Residential school stories hard for white ears to hear

“I’m reading it so I’ll be less racist,” I told my co-worker. As glib as this sounded, it was true.  

You may have read it, too. The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America by Thomas King is a good read for any white person. Not just because it’s humorous and informative, but because it won't leave you filled with white guilt.

If you’re like most white people, you might get your hackles up (don’t ask me what hackles are) when someone starts to preach to you about indigenous rights and white privilege. We tend to be thin skinned in this respect. Especially if it’s done from a podium, as I experienced a few years ago.

I tend to be on the open-minded spectrum of our society (again, that doesn’t make me non-racist) but even my hackles were raised when someone suggested that if I haven’t read the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action, then I’m more or less ignorant. 

The truth is, I haven’t read them. I’ve tried, but I’m still not through them all. This isn't a criticism of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings – it's about reading a government report.

 I actually feel it’s a grave mistake to start with the TRC’s 94 Calls to Action. To thin-skinned white people, they can come across as overly demanding. Any one of them on their own I can probably agree with, but it’s difficult to accept all 94 at once. 

What we lack is context. We can't accept a list of changes without understanding the history and stories that led us to this place. The stories from the TRC findings are horrifying and heart-wrenching, worthy of the same prominence as those of American slavery. Unfortunately, they're also found in a long report that most people won't read.

So here's a brief story: In 1951, an indigenous girl was taken from her parents at age seven to stay at a residential school in Prince Albert for six years straight. She was not allowed to go home for the summer or any other holidays – she may not have seen her parents at all during that time – because the school received federal funding for each day students were in attendance. It was a money-making venture at her expense.

Lillian Baptiste went on to have children of her own, but without being parented by her parents, not to mention the trauma of a school that tried to get the “dirty little Indian” out of them, she struggled, and her children were eventually taken away as part of the Sixties Scoop. She later demanded they be returned to her, only to be ignored by social services. 

Two of her children ended up in the U.S. The oldest boy, first sent to live as an unpaid labourer on a farm, ran away to a more welcoming home in Pennsylvania. His sister, the subject of an intriguing CBC podcast series, committed suicide as a teenager – in part because she was told she couldn’t return home to find her biological family. Her death was a mystery to her Saskatchewan family for decades. It required a herculean journalistic investigation before her story was shared. 

These are the stories we need to bring to the fore. Children being separated from their parents. Communities without kids. Residential school graveyards, many still unidentified.  

If this wasn’t cultural genocide, I’m not sure what is. Yet we even argue about that. 

Government can’t solve our racial divide with a report, although this commission was an important first step.  

As citizens – as treaty people – we're left to do the real work. One small step at a time.