We need to start believing each other

I’m not sure if my grandfather Moses Marsden would qualify as one of the beneficiaries of the Prime Minister’s June 11 apology.

Our family never knew much about the southern Ontario “training” school he attended in the 1870’s, other than he ran away from it before he completed Grade 3. It was one of those things that Indian families didn’t dwell on.

If Grandpa had told his family about the kind of experiences I’ve heard residential school survivors talk about, I don’t know if they would have believed him. It’s almost beyond comprehension that elected Parliamentarians and church leaders in a civilized society would institutionalize child abuse.

On June 11 an Alberta First Nation leader told a national television audience about teachers sticking pins in his father’s tongue when he dared to speak his Native language. A British Columbia man spoke in hushed tones to a radio interviewer about his wife and child fleeing the violence that was his residential school legacy.

You can hear a pin drop when Elder Merle Assance-Beadie shares with Anishinabek cross-cultural workshop participants some of the abusive treatment she endured at four residential schools. Her gentle words convey the sheer terror she must have felt as a young child being terrorized by teachers and clerics for no apparent reason.

But what must be one of the hardest pills to swallow for many of the 80,000 survivors is the knowledge that so few Canadians know anything about what Prime Minister Harper called one of the darkest chapters in this country’s history. I recall Marlene Brant-Castellano – the co-director of research for the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples – saying how troubled she was seeing university graduates not knowing anything more about Native issues than the ones she saw when she began her career as an educator 30 years earlier.

During recent workshops with 250 North Bay-area teachers, several – including one principal -- told me they had never known what a residential school was. This represents an educational oversight comparable to historians skipping over the Jewish Holocaust of World War II.

People have interesting responses to learning that Canada has such skeletons in her closet. Some North Bay teachers wrote in their evaluations that the First Nation perspectives on Canadian history amounted to “whining”. It is no doubt troubling to discover that your ancestors were complicit in systemic racism and child abuse.

We try to assure participants that they are not responsible, nor should they feel guilty about historic injustices.

“But, if it happens again,” we caution, “it will be your fault.”

And surely that’s the purpose of the national apology process – to admit that there has been a problem so we can avoid it recurring. Having a better understanding of the past should help all of us in Canada build a better future. As a Supreme Court judge wisely observed in ruling on a historic land claim – we’re all here to stay.

Listening to someone else’s perspective is an important element of trust, an ingredient that has been in very short supply in the relationship between First Peoples and others who came here to make a home for themselves. We need to start believing each other – and believing in each other.

As for Grandpa Moses, nobody believed him when he insisted that he saved money on gas by switching off the ignition when driving down hills.

But when I paid $85 to fill up my car last week, I wondered if we should have paid attention

Maurice Switzer is a citizen of Alderville First Nation. He serves as director of communications for the Union of Ontario Indians and editor of the Anishinabek News.