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

Catholic New Times, April 20, 2003 by Janet Somerville

So it was devastating for the national leadership when ACIP wrote on March 10: "In 1995, the General Synod of the Anglican Church of Canada accepted (our) extended hand and pledged to walk in partnership with us ... (towards) a truly Anglican Indigenous Church in Canada ... It is with heavy hearts that we declare that neither the content of the Settlement Agreement itself nor the process by which it has been negotiated reflects that covenant of partnership."

From ACIP's point of view, what's so wrong with the March 11 agreement?

Andrew Wesley, a lay pastor now working with Urban Native Ministries in inner-city Toronto, is co-chair of ACIP. His office is in the Council Fire building, a resource centre for indigenous people at Dundas and Parliament.

Signing away our birthright?

Interviewed by CNT a few days after the signing of the agreement, Andrew Wesley began with the problem of what the agreement does not cover. "Did they tell you about the release form claimants have to sign before they can get into this process? How they have to sign away any rights to sue for loss of language and culture, in order to get some compensation for physical and sexual abuse? We think signing that release is like signing away our birthright. It's like denying our rights to our own Aboriginal language and tradition."

Kenneth Young, Vice-Chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), brusquely agreed with Andrew Wesley in a telephone interview with CNT. "A release like that is unconscionable. Nobody should sign it," he said. "They took children away from parents and repressed our language and messed up our families ant our communities. That damage is still going on, down through the generations Who's going to sign away the right to be compensated for all that?"

The Government of Canada believes that it has already gone far in its "programmatic response" to the residential schools' aftermath. The first big step was the Canada-wide Healing Fund, announced in 1998 when the federal government finally made its response to the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples. More recently, in December 2002, Heritage Canada announced a new fund of $172 million over the next ten years, specifically fog initiatives to restore aboriginal languages and culture. The government insists that compensation for cultural loss should remain in the collective form of publicly funded programs like those two, and not at all in the form of litigation or individual cash awards.

The church has formally agreed with the government's position.

Nobody in the Anglican Church, however, is denying that awful damage was done by Canada's deliberate repression of languages and cultures through the residential schools.

"Sure the damage is real--I see it every day in our communities," says David Ashdown, bishop of the indigenous-majority Diocese of Keewatin. "We have people who are suffering, people who have committed suicide. The loss of parenting skills, from taking children away from a family setting for all those years, is tragic. But that doesn't mean that the solution is to take all that to a court. Breaking the cycle is what needs to happen, and that happens in communities when you walk the healing path together. As a diocese, we're committed to the healing path. It's our first priority. This agreement, imperfect as it is, allows us to keep walking together on that path."