Politics and Press

An apology that might mean something

My brother Doug and I are suspicious of official apologies by governments who are convinced by election polls that they might win some ethnic votes if they recall how miserably a specific ethnic group was treated a century ago. But this week the Canadian government made an official apology that might actually have been meant and which might have a meaningul impact. Prime Minister Stephen Harper read off an unambiguous apology to the assembled First Nations Chiefs in the House of Parliament regarding the way native peoples have been treated since Canada existed and in particular with regard to what happened during the lengthy period when residential schools were used to “take the Indian out of the Indians” as Harper put it. Children were removed from their families and their homes and transported to remote live-in schools where they were punished for using their native languiage, taught the ways of the white man and untaught the ways of their parents. Even worse, if that can be imagined, is that these children in far too many cases, were also sexually exploited by the people who were supposed to be teaching them.

It was a miserable cultural performance of the highest order, and its abject failure can still be felt a generation after the last residential school was closed. Not only have many of the former students never really recoverd from their ordeal, in many cases they have passed on their existential disillusionment to their own children. The results can be seen in many of the poverty-stricken reserves, particularly in the north, that remain Canada’s darkest secret, though it is no secret to any alert Canadian living today. For the problems are also sadly present in the drug-dominated sections of too many Canadian cities. where the attempt at enforced assimilation has led only to despair. Some natives were not interested in Harper’s belated apology, but many more seemed to be genuinely attentive, no doubt in the hope that a page is finally turning and that the native peoples can soon regain their rightful place on their home turf. Let’s hope they are right.