By Michael (Mickey) Posluns, Ph.D¹
Pickerel River, Ontario, mposluns@accglobal.net, June 25, 2008.

For more than a century the Government of Canada maintained contracts with four different Christian churches to administer Indian Residential schools. Most schools were operated as joint ventures with Anglican, Catholic, Presbyterian and United churches. Children were commonly taken away from their parents for ten months at a time, returning only in the summer months. Some did not come home even then.

The 1996 Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP Report)² documented in graphic detail the physical, sexual emotional and cultural harm done to these children by the schools. No short list can do justice to the harm and suffering inflicted on these children but this discussion is not the place to review the book length study of the RCAP Report or to second guess the recently appointed Commission on Truth and Reconciliation regarding the residential schools.

Most widely discussed in the last twelve years has been the sexual abuse suffered at numerous residential schools and the long term consequences for children isolated from their families. Also widely discussed are the frequent beatings for minor offences and for such ordinarily acceptable acts as speaking one’s own language. Less frequently discussed is the fact that these schools “achieved” a mortality rate nearing 50%: nearly half of the students going into the schools came out in pine boxes. The RCAP Report quotes Dr. P.H. Bryce, then Medical Officer of Health of the Indian Affairs Branch in a popular article published in 1907 saying that the schools had a higher mortality rate “than most wars.” A distinguished lawyer who had negotiated some of the church contracts is quoted in the same paragraph saying that the government’s conduct, in maintaining these schools in such a poor condition (poorly heated, poor food, bad ventilation) and taking in children already known to be ill (often with tuberculosis) was “dangerously close to homicide.” What would we say about a family whose doctor and lawyer offered such opinions and who, nonetheless, persisted in their treatment of their children for many more years?

On Wednesday, June 11 2008, the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, stood up in the House of Commons and, in a strongly worded statement that he is reported to have written himself, apologized in considerable detail for the harm done by Canada to First Nations, Inuit and Métis people in Canada by the residential school. The Prime Minister was followed by the Leader of the Opposition, Stephan Dion, who admitted that his party had formed the Government of Canada for more than half the time of the residential schools and, he also apologized.

What I wish to do in this article is to review the apologies, the responses of the national Indigenous leadership and some of the news coverage and then to consider the question embedded in the title of this essay, “What is the meaning of the Apology of the Government of Canada for the Indian Residential Schools from a policy perspective?” Does it represent a change in any of the government’s current policies or practices? If the acts for which the apologies are offered are seen as part of my counting series on “the metaphysics of Indian hating” does the Government’s apology represent an end to the attitudes epitomized by the metaphysics of Indian hating? (So far as church leaders had earlier offered their own apologies there is a need to consider whether the nature of Christianity has fundamentally changed from the conduct of the clergy, religious leaders and lay teachers of earlier times, and, if so, to what extent and in what direction. The discussion for which this question very much calls out will need to wait for another article.)

The Apologies and the National Aboriginal Leaders’ Responses

There can be no doubt that the day of the apologies was a day for making parliamentary history. Sage was burned in the House of Commons, and drums were beaten in that solemn chamber. Jack Layton, the leader of the New Democratic Party (NDP) put a proposal to the Prime Minister at the last moment which allowed the national Aboriginal leaders to speak from the floor of the House of Commons.³

The Prime Minister recounted the legacy of the century-long assimilation policy that wrenched 150,000 Aboriginal children from their parents and forced them to live in so-called schools characterized by brutality, sexual abuse and unhealthy living conditions.

The Government of Canada sincerely apologizes and asks the forgiveness of the Aboriginal Peoples of this country for failing them so profoundly. We are sorry.

The Prime Minister repeated these words in Ojibwa, Cree, Inuktutuk and French. He went on to say

The government now recognizes that the consequences of the Indian residential schools policy were profoundly negative and that this policy had a lasting and damaging impact on Aboriginal culture, heritage and language.

While some former students have spoken positively about their experiences at residential schools, these stories are far overshadowed by tragic accounts of the emotional physical and sexual abuse and neglect of helpless children, and their separation from powerless families and communities.

