Eight denominations signed a joint statement in March expressing their commitment “to implement the principles, norms, and standards of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples as the framework for reconciliation.”
“What the church is saying is that it will never again partner with cultural genocide,” said Mark MacDonald, National Indigenous Anglican Bishop, on behalf of the church leaders at a press conference in Ottawa on March 30. “That by affirming the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and implementing it in its life and ways the church promises not to be a part of such a thing in the future and to execrate the remnants of it that are still a part of our society today.”
The document forms part of the churches’ responses to Call to Action 48 from Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which calls on faith and social justice groups to “formally adopt and comply” with the UN Declaration, and included a deadline of March 31 for them to issue statements on how they will do so.
The ecumenical statement was signed by the Presbyterian, Anglican and United churches, as well as five other denominations that did not run residential schools but recognized their complicity in the system.
The Presbyterian Church in Canada has also issued its own statement on implementing the declaration in the work and life of the denomination.
Rev. Karen Horst, Moderator of the 2015 General Assembly, was among the faith leaders in Ottawa and said she was particularly struck by comments made by Commissioner Marie Wilson about the danger of “soft assimilation.”
“We did not issue [the Calls to Action] to make people feel comfortable and to invite everyone … into a process of reconciliation that would amount to a kinder, gentler form of assimilation,” Wilson said. “We called them Calls to Action because we did not want them to seem optional. We wanted them to sound imperative. And we wanted them to disrupt, and to make us uncomfortable so we would have to think about what do we start doing new that we did not do before, and what do we start doing differently than how we have done things before.”
“I think that’s going to be a challenge for us as a church,” Horst said. “That we don’t unwittingly yet still want as our primary goal assimilation as opposed to the protection of freedom and rights. So that was definitely a poignant moment.”
Horst and some of the faith leaders also took part an evening panel hosted at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian, where they elaborated on some of the ways their own denominations would be implementing the UN Declaration.
“The critical thing for us to understand is that challenges that have been developed have been established over many years,” Horst said. “It’s not something we can turn around overnight, but I think that this particular day, and the conversations that we shared, left all of us feeling that we were very hopeful and that there gradually would be transition, and gradually there will be healing happening, and I think we’re heading down the first stages of a new day.”
