While chairing the legislature’s standing committee on health recently, Linda Larson, MLA for Boundary-Similkameen, posed questions that the opposition criticized as insensitive and callous.
“How long do you think before the legacy of those residential schools finally burns itself out of the First Nations people?” she asked a presenter.
The speaker responded that “as long as our people feel uncomfortable with the [health care] system, as long as they feel that institutions are not friendly to them, then I think the legacy will not find its way out of the system.”
While Larson acknowledged that “the residential schools were horrific,” she focused again on a timeline for reconciliation: “How many generations is it going to take before the words ‘residential schools’ no longer play a part in how people feel?”
In British Columbia, most residential schools operated from the late 19th century on, with some closing as recently as the early 1980s. On Vancouver Island, there were the Ahousaht and Christie schools on the west coast, and, mid-Island, the Alberni school. The school on Penelakut Island was depicted in filmmaker Christine Welsh’s important documentary Kuper Island: Return to the Healing Circle. Demolished in 1985 after existing as a community torment for nearly a century, it remains a site of haunting memories for survivors and their descendants.
Within and near Larson’s riding, too, there were residential schools, and survivors have been vocal about the impact on their health, families, communities and languages, all of which were under prolonged assault for most of the history of what is now British Columbia.
A few weeks ago, I was at the Pathways to Reconciliation conference in Winnipeg, co-sponsored by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to mark the one-year anniversary of the end of the TRC’s work. A special presentation at the Canadian Human Rights Museum honoured the Alberni school survivors for their incredible courage in persevering with a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, establishing the joint liability of the federal government that funded the schools as an exercise in cultural genocide and the church denominations that ran them to Christianize indigenous children.
Our closing conference exercise envisioned steps to implement this year, in the next five years and over the next 50 years. We all had a sense of urgency about creating a different relationship between Canada’s indigenous and non-indigenous peoples, a principled way of living together that non-indigenous people have repeatedly betrayed since our arrival in North America.
It will be slow work, our timeline showed, because the damage was created over such a long period, and so comprehensively.
A rush to reconciliation — an impulse to ask when people will overcome the multiple generations of trauma and cultural losses — is not appropriate, but Larson’s questions offer us a crucial opportunity for education about the scope and pace of “reconciliation”: tangible gestures that demonstrate our deep remorse and commitment to a new way of living together.
Heidi Tiedemann Darroch teaches first-year English at the University of Victoria and researches reconciliation and historical trauma in relation to teaching.
