED AND FIFTEEN by Darryl Newbury

“The article below is the second in a series of four reflections on the residential school issue in Canada that will be published every day in the following week in Critical Perspectives and Reflections.

The discovery of the 215 bodies of Indigenous children in unmarked graves signaled the beginning of what many of us hope will be a genuine awakening in this country of the long standing colonial wound that has been festering since even before Confederation. The first article, by Wayne Johnston is a plea for us to Wake Up! to the profound seriousness of the issue? The second, by Darryl Newbury focuses on the need for education in our history. The third, by Bill Lee, considers the issue of the responsibilities of the Church and the State to right the wrongs. The fourth is a compilation of ten Indigenous voices with their individual reactions to the specific news of the 215.”


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In each of my nearly twenty years of teaching, I have had one section, or more, of Canadian history. Despite having a degree in education and Undergraduate and Masters degrees in Canadian history, I began my career with little real knowledge of Canada's Residential School Legacy. The textbooks and resources we had only mentioned them in passing and it was not emphasized in curriculum documents. In fact, it has only been since the Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that I (and many other teachers) have had the training and access to resources needed to meaningfully teach the truth of Canada's history to our students. That means that unless we are young enough to have attended school in the last half dozen years or so, we have had no formal education in the colonial truth of this country.

We learned another painful piece of that truth these past few days with the discovery of the remains of the 215 children at the Residential School in Kamloops BC. I can throw out statistics to shock people, like the fact that an Indigenous child was more likely to die attending residential school than a Canadian soldier was to die serving in the Second World War. But we cannot truly understand that statistic without learning about who these children were, what happened to them and the impact and trauma that their disappearances brought, and continue to bring, to their families and communities.

A few years ago, I added the unconscionable history of Arctic relocation when the Canadian State deemed it permissible to forcibly move Inuit people to the high Arctic to use them to assert its sovereignty, i.e., to use them as human flagpoles (Madwar, 2018). And most recently, my students have begun to learn about children in residential schools being used in nutritional experiments which often led to their starvation. (MacDonald, Stanwick & Lynk, 2014) Incidentally, these experiments continued for 6 years after the Nuremberg Code of Medical Ethics came to be in response to Mengele's horrific experiments at Auschwitz.

An Anishnawbe educator once told me that my generation of teachers is tasked with bringing students a truth about Canada that so few of us know, understand or dare I say, care about. Until we learn this truth and come to a collective understanding that it matters, can there be any real chance at reconciliation? Maybe the news from Kamloops will be the beginning of an awakening for this country. We have felt compelled to wear orange shirts, change our social media borders, lower flags to half mast and even put out teddy bears on our front steps to show that we grieve alongside our Indigenous brothers and sisters. Good, that kind of compassion is important. But, now if we truly want to do something meaningful, we can each dedicate 215 minutes of our time in the near future to learning the truth of this country by something as simple as reading the 94 Calls to Action of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Or if we are ready, we could engage in action. We could email or call our elected officials and ask them to address those Calls to Action and demand that they do something meaningful about on-reserve housing or water. 215 minutes is not a lot to ask for the grief, pain and intergenerational trauma that Canada has inflicted on generations of Indigenous people by stealing their children. 215


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Resources

Madwar, S. (2018) Inuit High Arctic Relocations in Canada. The Canadian Encyclopedia. https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/inuit-high-arctic-relocations. MacDonald, N.E., Richard Stanwick, R., Lynk, A. (2014) “Canada’s shameful history of nutrition research on residential school children: The need for strong medical ethics in Aboriginal health research”. Paediatric Child Health. Feb; 19(2): 64

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