by Phil Little, Ladysmith, BC

On Monday August 2, my wife Anne Marie and I attended the “March for the Children” in Chemainus. This march was convoked by the Penelakut Tribe, living primarily on Penelakut Island formerly known as Kuper Island and the site of a residential “Industrial School” administered by the Oblates of Mary Immaculate (The Oblates).

This small indigenous community hoped that a few hundred non-indigenous persons would attend to show concern and solidarity with their pain and a need for healing and reconciliation. Perhaps over 2000 people attended, many wearing, as we were, the orange shirts that cried out “Every Child Matters”.

Why would it even be necessary to proclaim what should be so obvious? “Every Child Matters”. Unfortunately the avalanche of recent revelations and public scrutiny on the Residential School System (RAA) has shown us that Canadian history has hidden, dark, and terrible secrets.

Perhaps it is more accurate to accept that there was not enough interest to understand the colonial settler expansion taking “Indian Lands” to bolster the real economic design of what colonialism is really all about – taking the land and securing access to the resources.

In this process Indigenous children did not matter. Throughout the Americas there was a real catastrophic genocide that came with the conquest by European imperial powers. What is now called Canada was colonized by France and then England.

2.

In the conquest process, originally a military exercise, the “church” has always been present, “the cross and the sword”, as a faithful support to the temporal powers justified by religious powers and doctrines. Such was the “Doctrine of Discovery”, a number of papal bulls such as “Inter Caetera” (1493) attributed to Pope Alexander VI. The imperial powers really did not need the church’s blessing but it helped sooth the Christian consciences of monarchs and military conquerors.

The Doctrine of Discovery provided a justification for the European invaders to take whatever they found including any inhabitants who were classified as “non-humans” because they were not baptised. The indigenous peoples could be enslaved or killed as they had no rights. Upon conversion they could be spared death but still dominated as inferior beings destined to serve the dominant white supremacy of Europe.

I belabour this point because this doctrine still has relevance in Canadian jurisprudence. In Canadian law it is the basis that still justifies the seizure of all lands and politically enables the Canadian government to control indigenous peoples through the odious “Indian Act”.

In B.C. 20 per cent of Vancouver Island was granted to Robert Dunsmuir, a coal baron with no interest in the human rights of indigenous people or even settler coal miners. These 19th century capitalists were simply following the patterns of conquest in the Americas since the 15th century. The many different indigenous nations had no rights despite 14,000 years of habitation and management of the land and sea of Vancouver Island.

3.

So at the “March for the Children” we, as descendants of colonial settlers living on unceded territories as is most of British Columbia, listened with heavy hearts. We listened to drummers from different nations, which included in one moment a dance-drama where one dancer threw off “the coat of shame” that still hangs heavy over indigenous peoples in the racism that they endure in so many facets of their lives – schools, community, and yes – even church.

One of the speakers was Charlene Belleau, from the Esketemc First Nation in the BC interior, a former Chief and having had numerous functions with the Assembly of First Nations. Charlene was a child resident at the Kamloops Residential School, administered by the Oblates. About the Oblates, Charlene had nothing good to say and she named the abuse and the abuser. Charlene mentioned that she was now a “grandmother” and she warned “don’t come for my grandchildren!”

Now would be an appropriate moment for some personal disclosure. In my senior years and much to my surprise in the past three years I have become a grandfather to four most beautiful children. I have the thousands of photos to prove this. So yes, I understood Charlene as this grandparenting thing is life changing.

But there is more: in my retirement on Vancouver Island we came to purchase a home in Saltair with a view of the sea, and it faces eastward towards Thetis and Penelakut Islands. As well, I was for 15 years a member of the Oblates, as a seminarian and later as an ordained priest. However I never worked in Canada as I was sent as a missionary to Peru. I left the congregation in 1980 but maintain contact with some current and former Oblates. So in a somewhat strange way I feel connected perhaps more than the average Canadian reading the newspaper stories about the residential schools.

4.

There is much written about the legacy of the residential schools and the more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children, abducted from their homes often by the RCMP, experiencing conditions of deprivation, shame, exploitation and abuse.

