The Inconvenient Indian (15 page)

I have no quarrel with this basic premise, that the retention of our identities is up to us. Still, it is a strikingly disingenuous argument in that the report makes little mention of the myriad of ways in which Canadian Indian policy has
discouraged
Indians from pursuing traditional goals and aspirations and continues to push us up the cattle chute of capitalism.

But let’s put the philosophical sophistries to one side for the moment. While the report was awash in generous language and fine recommendations, it was also narrowly focused on the economics of being Indian and the problems that bands and individuals have in measuring up to the expectations of Canadian capitalism. The per capita income of Indians in the 1960s, for example, was only $300, less than a quarter of the per capita income of non-Indians, while the average duration of employment for Native
people was 4.8 months. Of the Sarcee and the Blood in Alberta, the report notes that while these bands have “ownership and access to a wealth of resources, as well as a metropolitan centre which offers manifold job opportunities,” they fail “to utilize these assets fully.” For “northern Indians … any substantial improvement in the employment and income prospects … will be possible only with a large-scale migration to, and relocation in, areas offering opportunities for remunerative wage employment.” Indians, the report laments, are not accustomed to jobs that “require regular hours, punctuality, and a highly mechanized routine of work.” At every turn, the report posits White goals and standards as the measure against which Native people are to be measured and, in each instance, Indians are found wanting.

There were a host of recommendations that the Hawthorn Report put forth to try to close the gap between Native people and non-Natives. Many of them were reasonable, but what the report highlighted was that, in terms of economic development and economic sustainability, Canadian Indian policy had been a failure.

More to the point, the report revealed the logical fallacy that has haunted Indian history and policy in North America since contact—to wit, that all people yearn for the individual freedom to pursue economic goals. Indians are people, ergo, they want to make money and create wealth for themselves and their families.

In the 1950s and ’60s, Helen’s father, Bernard Hoy, my father-in-law, was an inspector for the Catholic Separate School Board in the Sudbury region. One of his duties was to look in on Catholic residential schools in northern Ontario. His memories of the schools were neither as damning as the Meriam Report nor as detailed as the Hawthorn Report. What he remembered were Native students
who spent their classroom time in their seats looking out the window. “They didn’t belong there,” Bernard told his daughter.

He was right. But if they didn’t belong there, where did they belong? Instead of trying to kill the Indian to save the child, North America might have gone into partnership with the various nations, and, together, they could have come up with an education plan that would have complemented Native cultures and, perhaps, even enriched White culture at the same time.

Just a thought.

Here’s the irony. Native people have never been resistant to education. We had been educating our children long before Europeans showed up. Nor were we against our children learning about White culture. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Natives and Whites had been living together in the same neighbourhood for almost three hundred years. Like it or not. It made sense for Native people to know English and/or French. It made sense to understand how the European mind worked.

Education is generally described in terms of “benefits.” But why, in the name of education, should we have been required to give up everything we had, to give up who we were in order to become something we did not choose to be? Where was the benefit in that?

Instead, North America decided that Native education had to be narrowly focused on White values, decided that Native values, ceremonies, and languages were inferior and had no value or place in a contemporary curriculum. This was the first abuse of the residential school system.

The second abuse was the unwillingness and inability of the governments of Canada and the United States, and the governing bodies of the various churches, to oversee the schools under their control.

The third abuse, once officials knew that health conditions and services were substandard, once they knew that disease was rampant, once they knew malnutrition was a problem, once they knew for certain that the children under their protection were being physically, mentally, and sexually abused, was their failure to act. They did nothing.

They knew, and they did nothing.

Richard Pratt was wrong. As it turned out, if you killed the Indian, you killed the Indian. A great many intelligent and compassionate people have called residential schools a national tragedy. And they were. But perhaps “tragedy” is the wrong term. It suggests that the consequences of residential schools were unintended and undesired, a difficult argument to make since, as Ward Churchill points out, the schools were national policy.

No one knows for sure how many Native children wound up at residential schools in the United States. Canada reckons their own numbers at about 150,000, so the tally for America would have been considerably higher. But for the children who did find themselves there, the schools were, in all ways, a death trap. Children were stripped of their cultures and their languages. Up to 50 percent of them lost their lives to disease, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse—50 percent. One in two. If residential schools had been a virulent disease, they would have been in the same category as smallpox and Ebola. By contrast, the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed millions worldwide, had a mortality rate of only 10 to 20 percent.

But for the sake of argument, let’s say that the mortality rate was only 20 percent, one in five. And let’s turn things around and ask a somewhat different question. What would have happened if the residential schools had been public schools instead? Schools in
Toronto, San Francisco, Vancouver, New York. What would have happened if the children who were dying were White? What would have happened if one of them had been your child?

Sure. It’s a rhetorical question.

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the new millennium saw a rash of apologies from churches and governments. In 1986, the United Church of Canada formally apologized to Native people for the treatment Native children received at their schools. In 1991, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate offered their apology. In 1993, it was the Anglican Church’s turn, and in 1994, the Presbyterian Church followed suit.

In 1988, then Minister of Indian Affairs Jane Stewart offered the first apology from the Canadian government. Twenty-one years later, in 2009, Pope Benedict XVI expressed “sorrow” to Assembly of First Nations delegates for the “deplorable” treatment of Aboriginal students at Catholic-run residential schools. But this was not an apology, nor was it a statement of responsibility. It was nothing more than a sympathetic lament.

