We halted the conference to watch the Apology of the Canadian Government to the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples of Canada whose histories and futures have been irrevocably damaged as a result of the Residential Schools System.  The loss of culture, language and interpersonal abilities alone is so terrible. Then you add in the loss of children and of parents.  This is cultural genocide that deserves more than an apology and deserves more than money.

For generations, neither the ruling party nor the official Opposition interrogated the practice of removing children from their home communities and subjecting them to education in the form of abuses.  The death rates were not considered. The community impact was not considered to be meaningful because for generations First Nations communities were not seen as communities.  There are enough descriptions of these horrors. We do not need to review them here.  For the most part the apology was well scripted and humble, meaningful and repentant. Every speech ended on an upswing, on the hope for the future and for health and prosperity for all peoples of canada. Thank you Steven Harper for making your speech with the respect needed. Thank you Stephane Dion for apologizing for the Liberal governments’ involvement in residential schools. Thank you Jack Layton for calling the Residential Schools system Racist and for heartfelt down-home survivor anecdotes. Thank you all for not grandstanding. Oh, except Gilles Duceppe who couldn’t just leave it alone, couldn’t just accept the occasion as one for apologizing. Of course there’s always more that could be done but this was not the time and it was not appropriate to bring a further agenda to the discussion!

What more do I want to be done? Well, I want to see a special teaching scholarship in honour of residential school survivors available to First Nations students in education. We need more first nations educators. I want to see a remembrance day for the survivors of cultural genocide. We have a Holocaust Remembrance day and I can see a Residential School Survivor day too.  I can see a bronze statue of three native children – one inuit, one metis, and one first nations, without smiles on their faces, standing as they did in those belying school portraits.  I can see it in a modern form, too, traditional images in relief on their clothing and their hair swirling into sacred shapes. I can see honouring this survival.  I can see this day as a vehicle for arts and cultural activities, as a celebration of the society that will not be put out, and as a reminder that the apology is just the beginning of healing. If we do not remember what happened, how can we prevent it from happening again?