Assembly of First Nations Chief Phil Fontaine, who personally suffered abuse at a residential school and was one of the first to go public about it years ago, said the apology marked “a new dawn” in race relations. “I reach out to all Canadians today in a spirit of reconciliation,” he declared provoking thunderous applause and pounding drums.

Inuit leader Mary Simon also said she believed “a new day has dawned.” Métis leader Clement Chartier told the survivors, M(Ps) and others in the packed galleries of the Commons that he considered the apology a sincere one, not just theatrics.⁴

Willie Blackwater, a 53-year old First Nations man who wept through much of the Prime Minister’s ten-minute speech said, “If I am able to forgive my perpetrator I can forgive Canada.” Blackwater was the lead plaintiff in two court cases that helped put a teacher in prison for eight years for having assaulted 31 boys In Blackwater’s case the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government was directly responsible for abuses at the church-run schools.⁵

Numerous other First Nations people who had listened to the Prime Minister from the galleries or from an overflow room or on a giant TV outdoors under the Peace Tower told reporters how important this event was to them. At the risk of summarizing many profoundly individual experiences, much of the importance described by First Nations and other Indigenous people was that the apologies established the reality of their own personal experiences.

This policy of assimilation was wrong, caused great harm and has no place in our country.”

On behalf of the government of Canada and all Canadians, I stand before you in this chamber so central to our life as a country to apologize to Aboriginal peoples for Canada’s role in the Indian Residential Schools system. We are sorry.

This is more than a repudiation of the policies that prevailed from Confederation, in 1867, until very recently. It is also a repudiation of the policies of the Reform Party (later renamed the Alliance Party), the western and larger precursor of the Conservative Party that presently forms the Government of Canada. Throughout the 1990s, when Liberal Governments concluded a number of modern land claims agreements, the Reform and later the Alliance Party fought tooth-and-nail against the bills ratifying these agreements. Admittedly there is a difference between land claims agreements and residential schools. However, one of the most often repeated refrains throughout the Nisga’a Agreement Ratification Bill debate (and debates on other similar bills) was the assertion, long after the Liberal Government had officially abandoned a policy of assimilation, that an earlier Liberal Government had “gotten it right” when, in 1969 they introduced a White Paper announcing a policy of renewed assimilation and denying that Aboriginal rights were any basis for negotiation.

At the apology, Ted Quewezance, a residential school alumnus and director o the National Residential School Survivors’ Society described the historic policies as “cultural genocide.”

Compensation and other Remedies

Kevin Rudd, the Prime Minister of Australia, made a similar apology in February 2008. The Australian apology did not include any financial compensation. The Canadian residential schools were modeled after the US-Indian industrial schools of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In Canada, each “residential school survivor” has been offered a cash settlement based on the time they attended a residential school plus claimed abuses. Political and popular support for an apology came about only after the courts established the legal liability of both the federal Canadian Government and the church administering each of the various schools.

In the U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback has been promoting a bill since 2004 providing for a limited apology. His bill was included as a provision in the Indian Health Care bill. Brownback said in a release, “While we cannot erase the past, this amendment hopefully helps heal the wounds that have divided America for so long. We can acknowledge our past failures, express sincere regrets and establish a righter future for all Americans.” Clearly, Sen. Brownback, like the Canadian political leaders contemplate these apologies as the start of a new era. This, in itself, justifies asking, as I will below, what evidence there may be of a reconsideration of current policies based on assimilationist premises.

Although the Government of Canada acceded to a program of healing and of compensation only when the courts found the Government responsible the payment of compensation has been a substantial expression of the harm done, at least to those who survived. Ironically, there appears to be no available means for compensating families whose children did not survive the “school” experience.

Likewise, the residential school experience is often credited by First Nations social service workers; with the difficulties many families have in providing adequate care for their children. Family breakdown, drugs and alcohol are so prevalent in some First Nations communities that more than half the children in care in some provinces are from First Nations communities. The argument relating this to the residential school experience is two-fold: (1) the generations of First Nations parents who were cut off from their own parents had no sound models on which to build parenting skills; and, (2) that the abuse suffered in residential schools has aggravated drug and alcohol abuse and has led survivors to pass the abuse they suffered on to their children and grandchildren.

