I remember the day that Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for Canada’s role in operating the Indian Residential School System. The sky was overcast and ready to cry and the trees were leaning in.
We were on
our way to Sundance and were now parked on the gravel shoulder of highway
number 6 listening to his speech live on the car radio in the middle of
Manitoba’s boreal forest.
I am
travelling with a Residential School Survivor who isn’t much older than I am. I
didn’t know that. Not until I returned
home to Grand Rapids and started working with Survivors at the Misipawistik
Wechetowin Healing Program. I didn’t know that it happened to people in my
generation.
I can tell
you that my travel companion was tough and did not like Stephen Harper. It
seemed that not many Indigenous peoples were fans of Stephen Harper and his
Conservative Government.
Nevertheless,
here we sat on the side of the highway one hundred kilometres from where we
were coming from and over 400 kilometres from where we were going waiting to
hear him speak. We rolled down the windows and smoked. I didn’t smoke much until
I started working with Survivors but I was smoking a lot then, sometimes you
needed a smoke to talk, sometimes you needed one to listen.
There were
few other vehicles on the highway that morning somewhere near Devil’s Lake where
the bush is thick and the only thing on the radio is CBC. The grey sky lowed
and hugged the tops of the tamarack and pine.
The silence
lifted that lone voice in the wilderness up to the sky with the smoke of our
tobacco. It was clear that no matter what we had thought of this man the
sincerity in his voice and his apology that morning was true. When his voice
broke, my tough friend whispered, “he’s going to cry”.
It mattered
and I will never forget that day. It is one of my “Do you remember where you
were when you heard?” moments. In the days and years since people and history
will say whatever and parse words but I remember where I was and what I felt
when I heard Prime Minister Stephen Harper Apologize in the House of Commons to
the Survivors of the Indian Residential Schools System.
It should
be regarded as one of the high points in Canadian Indigenous reconciliation,
but it isn’t and it is this bizzarro world called Canada in which the
Conservative government’s Indigenous record is ignored or forgotten.
It is
though the Conservatives can only be judged on John A. McDonald’s record
despite the fact that Liberals have been running the country for the majority
of its modern history and bear the responsibility for maintaining the Indian
Residential School System during their time in power.
Taking a
historical analysis of post war Canada shows that a Conservative government has
been good for Indigenous rights and reconciliation.
The
Conservatives did not get into power after World War II until 1957 after 22
years of Liberal rule. In 1960, Prime Minister John Diefenbaker granted First
Nations the right to vote. Until then a First Nations person would have to
enfranchise or give up their Indigenous Rights in order to vote. Diefenbaker’s
defense of equality for Indigenous Peoples was something he expressed as a
young lawyer defending First Nations and Metis people back home in Saskatchewan.
His actions noted in the groundbreaking autobiography Halfbreed by Metis author
Maria Campbell. “He would represent anyone rich or poor, red or white. If they
had a case and no money he would help,” wrote Campbell about Diefenbaker
adding. “He helped us and the important thing was he did so when no one else
would.”
Nine years
later in 1969, Pierre Elliot Trudeau and the Liberals ruling with a majority
government tried a bureaucratic Genocide called the White Paper that would have
enfranchised all First Nations people with a stroke of a pen.
The Conservatives
would not have a chance to form a truly ruling government for decades, ignoring
the brief and impotent reign of Joe Clark. Brian Mulroney brought them back into majority
rule and in 1991 Mulroney’s government launched the Royal Commission on
Aboriginal Peoples with a goal to a take an exhaustive and critical look at the
relationship between Canada and Indigenous Peoples. The RCAP report is a
defining document in Canada and serves as academic and legal foundation
throughout the country and around the world.
In 1985, Mulroney's government passed Bill C-31 which would remove the gender bias in the Indian Act which removed First Nations status from any woman who married a non-First Nations man. This could be an Indigenous man included Metis, Inuit or a First Nations Man who had already lost his status. It was one of the most heinous means of bureaucratic genocide and it was upheld for almost a century before a majority Conservative government changed the law.
In one of Mulroney’s
last official Acts he signed the Nunuvut Land Agreement on May 25, 1993
creating the largest Indigenous controlled territory in North America. The
Nunuvut Territory would become official under a Liberal government but this was
when it was made. It is a day, I would imagine, that some Inuit remember “where
they were the day that they heard”.
On June 12,
2008, it was a Conservative Prime Minister who gave me the grandchild of a
Residential survivor and a Survivor a moment of healing and reconciliation. It
was that same Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper who 10 days earlier on
June 2, 2008 launched the Truth and Reconciliation Commission an act that to
this day defines who we are as a country.
I am not
going to defend all the actions or policies of the past Conservative Governments
but I do think it is important to look at these facts in their real time and
historical context. The belief that a Conservative government is always bad for
Indigenous rights and reconciliation is not accurate.
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