Seeking That Elusive Truth

Someone, somewhere, somehow, will always feel aggrieved over a memory. Everyone, at some time or another in a life has an experience that is seen to be traumatic, one that has in some way changed their lives. Sometimes a memory is recalled and a singular hurt or irritation assumes proportions beyond the actual occurrence.

Sometimes that memory is allowed to fester, to grow into something it wasn't quite. And sometimes real damage will have been done to tender sensibilities, damage bordering on the criminal, in circumstances beyond the victim's control.

There are private schools, public schools, finishing schools, residential schools. In Great Britain it has been common practise for generations upon generations for well-heeled, and aristocratic families to send young children to what they term "public" schools, but which are, in reality, extremely expensive private schools.

Many of those children, young boys, sent to live elsewhere than in the warmth of their family home from the age of seven and up, experienced true misery.

Their instructors were merciless in their expectations, and discipline was the order of the day, every day. Punishment was never withheld for infractions, and often went beyond reason in physical cruelty. Nor were many of these young boys sheltered from being used and abused as sex objects.

Without doubt many of these youngsters grew into twisted and bitter adults, but many more managed somehow, through their inner strength to endure.

Young girls too were often sent away to other types of boarding schools, meant to "finish" their social graces, to teach them the roles of their prescribed futures as intelligent and capable, and resourceful and socially adept young women. Their teachers were often nuns, and the girls often suffered the strictures of discipline and unkindness of spirit that bitter older women can mete out to fresh and lissome youth.

There were special boarding schools, like those for the young who could not hear; schools for the "deaf and dumb", to teach them coping skills, so that they could go into the wider world prepared to take their rightful place there. These young boys and girls pined for their homes, all that was familiar to them; living in dormitories, learning in regimented classes, and eating in sensitively discordant dining halls.

And then there were the residential schools set up by well-meaning people of the church, in tandem with the government of Canada, to educate and look to the future social welfare of young aboriginal children. Sometimes aboriginal parents willingly brought their children to these schools with the understanding they would be taught life skills that would stand them in good stead for the future.

More often, aboriginal parents were informed they had little choice; they were expected to give up their young children to be fostered in the white man's education system, for their own good, the better to prepare them to take their place in the white man's society. It could not have been anything but difficult for these children - as it has always been for children anywhere - to leave the comfort of their homes and feel emotionally distraught as a result.

To put these matters into some kind of perspective, it's well to remember that society is always engaged in elevating opportunities for its children, and engaged also in protecting them from situations deleterious to their character formation and physical safety. It's why we have welfare agencies that look after those children whose situations are so dire with their families that for their safety they are removed and placed in foster homes.

These children too are in great distress. The parents, however neglectful and even abusive, are the only parents they know, to whom they cling, and from whom they have no wish to be separated. We know that often enough these children whose lives have been so dreadfully disrupted suffer further damage because the foster families - even on occasion, in return to their own families - continue the damaging process.

Children whose parents have introduced them to religion and who have taught them that religion is the foundation of their lives, are sometimes - sadly enough, too often, as fairly recent revelations in the Roman Catholic Church in particular have taught us - sexually abused by those in whom they and their parents have placed the ultimate trust. This abuse of the most vulnerable in any society is one of the darkest bruises on human society.

The Government of Canada, in its great good wisdom and prevailing guilt over the long-standing and seemingly insolvable problem of aboriginal Canadian living conditions, has accepted the claims of First Nations that their children were deliberately taken from them over a period of generations for the purpose of expunging their native inheritance from their memories and transforming them into "white" children.

In the process damaging the children and creating an existential confusion and irremediable harm to the future of First Nations. The mass trauma these children suffered, denied their heritage, forced to learn the white man's ways, is responsible for the latter-day situation where aboriginal peoples remain government-dependent, tribal entities, and pitifully dysfunctional as independent and proud people; above all, as responsible parents.

The fact that aboriginal children are given no lasting values through their communities, that their physical and emotional needs are neglected, along with their educational needs, that they are sexually abused, is a result of residential schools having had such a negative effect on their parents that they're unable to function. They turn instead to the comforts of alcohol and drug addiction, and the children are left to fend for themselves.

