… is it over?

In 1992 we had a year of rain in Bolivia. 12 months of it! Every trip out of town to any of the places where MCC had workers was going to be a challenge … often pretty much impossible. In the Berlin region, across the Rio Grande, there were 35 villages, resettled from the Highlands. People from the colder, drier altiplano learning how to farm in the much wetter tropical lowlands and, so low on the banks of the river, there was flooding that year. I was standing on what was dry land one day and then noticed …  the water! Noiselessly creeping across the field towards me through the underbrush.  It wasn’t even raining that day … just slowly rising water from a flooding river. I remember feeling a bit panicked for what would happen to the farmers because … it just kept coming. 

So why am I thinking of that image today, in 2021?  I carry Bolivia with me every day in one way or another, but this memory for me is bit of a metaphor about covid.  A silent flow, sneaking in, almost unnoticed until … it’s there, taking up whatever space it can.  

We are calendar people.  Linear. Befores and afters.  We have markers. Birthdays, baptisms, marriages, divorces. Graduations. Those are the biggies. More globally, well, the wars stand out. And the great depression. Just before Christmas 2019, we began hearing about covid.  It was far away, so … not a big deal, right? But by March 20, Alberta was shutting down the province.  That’s our marker date.  And now, as the water recedes, and we come back from covid (are we?), it will follow us around for a while.  Or maybe we are so sick of it all, we will pretend it never happened?  Yesterday I checked out a popular park in Calgary.  It has play structures, a pool area so big kids can get lost in it,  lovely hills, lots of green. A gorgeous place but a little to my surprize, it was packed. People everywhere and not a mask in sight. Like a normal, pre-covid, hot summer day at the park. 

A writer in a CBC interview talked last week about covid vocabulary.  She had a covid word or more for pretty much every letter in the alphabet.  Adjustment.  Together.  Corona.  Covid.  Distance. Epidemiology.  Mask. Media. Pandemic. Safe. Social Distance. Vaccines. Virus.  Polarization … it went on.  Oh, and zoom!  I think I’m tired of a lot of those words, for now at least, but a couple of other things about these last 16 months do stand out for me: first, how quickly (over 3 months) it occupied so much space. For more than a year we went to bed thinking about it and woke up worrying about what the day would bring to us … because well, it was everywhere! We developed a kind of universal language about it …so that it became for many of us, an anxiety inducing centerpiece in every conversation, zoom or facebook or masked.  The media nurtured the anxiety with 24-hour ‘coverage’ and repetition, and there were weeks where apparently nothing else was going on in the world.  Maybe all the ‘we’re in this together’ language helped a little, but we’ve been all over the place in how to avoid covid, survive it, and speculating about what it is. Together or not, covid became the ‘one thing’ and I’m very looking forward to when the weather or the Olympics will take center stage. History is full of major catastrophic events (WWI-9M, WWII-16M – one note says 60M, AIDS-22M, 1918 Flu-20M-40M) but I’m guessing that when the next calamity hits us, covid 19 will be the reference point. 

The other thing about covid is the tensions it has created among us.  Who would have thought that a mask or a vaccine would divide and polarize us.  Billions around the world would give their little left finger to get a shot in the arm for covid, but in those same countries, as here in Canada, there are also many who, for one reason or another, won’t take the needle. 

Someone in Bolivia told me the other day that even when there are vaccines available, many are not taking them.  In a region where covid deaths are now 8 times  per capita higher than what they are anywhere else in the world, including India.  I asked a friend about this. ‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘I do not understand. I don’t even understand my own family about this.’ 

I keep meeting people who are not taking the vaccine.  The responses vary. Friends of ours say they just prefer to not take foreign substances into their bodies. Others say we are messing with God’s will if we take the needle. Or ‘I don’t think I need it. My body will deal with the virus.’ Still others simply don’t trust government. ‘We have a 400-year history,’ one church leader said, ‘of government betrayals. Covid, these 16 or so months, followed by the worldwide push to vaccinate … has come at us with so much government that we just don’t trust it.’  Others say there’s a chip in the vaccine, which, implanted in our blood stream or tissue somehow will enable a tracking of all human beings. A mark of the beast or something comes to mind for them. Still others talk about Bill Gates who, said one person, has long been known to push for population control … so, a virus somehow let loose on the world by Bill Gates? In collusion with China? And somebody is now making a lot of money with the vaccines! Information has been so prolific and often so confusing that finding and connecting dots is bound to happen. 

