Repentance and the residential schools: Canada's Anglicans stay the course

Catholic New Times, April 20, 2003 by Janet Somerville

The long-debated agreement was initialled in November 2002. Its main architect on the church side of things, the patient and persistent General Secretary, Archdeacon Jim Boyles, then had two months in which to win the agreement of all the dioceses of the Anglican Church of Canada.

In a triumph of solidarity over self-protectiveness, thirty out of thirty dioceses voted to accept the agreement. Each diocese, whether or not it ever had an Indian Residential School within its territory, committed itself to bearing a share proportional to its resources of the $25 million the church has to find.

It must have tasted like manna in the desert, that unanimous affirmation by all the dioceses after the decade-long labour of the General Synod's team.

Remember the Anglican apology of 1993? Archbishop Michael Peers, the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, famously risked legal hair-tearing, ecumenical unease, and outrage in various corners by offering his dramatic apology to indigenous people for Anglican participation in the Indian Residential School system. ("We failed you. We failed ourselves. We failed God ...") For ten years since then, the national leadership of the Anglican Church has preached a difficult, repentance-oriented and very Christian gospel which has challenged generations of British-empire-flavoured assumptions. The "yes" from the dioceses seems to mark an astonishing depth of reception of that difficult gospel within the church the Primate leads.

You'd think that the corridors of 600 Jarvis Street (the church's national office in Toronto) would be echoing with chants of Te Deum and sighs of exhausted relief.

Except that it isn't happening that way.

A covenant strained?

The day before the signing ceremony on March 11, representatives of the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples (ACIP) came to the Primate's office and urged him not to sign the agreement. Their press release, dated March 10, put their opposition to the deal in stark terms: "As the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples, we want to declare that on March 11, when the Settlement Agreement is signed ... by the Primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, he will not be doing so in our name ... Our responsibility now, as representatives of indigenous Anglicans from across the country, is to inform our people of the pitfalls of the Agreement and to warn them of the dangers of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Process."

The Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples is no mere focus group. It is a body taken very seriously by the national church, and entrusted with a leadership role in a movement the church has encouraged at least since 1994, when a "covenant" between indigenous Anglicans and the rest of the church was expressed (by Indigenous members) in this way: "Under the guidance of God's spirit we agree to do all we can to call our people into unity in a new, self-determining community within the Anglican Church of Canada."

For many years now, at least since Archbishop Ted Scott was Primate, an official (and felt) concern for a "renaissance" of aboriginal communities in Canada has been a visible dimension of Anglican national gatherings. Present at those meetings are priests, archdeacons, bishops, and lay delegates with Cree, or Nishga, or Inuit features and accents. Senior clergy often wear Native-designed copes or chasubles in liturgies. If you ask about the garment, chances are you will hear how a particular First Nation chose to honour persistent Anglican advocacy for their rights or traditions. In many ways, awareness of the need for a "new covenant" between the Canadian majority and the marginalized aboriginal minority has seemed central in the Anglican Church.