Which explains the high suicide rates among children, the high rate of child addiction to alcohol and drugs, the school drop-out rates. Because, charge the erstwhile residents of these schools, they were themselves so dreadfully abused there. These charges are nothing less than amazing to many of the teachers who were present at those schools, who took pride in their place there, and who fondly believed they were doing something worthwhile for these children.

At the schools children's nutritional needs were looked after, their medical and dental needs which had been previously overlooked in the traditional aboriginal communities. The children were taught basic subjects much like children in schools anywhere else. But there they were also taught practical life skills as well. Yes, a strict discipline was maintained, but the teachers also recall special relationships with the children they taught with affection and care.

The brutality of corporal punishment that so many aboriginals point out was part of their education, was common enough in any public school anywhere in Canada. Where undisciplined and badly-behaved students - mostly boys - would be sent to the principal's office, and where they could expect to be punished by the "strap". Knowledge of this punishment was sufficient to ensure that most students sought the straight and narrow path.

There are many from among the aboriginal community who profess that the life skills they learned in the residential schools they attended prepared them to live in a functional way that has served them well over the succeeding years. Some considered their schools to have been normal ones, in the sense that they term them to have been "private Anglican schools". As in any school setting there are those who teach well and humanely and those who do not.

Now, in our politically correct environment that distinguishes present-day Canada, the public and the government is prepared to wail "mea culpa", guilty as charged. We perpetrated a social desecration on helpless people and their offspring. Yet these children were taught to read and to write and to calculate. They were taught democratic principles and common law. Some of their teachers were even aboriginal who would speak to the children in their native languages.

At these residential schools for aboriginal children there were often present other children, as well. Children whose parents worked in the far north, for example, and for whom there would be no other school experience than that they shared at the residential schools. Children of merchants, missionaries and hunters and trappers. They too found themselves in a situation of being confronted by people who were eager to be of assistance, to teach and to comfort.

Those teachers felt they were doing something truly worth the effort. And for little personal comfort, including a meagre salary. The working hours were long and the responsibilities were truly onerous. Those teachers have now been smeared, their efforts cruelly denigrated, the history of their personal sacrifices, their personal attendance on these children, critically besmirched.

Yet some of the teachers have never lost touch with the children they taught. There is no doubt that some aboriginal children were abused in the residential school system. There is no doubt that some children of wealthy Torontonians and Montrealers were sexually abused by predators posing as teachers as they attended prestigious private schools in both those cities, for example. Those schools have faced law suits and have settled in private where they could.

The cult and culture of victimhood and aggrievement remains front and centre in Canada's First Nations communities. The truth is they have much to be aggrieved about. But they have also much to be accountable for, themselves. Foremost among the accountabilities is that they have been satisfied to fester as society's dependents, incapable of bettering their situations. Which is not to deny that government too has been horribly lax in settling land claims.

What, in the end, will the $60-million residential school Truth and Reconciliation Commission accomplish? It will hear witnesses, it will weigh the "evidence" of failure, but the failures should be mutually apportioned. It's long past time for Canada's First Nations to commit themselves to pulling themselves together. If not for their own good, then for the good of their children's futures.

Doesn't it tell us something that in the last decade there has been a 47% increase in the aboriginal population, as opposed to a 8% increase in the general population? There's a steadily growing aboriginal child demographic that needs attention to ensure they have more than adequate provisions for a decent home life, their medical needs seen to, their education assured.

We're long past the era of residential schools where some 60,000 aboriginal youngsters were taught to become members of society. Tribal affiliation and pride is all very well and good, but collective backwoods lifestyles haven't done much other than spread impoverishment and third-world living conditions. And dire dysfunctional parenting; severe neglect of children's emotional, physical and practical needs.

These children require encouragement, social support, physical closeness to caring adults. They need to know that much depends upon their own ability to pursue a decent future for themselves, to feel self-assured as Canadians of aboriginal descent that their well being is a concern of all Canadians.

Time to stop the blame game and become serious about the future.