The world has lost over 4 million people. And it’s not over. But where things are opening up, will families come together where some are vaccinated and others not? Will churches? Mosques? Hindu temples? Communities? Teams?  Astrophysicist Hakeem Muata Oluseyi spoke this morning (the Sunday Magazine) about his life growing up in difficult circumstances – including drug addiction – in Louisiana to what he does today. He wasn’t talking about covid, but he said … ‘we are built to survive.’  We are and we will, but the scars of covid, often unseen, will be with us for a while. We will be tested, I suspect, on whether we are serious about the together talk. And it may be helpful to sit or play together on green hillsides, patios, or backyards for a while, and not talk too much about covid.  

A Lament:

Earlier last week, someone quoted their daughter who had asked, ‘mommy do I look too Muslim?’ The post below is about the long history we have in Canada of reminding the indigenous people who came long before we settlers did, and later, the ‘newcomers’, that it works best here, if they all try really hard to be like the rest of us. The post comes out of the EMC Church in MacGregor, Manitoba. It’s speaks into this long history and it’s important to read. I’m posting it with permission.

A Lament

By: Shannon Doerksen

Originally published June 10, 2021, on MacGregorEMC.com.

I was ten years old in 1996 when the last residential schools in Canada were closed.  I don’t think at that point I had even heard of them.   

I remember that the Canadian history I learned in school was very centred on European settlers – one could be forgiven for coming away from those lessons believing that the history of this land and its people only began once white people were there to see it – ‘if a tree falls in a forest and there is no white man there to see it, did it really fall?’  We were told that indigenous people were traded blankets infected with smallpox, but we didn’t have to sit with any discomfort about that for long because we were assured that the Americans had done worse.  This was echoed when we learned about Japanese internment camps, about turning away Jewish refugees fleeing Nazism.  There’s always someone, somewhere, worse, so we can feel better about ourselves in comparison.  We don’t need to feel uncomfortable. 

If we thought about indigenous populations at all, it was to decry their “inability to let the past go” and prescribe solutions for any problems they experienced that would make them more like us.  We couldn’t acknowledge that what we characterized as the past was actually very present and ongoing.  We didn’t believe that they had anything of value to offer us beyond a carte-blanche to use their land however we wished, with no discussion, pushback, or need to listen.  We were nice white people, and we were here to ‘help.’ 

Lord, have mercy. 

Recently, 215 bodies were found on the site of a residential school in British Columbia.  They say some are as young as three years old.  I have a child that age.  I try to imagine her being taken away without my consent to be educated in a culture and language not only not my own, but with the express purpose of instilling hatred and shame of my culture and language in her.  I try to imagine her not coming home and never knowing why or where she is, or her coming home to find we can no longer communicate and I am a source of embarrassment and shame to her.  I can hardly breathe. 

Christ, have mercy. 

It is interesting that this has come to the fore during a pandemic where we have heard, over and over again, from small groups of people loudly insisting that the restrictions contradict their freedom of religion by insisting they gather remotely, or their freedom of mobility by putting limits on shopping or recreation.  It was not so long ago that indigenous people in this country were barred from practicing their spirituality at all.  It was not so long ago that their mobility was at the mercy of a government agent’s whims.  

We settler Canadians love to think of this country as a bastion of peace and freedom.  For us, it often is.  We have schools and health care and clean drinking water and passable roads in our communities.  That’s not the case for many indigenous people.  A high school education is not locally available in some communities so children have to be billeted in an unfamiliar city far from their families and communities just to access basic education.  Expectant mothers in some communities can’t access the health care they need and have to spend the last bit of their pregnancy in an unfamiliar city far from home.  Safe potable water is not present in every community. These deficits are a cruel kind of insult added to injury – we want to relegate residential schools to an unfortunate dark chapter of this country’s past, but we won’t ensure that children won’t have to travel far from their families to complete high school?  We will deprive women of their family and community support for pregnancy and childbirth?  We will not ensure safe drinking water for every community?   

I am aware that I am not personally responsible for residential schools or the Sixties Scoop or smallpox.  I didn’t personally preside over the Indian Act, but here I am in a country that has afforded me a comfortable life and many opportunities because I follow, whether directly or indirectly, the people and policies responsible for those things.   

Generation after generation of settlers running things and here we are: I am not afraid that I won’t be taken seriously in the ER.  I am not afraid of mistreatment, or worse, at the hands of police.  I am not afraid that I will go missing and that law enforcement and the media will either ignore my disappearance or construct a narrative around it that insists it was my own fault.  I am not afraid of Child and Family Services.  I am not afraid that someone’s private property will be valued more highly than my life. No one should be afraid of those things, but as things are, indigenous people in this country have good reason to be.   

I don’t know how to fix things, but the point of this post is to lament. That is something of importance too because it’s by lamenting that we can begin to see the scope of a problem. Maybe right now, grieving and learning is what needs to be done. Maybe then, by paying attention to the injustices suffered wave upon wave by indigenous people in this country, in some small way, we can figure out how to accomplish something in the direction of reconciliation and reparation. 

Lord, have mercy. 

… this tragic story …

I was a little surprized at the question. A media correspondent today asked Murray Sinclair, who chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (2009 to 2015) how important he thinks it is to find the graves of the thousands of children who died while attending the Residential Schools in Canada.  I doubt she would have asked had the subject been missing soldiers, but for some reason, when we’re talking about missing indigenous children, it’s a question? Sinclair responded respectfully. He always does.  

A few years ago, someone said that a hundred years from now, someone in Israel will apologize for the fact that since 1948 Israel, with the support of Canada and the United States and other countries, has occupied and taken away the land, the individual homes, literally the collective life of Palestinians in Israel, in the West Bank, in Gaza. It’s a ghastly terrible story that continues today.  Look at any fotos of what’s left of Gaza and read a story about how the constant harassment of the Israeli Military in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza impacts children who live there.  But then the comment continued.  Someone in Israel will apologize for what they did but they will keep what they took. 

In 2008, Prime Minister Harper made a formal apology to the Indigenous peoples of Canada for Canada’s role in the operation of Indian Residential Schools (IRS) the Canada-wide school system of ‘aggressive assimilation’ in which indigenous children were, in many cases, abducted, forced into residence and kept there, many for years. Sir John A MacDonald is to have said that ‘we must take the Indian out of the Indian’ and the residential schools became the tool.  It was thought that if you changed how they dressed, forced them to speak English or French, kept them away from their communities for 10 or 12 months of the year, and turned them into Christians, the ‘indian problem’ would go away. From the late 1900s until 1996, there were a total of about 130 schools.  150,000 children were removed from their communities, into the schools.  As if it wasn’t enough to take small children away from their parents and separate them from their sisters or brothers, many were also abused and violated. Thousands died, buried in unmarked graves. Often their families were never told what happened to their children.  Could any of us endure this? 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) travelled across Canada as part of the IRS Settlement agreement.  Along with many others, I was able to attend a few of the sessions and listen to the stories of some survivors.  They were sad, awful stories, hard to hear and I remember wondering: 1) how was it possible for the Canadian Government and the churches of Canada to think that this was somehow an acceptable to treat anyone.  Today, it’s called cultural genocide but by whatever name, the systematic separation of children from their parents, to forcibly root out who they were …  is simply barbaric.  But this was us. Canada. 2) how is it that I, along with apparently most Canadians, knew so very little about this history.  It’s as if the people who were here before we settlers arrived were not worth acknowledging, except as a problem, and that the best way forward, now that we had conquered them, was to make them like us, or, failing that, to put them on reserves and make them invisible to us. 3) how utterly kind the people were to us, who came to hear their stories.  I attended I think, 4 sessions. In Saskatoon, Lethbridge, Calgary and later, in Edmonton. We were welcomed, hosted, and I don’t remember once being made to feel badly.  In fact, they seemed to go out of their way to help us not feel badly. 4) how respectfully most of the ones I heard, spoke about the church.  

A lot is being made now, by the media and by our current Prime Minister about apologies needing to be made, after the discovery of 215 unmarked graves of little children near a Residential School in Kamloops, BC.   For sure that’s important, but our own Federal Government made a big deal, back in 2015 of accepting all 94 calls to action that came out of the TRC.  If they had read the calls to action at the time, they would have known that numbers 71 to 76 were part of the commitment!  Somehow, it’s as if we make commitments a little easily, while everyone’s watching, and then move on to other things that are always more pressing. It’s important to apologize and to fly flags at half mast, but surely, from 2015 until 2021, we could have done some significant work on 71 to 76. It’s right there in a section called ‘missing children and burial information.’ Hard to miss,  and now it’s 2021 and as if we’re just becoming aware of what happened to the children. I wonder if that in itself becomes another offensive part of this whole sad story. Our capacity to hear it, walk away, and then, when we’re painfully reminded again, forgive ourselves for having kind of forgotten about it while calling for action and more apologies. 

Missing Children and Burial Information 

71. We call upon all chief coroners and provincial vital statistics agencies that have not provided to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada their records on the deaths of Aboriginal children in the care of residential school authorities to make these documents available to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. 

72. We call upon the federal government to allocate sufficient resources to the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation to allow it to develop and maintain the National Residential School Student Death Register established by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. 

73. We call upon the federal government to work with churches, Aboriginal communities, and former residential school students to establish and maintain an online registry of residential school cemeteries, including, where possible, plot maps showing the location of deceased residential school children. 

74. We call upon the federal government to work with the churches and Aboriginal community leaders to inform the families of children who died at residential schools of the child’s burial location, and to respond to families’ wishes for appropriate commemoration ceremonies and markers, and reburial in home communities where requested. 

75. We call upon the federal government to work with provincial, territorial, and municipal governments, churches, Aboriginal communities, former residential school students, and current landowners to develop and implement strategies and procedures for the ongoing identification, documentation, maintenance, commemoration, and protection of residential school cemeteries or other sites at which residential school children were buried. This is to include the provision of appropriate memorial ceremonies and commemorative markers to honour the deceased children. 

76. We call upon the parties engaged in the work of documenting, maintaining, commemorating, and protecting residential school cemeteries to adopt strategies in accordance with the following principles: 

1. The Aboriginal community most affected shall lead the development of such strategies. 
2. Information shall be sought from residential school Survivors and other Knowledge Keepers in the development of such strategies. 
3. Aboriginal protocols shall be respected before any potentially invasive technical inspection and investigation of a cemetery site. 

In a visit to what was once a Residential School in Fort Chipewyan, Northern Alberta, a number of years ago, along with about 10 or 12 leaders from various Canadian Church Denominations, we met Ed, who had attended and survived the school. I remember a comment: the hardest thing, he said, was the omnipresence of the nuns.  They were always watching us.  

And that’s the thing.  In Palestine, it’s the always threatening and excessively powerful presence of the Israeli military. Their cameras and machine guns are everywhere.  In the Residential schools it apparently was the threat of punishment and often, abuse.  It’s sackcloth and ashes we should be sitting in for a while, and then, as Casadi Schroeder said in a post after she read about the 215 graves in Kamloops  …  ‘Let’s dig up the past, both literally and figuratively! Let’s listen well, learn, not defend ourselves, not judge, take responsibility, say sorry, pray, and allow our First Nations of Canada to do what they need to do to find healing (and not what we think they need.)’  And maybe let’s not ask how important it is to find the graves.