According to a native adage, you have to walk a mile in another person's moccasins before you can understand them. No one said how far you have to walk to understand their pain if you take their moccasins away. • Our cover story, Sharing the Pain, is an attempt to reveal some of the pain caused by residential schools and some of the ways the church is trying to address it.
After union in 1925 The Presbyterian Church was left with only two residential schools, Cecilia Jeffrey in Kenora, Northern Ontario, and Birtle, near Brandon, Manitoba.
Churches began recognizing problems with residential schools by the 1960s and eventually withdrew from them, but it really wasn't until the 1980s that stories of clergy sexual abuse in Newfoundland followed by the Mount Cashel scandal shocked the Canadian consciousness into some wider sensitivity to the physical and sexual abuses in residential school settings, to say nothing of their impact on native culture and society.
Still, a decade slipped by with little done about the situation until lawsuits in the late 1990s focused even more attention on the issue. Churches, facing suits in the millions of dollars, argued that they should not bear all the responsibility, since they were only acting on behalf of the country through the federal government.
More court cases ensued, and there remain loose ends, but Ottawa eventually began negotiating with the churches to limit their liability. In the meantime, the churches had apologized to native people for what happened.
The Presbyterian Church made its apology in 1994 and signed an agreement with Ottawa to cap the church's liability at $2.1 million (later revised to about $1.3 million) for compensation awarded for abuse cases. The church also committed about $1 million to other ministries and support around the healing and reconciliation process between native and non-native people.
The church now supports seven front-line ministries across the country and has recently appointed a national staff person to raise awareness in the pews regarding the schools, their history and impact on those who attended.
Isn't that enough, some ask? Such a question only proves the need for education and engaging with the native community to understand how the schools affect their lives today.
In hindsight, it is unfortunate that assembly council decided to take the $3 million for claims and healing and reconciliation projects from existing church funds rather than engage in fundraising; which it had done for the Journey to Wholeness.
The decision was painless — while the schools caused much pain. It is pain that needs to be shared, and although a financial pinch hardly equals the physical, sexual and emotional pain students suffered, it tends to focus the issue more clearly.
Had congregations been obliged to raise money, they would have had to confront the church's association with this dark history.
So the issue now is how to engage congregations across the country. Paradoxically, we may have something to learn from South Africa, the country that modeled its apartheid system on the Canadian reserve system.
The South African most closely associated with modern apartheid is Hendrik Verwoerd, prime minister of the country during the 1960s. His grandson, Wilhelm, has been tireless in trying to undo the damage his grandfather's policy did.
A former professor of philosophy and theology, Verwoerd has argued narrow, legal definitions of responsibility are unhelpful, because the dominant group in society will say they didn't commit any wrong in their generation, so avoiding history and the legacy that gives them a huge advantage over the wronged group.
Verwoerd has taken up the notion of connectedness as a starting point. He notes that when a relative does something wrong, we tend to feel shame — even though we are guiltless.
Acknowledging their connection to those who did evil in South Africa, Verwoerd says, could help liberate whites from their guilt by association. They could be sorry for what happened beyond a meaningless apology.
In Canada, non-natives have clearly benefitted at the expense of natives. Perhaps we can begin to address the situation by examining our connectedness to the past.
Residential schools happened. None of us can change that nor can we forget it, put it behind us or anything else that tries to obscure the painful past. What we can do is try to understand. And we can bear one another's burdens and walk a couple of miles together.