Today we who are not indigenous feign surprise to learn of the thousands of children who never returned home, yet for the many Indigenous Nations across the country this was never forgotten. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission chaired by Justice Murray Sinclair suggests 4000-6000 children did not return home.

As new burial sites without markers or identification are identified with modern search technology, this number is bound to increase. The numbers are not known because of poor administration and accountability, and the destruction by the government of many documents.

5.

A key point that must be clear: The Residential School System (RSS) was the work of the government of Canada. The ideology and structure of the System was determined by the government, and while typical of the age the System was founded on “racist” and “European supremacist” ideals that denigrated the Indigenous peoples and viewed them as an obstacle to settlement and the extraction of resources.

Why did the churches and congregations get involved with the RSS?

I have previously indicated the first reason for church collaboration with the empire in what was from the beginning an insidious project. The different treaties between the “Crown” (i.e. Empire) and Indigenous peoples at times did include references to education. What the government intended and what the different tribes expected turned out to be contradictory realities, as was so much in the Treaty process.

Since the time of the Emperor Constantine, Christianity and its churches (Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican) have been not only faithful servants of the empire but have also allowed the empire to define the religion. Even the basic Nicene Creed of 325 c.e. is formulated with the interests of the Empire in mind, defining who is in and who is out (the heretics).

Churches, of course, got payback for their service, to whichever empire they served. An example of that in Canada is the residue of government funded Catholic school systems in some provinces, while other religious groups (Jews, Muslims, Mormons etc.) are denied funding for their religion based schools.

In the early years of European influence in what is now Canada, the missionaries had access and support because they provided a link between the military, the traders and the Indigenous groups.

Sites such as the Jesuit mission St. Marie among the Hurons (Wendat) served strategically the early development of New France. Without a doubt the Jesuit missionaries, some now known as the Jesuit Martyrs, were guided by spiritual goals to win converts to Catholicism.

Later with the development of Upper Canada, there was an influx of Protestant “Loyalists”, bringing with them their roots in the American Puritan tradition and simultaneously the Anglican and Protestant churches were keen to establish a foothold among the Indigenous groups.

Simply put then is the recognition that religion and politics has always been, and still is, a mixed and complex relationship in Canada. The narrative of the Catholic Church and government regarding Indigenous peoples has usually been cooperation and not challenge.

The political dimension within the missionary endeavour was neither taught nor explicit. It was simply understood by all groups. This was the reality in all colonies, such as Australia where an identical reality to the RSS was created and today is causing the same problems for Indigenous peoples and society.

The Anglican Church of Canada has recognized that the RSS was simply wrong. It was wrong for the church to be involved. Archbishop Michael Peers, Primate of the Anglican Church said in 1993: “I accept and I confess before God and you, our failures in the residential schools. We failed you. We failed ourselves. We failed God.” Then Archbishop Peers in this apology lists the many ways the Anglican Church failed. (https://www.anglican.ca/tr/apology/english/)

6.

In 1991 the President of the Oblate Conference of Canada, representing the 1200 Oblates in the country, Doug Crosby OMI (now bishop of Hamilton) issued a full apology to Indigenous peoples. His apology was complete without reservations.

We apologize for the part we played in the cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious imperialism that was part of the mentality with which the peoples of Europe first met the aboriginal peoples and which consistently has lurked behind the way the Native peoples of Canada have been treated by civil governments and by the churches. We were, naively, part of this mentality and were, in fact, often a key player in its implementation. We recognize that this mentality has, from the beginning and ever since, continually threatened the cultural, linguistic, and religious traditions of the Native peoples.

Furthermore the Oblate apology stated:

“We apologize for the existence of the schools themselves, recognizing that the biggest abuse was not what happened in the schools, but that the schools themselves happened …” (http://caid.ca/MisOblMarImmApo2001.pdf)

The full Oblate apology is well worth reading and nuancing.

Subsequent statements by the Oblates especially in this time of renewed scrutiny of the RSS and the “unmarked graves” have been clear and repentant. However it is also important to acknowledge that the Oblates of today are two generations after the closure of the last residential schools.

