Almost seven years ago, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Canada’s First Nations for the abuses they suffered under the residential school system.
Harper’s apology sounded pretty good at the time, spelling out in plain language the nature of the abuses, including the overriding aim of destroying the country’s indigenous languages and cultures. However, when it came to compensating individuals, some of the survivors were deemed unworthy, as they were abused at school only by day. In Harper’s world, apparently real abuse requires a sleepover.
Which is why next week Sechelt (shíshálh) and Kamloops (Tk’emlups) First Nations will be in federal court in Vancouver in an attempt to certify a class action lawsuit against the federal government on behalf of their surviving day scholars.
The two bands are fighting for the rights of about 300 former students, one-third of them from Sechelt, to have their “burden of experience,” as Harper called it, belatedly recognized.
Lead plaintiff for Sechelt, councillor and hereditary chief Garry Feschuk (?ákístá), quoted a key section of Harper’s apology in an interview this week, and every word in that section applied to the day scholars.
Parents were forced under threat of imprisonment to send their children into a daily environment where physical, sexual and mental abuse occurred and became generational, and where any display of their language or culture was terminated with extreme prejudice.
“It was atrocious what happened,” Feschuk said. “Even my grandmother, she only knew her language when she went to the school, and she had needles stuck into her tongue for speaking the language. My aunt, I can’t even sit with my aunt when she goes through her stories.”
The validity of the day scholar case is really inarguable, but that hasn’t stopped the government’s lawyers from arguing that the abuse was not as bad as what resident students went through, or denying that many of the abuses even happened.
And remember, this was a people who had been almost wiped out by disease, who had reached out to the Oblate missionaries, and this is what they got.
Yet the fact that they reached out has also been used against them in court.
It’s truly shameful.
For the former students, the final insult was to receive, decades later, a “full apology” from the prime minister, only to be told that it really wasn’t about them, or their families, or their language, or their culture. The childhoods stolen from them didn’t count.
Harper’s apology was made on behalf of Canadians, and at the time I thought it was the honourable thing to do and I was glad. Today, when I see the government trying to chisel the Sechelt and Kamloops survivors out of their meagre settlements, I feel the opposite. There is no honour in the government’s position.
I really do hope the First Nations kick Canada’s butt on this one.
