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From the Canadian Jewish News ...

An apology that’s long overdue

The following official court notice appeared in local newspapers recently: “The Indian residential schools settlement has been approved. The healing continues.”

The court order states that $1.9 billion be given to native people who suffered in residential schools. Up to $275,000 per person will go to individuals based on the amount of sexual, physical and psychological abuse they suffered; $125 million has been set aside for “healing”; $60 million is earmarked for “research” and preserving the experiences of the survivors; and $20 million will go to national and community commemorative projects.

If you’ve never read about Canada’s residential schools, Google “native residential schools Canada” and learn that children were pulled from the arms of their parents as part of religious missionary work and taken to one of 72 residential schools across Canada. The last schools closed in 1996.

In these unsanitary schools, children were punished for speaking their language and forced to sleep next to youngsters dying of tuberculosis (of whom thousands were buried in unmarked graves).

The $1.9 billion that has been earmarked to pay for this genocide – the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide says the forcible transfer of children from one group to another is an act of genocide if done “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – is long overdue and far too little.

If it’s possible to quantify the value of a child, whether that child died in St. Philip Residential School or Duck Lake boarding school (where it is said that more than one half of the children sent there died before their 18th birthdays), $1.9 billion does not cover one single native son or daughter who died at the hands of nuns, priests, government officials and those sworn to protect us, the RCMP.

Over the next year, survivors of the residential schools or their family members will make claims for the suffering they endured. Those who present appropriate evidence will one day receive a cheque in the mail. They will open the envelope, remove the cheque and likely stare at it for a long time – the same way, I imagine, Jewish Holocaust survivors do when they hold a German government cheque in their hand.

The amount of the cheque or the simple fact they were granted financial compensation, will not, however, be sufficient to give them closure.

To achieve that will require thorough and ongoing education for people like you and me that reveals the anguish our native people have gone through. Our schools need to bare the Canadian soul by teaching the real history of Canada, including the nasty policies of corporations that committed unspeakable crimes against native Canadians.

To find closure, a government cheque will not suffice. The prime minister of Canada must involve our entire country in a truth and reconciliation process so, we, the children and grandchildren of those who perpetrated this national crime, are encouraged to beg forgiveness from native survivors, and from those who died and will never have a voice.

He must speak to the entire nation, on prime time television, and say: “We can never properly repay those who lost their lives in Canadian residential schools. We will never be able to return children to their mother’s arms who died in those horrific places. The Canadian people will forever live with this aspect of our history. However, today we beg you for forgiveness.”

How is it possible that in our country, one with “glowing hearts,” the most vulnerable among us – our children – were treated by the Anglican, Catholic and United churches like the enemy? How do we come to grips with the fact our government for decades ignored report after report that death tolls in some of these schools had reached 69 per cent?

To our children, our Aboriginal children, we say: “We are deeply sorry.”