Very few of those who worked in the residential schools are still alive. These Oblates of today bear a heavy institutional responsibility, but not different than the responsibility of all Canadians for what “our government then and now” has done to Indigenous Nations for 5 centuries.

Was the church “naïve” as the Oblate apology suggests?

So the Anglicans and the Oblates recognize that the Residential School System in itself was wrong. It was essentially evil and corrupt. Of course education is not wrong but education is a tool of society and it can be used to encourage and build, or to hammer and destroy. How is it that the religious groups of that time did not see the evil in the system – the abduction of children as young as 3 from their families, the attempt to destroy the Indian in the child, which of course was designed to culturally separate the child from its roots and land. The RSS had this political and economic purpose – to take the land and its resources and to reduce the resistance of the original peoples (already weakened by genocidal and criminal events).

7.

I was a missionary in a foreign land, in Peru. I actually went to the missions before ordination as part of my “formation”, but that formation was to integrate me into the clerical role. Upon ordination it was assumed that I was ready to work as a pastor, administrator, teacher, counsellor and missionary. My formal academic preparation consisted of very weak theology courses in the process of being redeveloped after Vatican II.

A few of the scripture courses were well developed and the canon law course by its nature was traditionally structured. The other courses were insipid and uninspiring, but ordination was almost guaranteed to anyone who followed the procedures. I had no courses in psychology, sociology, anthropology, pedagogy, preparing sermons, counselling, or the administration of the sacraments.

I studied at St. Paul’s University in Ottawa, directed by the Oblates, and along with theology the university offered other programs such as Family Counselling, Canon Law and Missiology. Missiology was a two year program to prepare future “missionaries”. Men and women religious, as well as clergy, from around the world came to this program to study the complexities of being a missionary.

I did not take any of these courses, nor do I know of any Oblate who worked with Indigenous peoples in BC or Peru who even took one course in this program, in spite of the fact that it was a program offered at the Oblate run university in Ottawa.

When I returned to Canada and decided to work in education, I needed to go back to university and obtain a degree in Education and a Teacher’s Certificate. In short I had to be qualified.

To be a missionary required no preparation, no certificate, and no qualifications. Possibly the same could be said for those sent to be parish priests anywhere. All that was required was the ordination ceremony.

One Oblate priest I know was a medical missionary working in the Amazon jungle of Peru. He trained as a medical doctor to be licensed in Canada and then went to Peru to work professionally doing amazing work in the most difficult of missions.

A number of Oblates worked in education, but they too had to become qualified to work in education. But to be a parish priest or missionary required no preparation and no qualification, other than obedience to one’s superior.

8.

Some missionaries somehow developed by intuition a sense of the missionary who was faithful to a call to discipleship, based on love and respect. Among the many who were missionaries in BC, there are some whose missionary instincts were strong and well developed. Adrien-Gabriel Morice OMI who worked in Ft. St. James and that northern region showed a profound respect for the Carrier people, their culture and language. Not only did he learn the language but he developed the first written system for Carrier and published a bi-monthly newspaper, the “Dustl’us Nawhulnuk” in Carrier.

Fr. Morice was exiled from the area in 1904 by the bishop because of complaints by the Hudson Bay factor, demonstrating that the church prioritized the needs of the empire to discipleship.

Another former Oblate missionary of this kind was Fr. René Fumoleau, who worked among the Dene of the north. Born in France he came to the NWT in 1953 and was a well-known and respected priest, photographer and story teller. As an advocate for the Indigenous peoples he researched Treaty 8 and Treaty 11, as well as Métis rights and their history. René was a social justice advocate for the Dene. As a senior, René left the Oblate congregation but continued as a priest of the diocese of Mackenzie.

Among these missionaries whose natural instinct led them to serve among the Indigenous peoples with love and respect, I would include a classmate, Fr. Frank Salmon omi, who worked for many decades among the Nuu-chah-nulth of the west coast of Vancouver Island and continues with First Nations in northern BC. After decades working in most untraditional manners, kayaking between west coast villages, he was adopted and given a religious name “Na S ii C” and he was told that he was no longer an “Indian missionary” but an “Indian priest”.

9.