Whether such losses can be remedied or compensated is not clear. Nonetheless, the contrition supposedly underlying the apologies would be incomplete if it did not attempt to address these questions.

The Media

The apologies should also have made the wrong-headedness of the policies that gave rise to the residential schools undeniable. As we will see below there remains amongst the media commentators who continue to deny either the reality of the experiences of First Nations people or to claim that the government and churches were acting for the good of their young charges. As the apologies become integrated into the Canadian national psyche these denials will come to be seen as the moral equivalent of Holocaust denial.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The Government has also named a panel of three persons, chaired by Justice Harry LaForme, the only Aboriginal person presently sitting on a Court of Appeal in Canada, to serve as a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” However, unlike its South African counterpart, it will not be able to offer amnesty in return for full disclosure. Its role is to hear evidence but not to assign blame or legal responsibility. So far as it will provide a large body of evidence, largely from the perspective of former students, it will make a significant contribution to the history of the residential schools. It will not, however, bring perpetrators to justice. Neither will it discuss current policies arising out of the same fundamental attitudes.

Non-Indigenous Canadian Responses

Three days before the parliamentary apologies an Ipsos-Reid poll conducted for Canwest News Service and Global Television found that two in three Canadians agree that “it’s about time that the government and Canadians come to terms with its past actions, and so issuing apologies for past transgressions and mistakes is appropriate.” John Wright, a senior vice-president at Ipsos-Reid, said that while the poll shows a high level of support for recognizing injustice through apology, it does not mean that apologies, in and of themselves, are enough.

Wright said an apology can “kick start” a process that, in the case of the residential school abuses, will involve the work of the truth and reconciliation commission. Whether the present popular disposition in favour of an apology will last through the five years of projected work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission remains to be seen. So also does it remain to be seen whether it will extend to an examination of currently repressive policies.

A survey conducted in the two days following the apologies by Innovative Research Group found that 83 per cent of those surveyed were aware of the apologies and that 71 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that the government should apologize, while only 18 per cent disagreed or strongly disagreed. About half of the respondents said that they were left with a more favourable view of the government while 13 per cent were left with a less favourable view.

Will the Expressions of Reconciliation be Reciprocated: The Meaning of an Apology from a Policy Perspective?

NDP Leader Jack Layton told the House of Commons:

"It’s a profound day, the survivors I have had a chance to speak to have been waiting for a long time for the country to acknowledge the wrongs that have been done and I am hopeful the apology will take responsibility for the totally unacceptable and racist policies of the past, but most important, it’s got to be a day when we make a commitment to real change."

Stephane Dion, the Leader of the Opposition said that:

"Today’s apology is about a past that should have been completely different. But it must also be about the future. It must be about reconciliation and fundamental change."

Reconciliation is a particularly large and complex idea in this context. The Supreme Court has spoken, in a series of decisions, about the need to reconcile the common law and Aboriginal law, as well as of the need for reconciliation between federal and provincial governments and Aboriginal communities and their governments.

The notion that Aboriginal communities have historically had their own governments, including their own bodies of law and legal thought, and that Canadian and Aboriginal governments need to be reconciled may not be part of the foundational thought of the two-thirds of Canadians who support an apology. Certainly, non-Aboriginal discussion does not commonly relate the residential school experience to this kind of conscious and knowledgeable reconciliation.

The very notion of reconciling legal systems – both courts and legislatures – requires that not only judges and lawyers but also parliamentarians become knowledgeable in the other’s legal system. Prof. Kent McNeil in a paper entitled “The Jurisdiction of Inherent Right Aboriginal Governments” discusses the concept of First Nations self-governments having powers parallel to and concurrent with federal and provincial governments in Canada.⁶

Far from being knowledgeable about the workings of First Nations governments, most constitutional scholars in Canada today could not likely tell you the name of the First Nation on whose traditional lands they lived or worked. The idea of reconciling legal systems conjures, at least in my mind, lawyers who are no less able to compare Anishinabek and Haudenausonee legal thought with Canadian and American practice, and to compare the recognition of various kinds of rights in different First Nations legal systems with federal and provincial Canadian systems.

