Truth and Reconciliation Day

Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day. Those two words are very important and are often misrepresented. The world is full of extremes. It's also full of political agendas. Some of those agendas are noble. Some are not. Some have sinister plots hidden with lies.

Truth and reconciliation involves telling the truth. A cultural genocide is completely different from a literal genocide like they did in Cambodia and like they are now doing in Gaza. They weren't lining kids up in residential schools and executing them. That did not happen.

Lying and claiming that it did is not telling the truth and is not promoting reconciliation. It's doing the opposite. It's promoting division. It's not bringing people together it's driving them appart.

We see people with a dark and devious political agenda exploit the residential schools to promote some pretty bizarre things just like they do with climate change. Climate change is no reason to throw away our economic system and implement Communism. That is bat sh*t crazy.

Likewise the dark and misrepresented history behind the residential schools in Canada is no reason to throw away the Canadian Charter of Rights, a document we can all be proud of, and do away with civil liberty. That would be an insane conclusion from a group of misrepresented facts. Xi Jinping is pretty sensitive about claiming his persecution of the Uyghurs is a genocide but is quick to call the Canadian residential schools a genocide. That is somewhat ironic.

Forced sterilization is not a literal genocide but it's a bad thing. It's a figurative genocide because it ends their posterity and wipes their existence out over time. Organ Harvesting political prisoners is a partial genocide because it involves committing murder to sell organs.

Yet we're not here to talk about China or Cambodia or East Berlin. We're here to talk about Canada. When we listen to sinister politicians misrepresent the residential schools, that's when we need too talk about China, Cambodia and East Berlin because we all know where the road they want to take us on leads. Communists like the Red Braid Alliance for Decolonial Socialism is one extreme. Residential school deniers is another extreme.

To be honest, I'm not sure what a residential schools denier is. We all know residential schools existed. We can't deny their existence. Yet there are conflicting narratives as to what really went on in the residential schools. The relatively recent discovery of child graves at a residential school in Kamloops made dramatic headlines but I'm hearing conflicting reports as to whether or not those actually were graves. We know that some schools had graves because a lot of children died of diseases back then like tuberculosis. In one of the reports a child's diary explained how the nuns held a funeral for a child who died of tuberculosis.

We know that childhood diseases back then were a big problem for everyone not just natives. My mother's father died of scarlet fever in Nova Scotia when she was a little girl. That's why she had to come out west to be raised by her aunt and uncle. Claiming that there were no graves on any of the residential schools in untrue. Just like claims that the nuns were killing kids is untrue.

We know that residential schools probably were not a very pleasant thing. Like private schools in England or Ireland back then. In England, people would send their kids away to boarding school to get an education. Most kids hated them. Obviously the cultural shock for native kids would have compounded that hatred.

Back then what happened when kids misbehaved? They got the strap. They didn't phase corporal punishment out of Canadian public schools until I finished primary. When I was in primary I remember a kid was misbehaving and the principle was called in and spanked the kid in front of the whole class. That's they way it was done back then. We didn't think anything of it.

When I was in Ireland I heard a lot of people complain about the nuns beating them in private school. In Ireland, Boston and many other areas of the world, we have all heard about horrific reports of sexual abuse not from the nuns but from the priests. No doubt that likely happened at residential schools in Canada as well. That is horrific and we need to face that. It's not my fault but it is something we have to recognize. One of the most offensive things I ever heard any Pope say was his claim that the Canadian residential schools were a genocide. He needs to own their priests part in sexual abuse. He doesn't need to distract everyone from that with falsehoods.

One of the common complaints I hear about the residential schools is that kids were not allowed to speak their native tongue. I get it. When you're in French immersion, you're not allowed to speak English. It helps you learn the language faster. Yet it does appear that the residential schools tried to remove a kids culture from them which was wrong. We have completely changed our approach now. Now we celebrate our diversity and celebrate native culture.

Every culture has good and bad. Slavery is bad and slavery was common among the tribes of the Pacific Northwest. That is not something we should emulate. Yet the drum circles, the pow wows, the longboat, the carvings and artwork, those are all wonderful traditions we should continue to celebrate. In the Canadian mosaic we celebrate our cultural diversity.​ That's something we can be proud of. The politicians want to rewrite history to take away our pride and our self worth.

I like the saying every child matters because it's true. