Sunday June 6, 2021

Something snapped inside me when I heard about 215 bodies, buried in mass graves, on the grounds of the former Kamloops Residential School.

            Thoughts of the mass graves in Nazi death camps, in Bosnia, in Rwanda, flooded my mind. The news ripped apart any veils of excuses or equivocations, revealing the residential school system as an atrocity. 

            I have to admit that in the past, although I considered the residential schools genocidal in intent, I have nevertheless not condemned them utterly and totally.

            That’s because I have known  many who served in those schools. Generally, they were dedicated, caring, self-sacrificing individuals. My church celebrated the commitment of its doctors, nurses, teachers, matrons.

            Granted, some of them held colonial attitudes towards their indigenous charges. But in the 1950s, who didn’t? 

            I failed to recognize that good people might work within a diabolical system. 

            I failed to distinguish the system from the individuals. 

The power of systems

            Systems are more than the sum of the individuals involved. Or less than. But certainly different than. I now think it is possible for an entire system to be evil, while every person working in it thinks they’re doing good.

            Systems develop lives of their own. 

            No matter how well-intentioned the original vision – which the residential school system was not – the system develops its own inertia.

            An exceptional circumstance here becomes the standard there. An experiment here becomes the norm there. One cover-up leads to more cover-ups. Until no individual – no matter how kindly or compassionate – can deflect the juggernaut. The system itself must be protected. Defended. Or else what would happen to the work we’ve devoted our lives to?

            The 215 bodies at the Kamloops school were discovered by a ground-penetrating radar. Basically, it fires an electronic impulse into the ground, and “sees” what reflects back – rocks, roots, garbage…

            And bodies.

            None of those bodies have been exhumed and identified, yet.

            I haven’t seen the radar scan. I have to assume that it is detailed enough to ensure that these are, in fact, human bodies.

Disposal practice

            There are no records of those deaths. No grave markers. No letters to the children’s parents. I can’t tell, from news coverage, whether all the bodies were dumped into a single mass grave, or into several sites over the years (the second option now seems more likely). 

            But if there are, in fact, 215 bodies there, it seems clear to me that these burials were an accepted practice. They were taken for granted. 

            That many bodies requires – nay, demands -- institutional complicity. 

            The school did not notify its parent church, which provided its staff. It did not notify the government, which paid its bills. It did not notify the children’s parents, who waited for their children to come home.

            It kept 215 deaths secret.

            Official records list only about 50 children’s deaths during the school’s operation, less than one a year. It started in 1890 as an industrial training centre, and was turned into a residential school three years later. At one time it was the largest residential school in Canada, incarcerating 500 indigenous children at a time. The description is apt -- the architect designed the building using prisons as his model.

            And almost half of that population could be shovelled into the ground, and everyone kept quiet about it?

            There are no excuses for such behaviour. 

            A system that could bury 215 children, without blinking an eye, has to be utterly evil.

Who to blame?

            The residential schools were staffed by Canadian churches: Anglican, Roman Catholic, Methodist and Presbyterian, the last two merging into United Church operation after 1925.

            The Kamloops Residential School was run by the Roman Catholic order Oblates of Mary Immaculate. I refuse to blame Catholics as Catholics. Their church’s teachings do not make Catholics any less moral or more prone to abuse than anyone else. The Roman Catholic Church just happens to be a bigger target than, say, Red Green’s Possum Lodge.

            No, the residential school scandal is not about “them,” whoever they are. It’s about us. 

            For 100 years, we were intentionally deaf and blind to the essential evil of the system itself. Indeed, we supported it. We recruited people to work in it. We made heroes and heroines of them. 

            We had people among us, both white and native, who told us about the conditions they had experienced in person. They wrote letters to the government and to their parent churches. 

            We didn’t believe them. We didn’t WANT to believe them. 

            The system was wrong. And we were wrong to support it. 

            We – the nation that likes to think of itself as kind, gentle, and devoted to good order – created a monster. It’s time we drove a stake through its heart. 

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Copyright © 2021 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all other rights reserved.

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SOMETHING EXTRA

I woke about a week after the announcement of the finding of 215 bodies buried at the Kamloops Residential School. A line kept pounding in my head: “We are the Dead… We are the Dead…” It seemed to demand expansion. 

            And then I realized where I had heard that line -- In Flanders Fields, the poem written by John McCrae during the First World War, in 1915,.

            I found that by substituting a few details, his poem still resonated. So, with apologies to Lt.-Col. John McRae, here is a revised version

In empty fields the grasses grow;

We have no crosses row on row.

Naught marks the spaces where we lie, 

Our witness silenced.  We must die

To shield the secret of our schools. 

We are the Dead. Our lives were brief:

Born, loved, abducted, endless grief, 

Sacrificed to seal the lie

Of residential schools.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If you break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though grasses grow

‘Round residential schools.

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YOUR TURN

I’m sorry, I can’t include all your letters of sympathy about my daughter Sharon testing positive for COVID-19. I do thank you, all of you. 

            Sharon was quite sick for a week. Not bad enough to put her into ICU, but enough to require two trips to the Vernon Emergency department. She is getting better now, but recovery will take time. One of her children, my granddaughter Katherine, caught a mild case of COVID; my grandson Stephen tested negative, but of course had to be quarantined anyway. 

            I have had no symptoms at all, and get my second vaccination on Monday! Yaaaaay!

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TECHNICAL STUFF

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PROMOTION STUFF…

To use the links in this section, you’ll have to insert the necessary symbols. (This is to circumvent filters that think some of these links are spam.)

            Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” is an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with free consultation. http://wwwDOTchurchwebcanadaDOTca. He set up my webpage, and he doesn’t charge enough.

            I recommend Isabel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, wwwDOTtraditionaliconoclastDOTcom. She also runs beautiful pictures. Her Thanksgiving presentation on the old hymn, For the Beauty of the Earth, Is, well, beautiful -- https://www.traditionaliconoclast.com/2019/10/13/for/

            Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” -- ruminations on various subjects, and feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at tomwatsoATgmailDOTcom (NB that’s “watso” not “watson”)

ALVA WOOD ARCHIVE

            The late Alva Wood’s collection of satiric and sometimes wildly funny columns about a mythical village’s misadventures now have an archive (don’t ask how this happened) on my website: http://quixotic.ca/Alva-Wood-Archive. Feel free to browse all 550 columns