Oh, really? For what exactly? There are a lot of children’s graves that are unmarked and forgotten. There are a lot of children whose lives remain unmarked and forgotten. Others are irremediably broken.
I once foolishly but innocently asked a Native man about his experiences in residential school. He said nothing. He just wept. He was in his eighties.
What are we sorry for, when we don’t even know what we did? How do three words make restitution for the haunting confusion and homesickness of a little child, or the fear and terror of having one’s tongue squeezed with pliers, or roughly yanked for the crime of speaking the only language one knew?
How many children were sexually abused?
How many were subjected to random acts of brutal sadism?
How many were murdered?
No one knows.
When death occurred due to illness, abuse, or both, bodies were usually not returned to families, burial locations were not disclosed, nor were causes of death. As a parent, one was not even given bare bones. ‘Your child died. Good day.’
These were Christians, in a Christian nation. In 1874, a law was passed, declaring that Native people were ‘inferior’. In 1884 another law was passed, making it mandatory that Native children attend residential schools. Even if they lived within walking distance, there was no going home. For parents, failure to yield their children was a crime, and was dealt with harshly. It was a crime, after all. Inferior criminals. The children were viewed as not having souls. Had to get them souls. By beating them up. By starving them. By raping them. By killing them. It’s Christianity.
The last residential school closed in 1984.
One of the last children to be abused was a young girl at St. Joseph’s School in Williams Lake, BC.
She was more or less a sex slave for Prince George Bishop Hugh O’Connor. She had a baby by him.
For the Bishop (who continued to his death to be referred to as ‘Your Eminence’) the transgression became a ‘felix culpa’ (happy fall) in which he became (in his own and in the eyes of the Church) a martyr-like victim, cruelly robbed of his precious vow of chastity, through feminine wiles. ‘Eve’ made him do it.
Asked if the Bishop should go to jail (he did, and for other rapes) then Vancouver Archbishop Adam Exner opined that ‘the poor man has suffered enough’. He had no opinion on the possible suffering of the girl, or any interest, apparently.
And so it went. ‘More wine, Your Eminence?’
Then, after 124 years, we finally say we're sorry. And on the very same day, a government minister goes on the airwaves to say that we’re really not, and that spending all that money on the survivors (perhaps $25,000 each) is perhaps not a good idea (you know what they’re going to spend it on!) and instead we should teach them good, solid work habits, presumably like his, and, although he didn’t say so, maybe give them a soul. If only they were Christian enough, like the rest of us…
So we’re all very sorry. Really. Then we hear that in that lost cause which is Afghanistan, some of our soldiers have witnessed young boys being raped by Afghan soldiers. In one credible case, the boy’s intestines ended up outside his body. It wasn’t reported whether he lived or not. Nor was the rape an isolated incident. In Afghanistan it is common.
But it is the position of the Canadian government, led by the very same Stephen Harper who is sorry for the abuse of Native children, to ignore the rape of Afghan boys, lest President Karzai be upset. Or worse, George W. Bush. ‘Don’t look, don’t tell’, is the unofficial official policy, subject to plausible deniability, but in effect all the same.
This is the same government that has squirmed and contorted to deny that it hands over Afghan prisoners (probably 90% of whom are as innocent as Quantanamo inmates) to the Afghan military to be tortured and/or dispatched in spite of plenty of evidence to the contrary. We wash our hands...
Canada abandoned a proud tradition of peacekeeping to fill in for American troops in a foolish and deadly exercise that was all about a trans-national oil pipeline, never about capturing Osama Bin Laden (who isn’t there) or bringing ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ to the region. President Karzai (ex of Unocal Oil Inc.) may preside over his own parlor, but otherwise warlords and the Taliban rule, and poppy crops have never been so abundant. America was willing to fete Taliban officials when it seemed they might cooperate with the laying of the oil pipeline, and promised money and respect if they cooperated, and vilification and bombs if they did not.
For its pointless and craven obeisance to George W. Bush Canada has paid with the lives of eighty-four soldiers and one diplomat. Now it seems that the Harper government is also prepared to squander whatever may be left of Canada’s battered moral authority.
'Don't look, don't tell'? I thought we did that for long enough. We are sorry indeed.