Some of you might suppose that the Pope, who is also the CEO of one of the world’s more profitable corporations with assets around the world, was worried that a formal apology might have been seen as an admission of guilt and would make the Catholic Church liable for damages, but that is not the case. While Protestant sects have national churches, Catholics do not. There is no National Catholic Church of Canada. There are simply franchises—dioceses, religious orders, and institutions—that are legally separate and legally protected from each other’s liability. Even though the Vatican is in charge of all Catholic activity in the world, there is no way to hold the folks in Rome legally responsible for the
abuses that happened at a residential school in the wilds of Canada, even if the Church knew about it, even if they did nothing to stop it, even if they condoned it as part of the process of assimilation.

Finally, in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper stood up in the House of Commons and said that “assimilation was wrong, has caused great harm and has no place in our country.” And then the Prime Minister of Canada said, “We are sorry.” He said it in the House of Commons with Native people in attendance. And it was broadcast on national television.

I was in Ottawa the day before the apology was given. Native people and Native leaders from all over the country came to town to hear what the government had to say. Many of the people I talked to had been waiting a very long time to hear those words.

We are sorry.

The United States, on the other hand, has offered no such apology, though in December of 2009 the U.S. Congress did pass an official apology resolution, which President Barack Obama signed into law. But, aside from signing it, President Obama has done nothing else with it. I would have expected that, by now, his staff would have organized a public ceremony, that the White House would have invited Native people to come to Washington to hear the apology. Maybe Obama is waiting for the Pope to clear his schedule, so the two of them can apologize at the same time.

The Canadian apology, while heartfelt, was, in many ways, a stingy thing, limited only to the abuse that Native people had endured in the residential school system. There was nothing in the apology about treaty violations. Nothing about the theft of land and resources. Nothing about government incompetence,
indifference, and chicanery. Nothing about the institutional racism that Aboriginal people have endured and continue to endure.

The American apology, by contrast, was a blanket apology that did not limit itself to residential schools or shrink from specifics. The Removal Act, the Trail of Tears, the Sand Creek massacre, Wounded Knee, the General Allotment Act, the theft of Indian land, and the mismanagement of tribal funds were all spelled out in the joint resolution.

“The United States, acting through Congress … acknowledges years of official depredations, ill-conceived policies, and the breaking of covenants by the United States Government regarding Indian tribes” and “apologizes on behalf of the people of the United States to all Native Peoples for the many instances of violence, maltreatment, and neglect inflicted on Native Peoples by the citizens of the United States.”

As apologies to Native people go, the American one is impressive. Mind you, it was an amendment buried in the bulk of the 2010 Defense Appropriations Act, so many people might have missed it in the hustle and bustle of their daily lives. The best part, at least to my twisted way of thinking, is the disclaimer tagged on at the end of the resolution, which says, “Nothing in this Joint Resolution authorizes any claim against the United States or serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States.”

The North American legal wiggle. Guilty but not liable.

This is not very charitable on my part. Neither country was under any obligation to apologize to Native people, and yet, they did. Given the good opinion that Canada and the United States have of themselves and their reputation in the world, these apologies must have been difficult, and a more generous person would credit the effort.

So, thank you. I really mean it. My only concern—and I hate to bring it up and spoil the moment—is that I’m not sure that the apologies that Canada and the United States gave to Native people in North America were entirely sincere.

Certainly they were heartfelt. The Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper, was clearly moved when he gave the government’s apology, and I’m sure that President Obama was pleased to have signed the joint resolution. More importantly, there were a great many Native people who appreciated the apologies, whose lives were vindicated by these public gestures of regret and contrition.

And yet I can’t help but feel that there was something disingenuous in these gestures. Perhaps it was Canada’s unwillingness to consider the
whole
of its history with Native people. Perhaps it was that moment, less than three months after Harper offered Canada’s apology, when he stood up at the G20 Summit in Philadelphia and announced to the world that, as Canadians, “We have no history of colonialism.”

Hello.

Perhaps it was America’s rather belligerent disclaimer of any legal liability. Or perhaps it was simply the continued framing of North America’s deplorable behaviour as little more than a no-fault fender-bender.

A tense moment in the parking lot at the mall.

In real life, we expect apologies to be accompanied by a firm purpose of amendment. I’m sorry. It was my fault. I won’t do that again. But in the political world, apologies seem to have little to do with responsibility, and it appears that one can say “I’m sorry,” and “I’m not responsible,” in the same breath. I mention this because, despite the apology, North America’s paternalistic
intervention in the lives of Native people continues unrepentant and unabated.

But, of course, there’s a perfectly good reason for this intervention. Native people can’t look after ourselves. We don’t have the capacity to manage our own affairs. We don’t know what’s good for us. We haven’t the level of sophistication to understand the workings of the contemporary world and to participate in a modern economy.

You’ve probably heard these concerns. I know I have. I’ve been told any number of times that we have to learn to stand on our own two feet and develop the skills necessary to manage on our own, without relying on government generosities.

In the same way that Air Canada, AIG, Bombardier, Halliburton, General Motors, and the good folks out in Alberta’s Tar Sands Project manage on their own, without relying on government handouts.

I suppose I could have mentioned Enron, World Com, Bre-X, and Bear Stearns as well, but these disasters were more greed than incompetence. Weren’t they? Though I suppose the one does not preclude the other.

So, if I’ve got it right, while North America is reluctant to support the economic “incompetence” of Native people, it is more than willing to throw money at the incompetence of corporations. And why not? After all, if we’ve learned nothing in the last century, we should have learned that government support of big business is capitalism’s only hope.