However Oblate history unfortunately will record that most missionaries, particularly those whose participation in the Residential School System, were guided by other norms not beneficial to Indigenous peoples and fundamentally contrary to a model of discipleship that would have been true to the gospel.

Rather than love and respect, as a form of discipleship, that ought to have guided all missionaries, there was an attitude of “contempt” that was simply typical of the colonizers. Rather than seek to preach the gospel in the culture of the Indigenous people there was an insistence on “integration” or “assimilation. We need to remember that Canada was not colonized, Canada was the colonizer.

Was it European racist supremacy, the numbers competition with Protestant missionaries for “souls”, or simply the need to control others that gave impetus to the Catholic missionary effort? Some Oblates, members of other congregations, clergy and lay workers of different churches have gone to jail for sexual abuse of children in the residential schools.

At the “March for Children” event, Charlene Belleau spoke of an Oblate bishop who went to jail for a sex related crime. Not only in B.C., but across the country the Residential Schools were notorious for violence, physical and sexual abuse, sadistic punishments for children who spoke their own languages (including the use of an electric chair at the St. Ann’s Residential school in Ft. Albany, Ontario).

At the Shubenacadie Indian Residential School in Nova Scotia (also administered by the Oblates), and other schools across the country, the Indigenous children were used for pseudo-scientific nutrition studies, which acknowledged that the children were suffering chronic malnourishment as part of the government strategy.

The discovery of so many unmarked graves only adds fuel to the accusations of deaths (beyond those caused by disease such as tuberculosis, the influenza epidemic, measles and other conditions related to malnutrition,) that should be considered to be criminal.

Curiously in the early 20th century an Oblate General Administration visitation from Rome to the missions mainly in the north saw the reality of the Residential School System and recommended that it was contrary to the charism of the Oblates to be involved in such a work.

In fact the Oblates, and other religious persons, working in the residential schools were “civil servants”, along with the Mounties who kidnapped the children, the corrupt “Indian agents” who administered according to the “Indian Act” and other government officials from the Prime Ministers down. The ultimate purpose of the schools was to destroy the “Indian” and to break the connection to the land. It was politics and economics.

10.

While in my Oblate days I did not work in B.C. or anywhere in Canada, I do not absolve myself from this critique. I went through the same “formation” as an Oblate, in the same institutions as the older generation. As a post-Vatican II student my studies were at least in English rather than Latin, but ultimately the programs were theoretical and speculative philosophy and theology courses that were somewhat meaningless in the real world.

I was on the treadmill to ordination after which I worked in the missions, for which no preparation was offered. In Mexico a Catholic Monsignor and academic, Ivan Illich, offered an intense preparation for missionaries to Latin America. Illich began with a question: why do you want to come to Latin America as a missionary? His program offered a critical study in a multi-disciplinary format, including psychological analysis.

Of course, such a program was not offered to me or any others who went to Peru as missionaries. We were part of a virtual invasion of men and women religious even before Vatican II, and documents show that this invasion had a clear political intent to deter social movements that could lead to unrest.

In Peru I came to know one of the leaders of renewal in the church, Fr. Jorge Alvarez-Calderon. I attended retreats with him and he also came to my parish to help with the formation of lay leaders. Jorge asked me if I had come to Peru as a “tuerco útil” – as a useful tool of capitalist control and purpose. Many missionaries to Peru actually worked only with the middle-class or the affluent. (The Oblates at least did work exclusively among the poor or the lower middle class.)

That challenge was beyond my formation to contemplate and required a rethink of what I was doing and why. In short, without a doubt, the missionary effort in Latin America since the beginning of the Spanish conquest, and still in modern days, has been as much political and economic as religious. But this was not explicit; it was simply understood or as in my case simply not considered until it was brought to the surface.

During my short time in Peru, I came to know three martyrs. One was a young woman teacher who worked as a catechist in a nearby parish, and taught along with me at a small school for youth lay leaders. I taught a course in scripture. She was active in the teacher’s union and during a national strike she was imprisoned and tortured, and died from her injuries.
The other two were priests who were murdered because of their support for agrarian reform which threatened the interests of the large landowners. The late 20th century was a time of martyrdom in the Latin American church when missionaries and church workers refused to work as civil servants of the governments. One of the greatest of this time was Archbishop Oscar Romero, now a canonized “Saint”.