Apology and the Metaphysics of Indian Hating

Perhaps it seems like a stretch from apologizing for the Indian Residential School experience to reconciliation of legal systems. The stretch is not as might appear at first blush. The first Canadian statute dealing with “Indians” was the pre-Confederation 1857 statute entitled ­An Act for the Gradual Civilization of the Indians. In 1876, when David Laird, then the Minister of the Interior, with responsibility for Indian Affairs, introduced the first Indian Act he devoted a large part of his speech to the idea of making “enfranchisement” attractive, and if it were not attractive to Indians, the government would make enfranchisement compulsory. The difference is that “enfranchisement” in an Indian context meant loss of membership in one’s Indigenous community, and a corresponding loss of land rights as well as hunting and fishing rights.

Residential schools grew out of the same root belief that the sooner Indians gave up being Indians the better off the country would be and, from the government’s point of view, the better off they would be. It was all part of a piece.

Nobody appears to doubt the sincerity either of Prime Minister Harper or the other three leaders who offered apologies. The question on which I wish to close this discussion is not Were they sincere? But What did they sincerely mean?

At the very least, a functional apology ought to lead to a good deal of humility and an end to the arrogance that led previous governments to claim that they could determine the best interests of Indian communities and Indian persons. Or the parliaments that passed acts declaring that “a person was someone other than an Indian.” Or the ­British Columbia Evidence Act that declared, as recently as 1960, that an “Indian was a person destitute of the knowledge of God” and requiring instruction in the meaning of truth.⁷

If the apologies are not followed by a sudden onset of humility, not only amongst ministers and MPs and Senators but also amongst the senior officials of the Indian Affairs Branch and the “old Indian hands” on the interdepartmental Committee of Senior Officials.

The Supreme Court of Canada, in its decisions interpreting section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, the section recognizing and affirming “the existing Aboriginal and treaty rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Canada” have set out a series of tests for justified infringements of these rights. The first test is that an infringement must serve a specific and identified public purpose. The second is that the infringement must be the least intrusive means for accomplishing that purpose. Thirdly, there must be fair compensation. (There is a substantial list of other tests that I will not explore here.)

A corollary of the least intrusive rule has been the requirement for consultation. “Consultation” to the Court, as to the Oxford English Dictionary requires the actual decision makers to give serious consideration to one another’s viewpoint. It is not hard to see how a relationship founded on consultation might progress to reconciliation.

So far the Government of Canada, and the governments of most of the provinces have steadfastly refused to take the injunctions for consultation seriously. If the fine words of the apology – the denunciation of assimilation and racism – mean a recognition of the humanity of First Nations people and their capacity for political and legal organization then consultation must follow hard on the heels of the apologies.

Just hours before the Prime Minister rose in the House to give his apology, a Conservative MP, Pierre Poilievre, the parliamentary secretary to the President of the Treasury Board went on a local Ottawa radio show to say that Canada’s aboriginals need to learn the value of hard work more than they need compensation for abuse suffered in residential schools. The Prime Minister demanded that Poilievre apologize the next day but he did not ask for his resignation as a parliamentary secretary.

It remains to be seen whether the present Conservative Party, dominated as it appears to be by former members of the Reform Allliance Party can abandon that party’s deep commitment to forced assimilation in favour of policies founded on humility, consultation and reconciliation.

For the past several years, Indian Affairs budgets have been capped at two per cent, i.e., any given budget is not to increase by more than two per cent over the previous year. Yet, each instance in which a band has taken over the administration of a program previously administered by federal civil servants has resulted in funding reductions coupled with a contractual requirement to meet provincial standards. This, of course, is a recipe for failure. No one else is asked to produce more results with decreasing amounts of money.

