Meredith's Blog

Namwayut. It means, ‘we are all one’. After the week of events in relation to the signing of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, I know this to not be true. The light shed upon the monstrosity that occurred within the Indian Residential Schools confirms this truth. Over 143 years 150,000 children have been taken from their families to attend Residential School (www.reconciliationcanada.ca/explore/history/). This action was one of the worst crimes committed in history, through the loss of Aboriginal culture and the emotional and physical abuse inflicted upon so many innocent children. It is now, however, that the actions in the residential schools are finally being formally recognized. In my visits to the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE) and to the Belkin Art Gallery, it became startlingly clear to me that these people needed a voice all of those years. And now we have finally given them one.

The British Columbia National Event about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission at the PNE was awing. The sheer collection of Aboriginal people who had come to provide testimonials, share their culture, or simply to provide support was truly shocking. Listening to stories such as that of Amy George, who was physically abused via a strap, but also emotionally, with nuns telling her, ‘You’re so hard to teach because you’re so dumb’, made it difficult for me to control my emotion of unbearable sadness. If I am reacting in such a strong way to one woman’s story, one can only imagine her emotional trauma for much of her life, during and after her time at the residential school.

The Belkin Art Galley held a subdued tone when I entered on Sunday. The predominant colours of red and black in the artwork, both in dark tones, indicate pain and apathy to me, as if indifference was the only way to endure. I found Skeena Reece’s movie ‘Touch Me’ especially provocative. Instead of the distress that was so clearly expressed in the other works, this piece was about kindness and forgiveness. As one of the curators of the Belkin Gallery questions, ‘I think because we’ve had such a difficult history in Canada that it’s produced, as it’s called, difficult knowledge. What do we do with that?” (www.blogs.vancouversun.com/2013/09/17/witnesses-bringing-residential-schools-into-the-present/).  Ms. Reece has clearly captured the essence of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission through her piece, which is to mold the population to accept this ‘difficult knowledge’, to respect that we have failed as a nation and too move to rectify these wrongs through awareness.

Moreover, the tenderness with which the Aboriginal woman attended to the Caucasian women moved me to tears, and proves further the indecency that the Residential Schools created. All people have the capacity to be brilliant, we just need to give them the voice.

The subjugation of Aboriginal people has caused me to question my Canadian citizenship. Although the ethical values concerning human rights were not present in the late eighteenth century when these schools first emerged, they were certainly present in Canada in 1996, when the last residential school finally shut its doors. It’s appalling that a country in which the national anthem exclaims ‘the True North strong and free’, such freedom doesn’t exist for all. In the future, I hope this freedom upon which we base our nationalism can ring true for all Canadians, all of our ‘home and native land’.