The option left to me, the challenge, was to become a useful tool of the people, not the powerful oligarchy. Such was the option of Fr. Morice and Fr. Fumoleau. My time as a missionary in Latin America came to an end.

Did any Oblates ever question what was happening in the Residential Schools? Were there ever any “whistle blowers” to report the abuse and if so, to whom would they report? It would seem to me that the Oblates, as well as the other missionary groups, Catholic and other Christian groups, were simply typical “settler colonists”, who came with the same European racist ideology that considered the Indigenous person to be inferior and of a lesser humanity.

Such were the definitions of the “Indian” in Canadian legislation and the continued regulations for government residential schools. Indians achieved humanity by integrating, by becoming good Christians, speaking good English or French, and breaking from the traditions such as the potlatch.

11.

I do not think the Oblates were naïve as is suggested in the formal apology. The Oblates were simply part of a formal mechanism of domination and dispossession by the European masters to extract resources from the colony. The Oblates were not much different than other groups who shared the same supremacist ideology and the same insipid and obtuse spirituality.

Bev Sellars in They Called Me Number One: Secrets and Survival at an Indian Residential School provides a graphic illustration of all that was wrong with the Residential School System. There is a photo of the Cariboo Indian Girls Pipe Band, with the girls in full Scottish pipe band regalia. They were “good little Indians” and taken to perform at parades in Canada and the USA.

The girls were an example of the transformation expected by the government and the success of the Oblates. The girls exhibited a new culture, a new music, a cultural dress of the empire. (https://collections.irshdc. ubc.ca/index.php/Detail/objects/1787). They only had to stop being “Indian” but in the process society still would not accept them as equal and in turn they became uncomfortable in their own indigenous communities.

In the language of Fr. Jorge Alvarez-Calderon, the Oblates (and most missionary groups) chose quite consciously to be faithful and compliant “tuerco utiles” of the dominant ideology of the empire. Of course they were not all evil men. I knew many of them and I found them to be interesting and congenial.

But as the Oblate superior, now Bishop Crosby, said “the biggest abuse was not what happened in the schools, but that the schools themselves happened”. The Residential School System was evil. Its intent and purposes as defined by the government were abusive and even criminal. Those who participated, even under the vow of obedience, were sharing in something that they should have known was sinful and simply wrong. It happened because of the government, just as the government still today denies equal funding for the education of Indigenous Children.

The concept developed by Michael Iafrate on “Destructive Obedience” perhaps is applicable after all. The training provided “a process of discipleship, conversion, and deliberate conscience (de-)formation that is fundamentally at odds with Christian discipleship and ultimately destructive” to victims and victimizers.

There is another way of Christian leadership, sorely wanting in the church today. The beginnings of prophetic leadership seen within the CCCB with such formal statements such as the 1979 “Witness to Justice: A Society to be Transformed” with bishops like Remi De Roo were soon squashed under the rule of the Polish pope. Perhaps a few progressive statements from a leadership not responsible to its people will never be good enough.

There is anger in the nation. Churches are being burned. The “spotlight” is on the church, perhaps unfairly so. The Prime Minister, clever politician that he is, has deflected blame away from the government to the churches, but the churches were working for the government. Compensation agreements were evaded, and while the church could not raise “compensation funds” for reconciliation programs the building and restoration of church buildings projects could easily raise many millions of dollars. Some bishops have made statements showing that they still don’t get it.

Fortunately a few bishops have taken the high road acknowledging the wrong done and have entered into real dialogue with Indigenous peoples leading to reconciliation. The archives of some religious groups are being made available for research into the reality of the residential schools. Is it too little too late?

I do not think that future generations of Indigenous peoples will have any reason to accept Christianity. It is fully toxic with the ideology of colonialism and a long history of serving the imperial masters. The legacy of the RSS in terms of religion will be that the Christians who administered the schools are the reason why Indigenous peoples will seek a new path to express their spirituality.

Phil Little writes for ICN about Indigenous culture in Honduras as well.