When First Nations schools were receiving about $3,200 per student, if the student attended school every day of the school year, the Indian Affairs Branch paid non-First Nations Catholic and public schools $4,500 tuition by the end of October for each student regardless of attendance. Needless to say, the non-First Nations schools were seen to offer greater resources and to retain good teachers longer than on-reserve schools.

Each and every program that has been transferred has been found to be skewed in a fashion similar to the education programs.

The Auditor General has said that First Nations governments are required to do far more reporting and accounting to the federal government than any municipal government or any other small agency. Yet, a few days after the apologies, the present Minister of Indian Affairs, Chuck Strahl declared that First Nations people have a right to full accounting. No doubt they do have such a right no less than everyone else. But Mr. Strahl’s declaration sounded very much like another Minister of Indian Affairs proposing to “rescue” First Nations communities from their own elected leadership.

What would we call these “Schools” in Another Setting?

A Vancouver Sun editorial ran under the headline “Apology to First Nations will be meaningless without atonement.” I don’t think Canadians have begun to ask what atonement might look like in this context. I do not mean to play with words when I challenge whether the creation referred to can properly be called an educational system. Or when I often put the word “school” in quotation marks in this context.

When I co-authored George Manuel’s autobiography, The Fourth World: An Indian Reality, he observed that at the school he attended the children often worked in the fields while the horses were free to play. The per student payments for room and board paid by the federal government to the churches were significantly less than those paid by the Ontario provincial government for a residential school for the deaf in the 1920s. The effects on a child’s desire for learning of corporal punishment for speaking one’s own language further raises the question of whether there ever was a serious expectation of learning attached to the government’s policies in regard to these schools.

What would we call an institution with a 46% mortality rate if the inmates were Jews or Roma, Communists or homosexuals How would we respond to a recidivist whose history of committing the same offences over and over again ran close to a century?

The Government and Parliament of Canada, in offering their apologies, have taken on the burden of demonstrating not only that their words were sincere but that the Government and each other party are prepared to translate their fine words into actions; and, that those will not be actions based on their own impulses but on genuine consultation and authentic efforts at reconciliation.

Government officials and parliamentarians will need to become functionally literate in First Nations history and geography. When they look at a map of Canada they will need to see not only the provinces and territories but also the traditional lands of the various First Nations.

I look forward to revisiting the Apologies of June 11, 2008 a year from now to see what, if any of these fine words still ring true.

End Notes

1. I am grateful to Rarihokwats and Four Arrows for the publication of seven “e-notes” including the original apologies and responses of the First Nations, Métis and Inuit leaders and the media reports, analyses and opinions from the following ten days. Copies of these and other e-notes can be obtained by writing to four_arrows@canada.com.

2. Much of the Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples can be found online at the web site of the Department of Indian Affairs and Northern Development of Canada. My references are taken from the CD-ROM version of the RCAP Report, Georges Erasmus and Associate Chief Justice René Dussault, Report of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, on Seven Generations: An Information Legacy of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, CD-ROM, Ottawa: Libraxus Inc., 1997.

3. Normally, when the House of Commons is in session only Members may speak. The procedural workaround suggested by Jack Layton was for the House to move into what is called “Committee of the Whole House,” i.e., the Speaker leaves the Speaker’s Chair and the Chair of the Committee of the Whole sits at the Table in the aisle between the Government and the Opposition. Committee of the Whole is much less formal and can invite witnesses and guest speakers.

4. This summary draws particularly on a report for Canwest News Service by Juliet O’Neill and Tobin Dalrymple.

5. Initially both the government and the hierarchies of the Catholic and Anglican (Episcopalian) churches had denied responsibility.

6. Kent McNeil, “The Jurisdiction of Inherent Right Aboriginal Governments” Research Paper for the National Centre for First Nations Governance, Oct. 11, 2007.

7. “Indian Testimony Receivable in Certain Cases”, ss. 12-14, Evidence Act, Chapter 143, Revised Statutes of British Columbia, 1960.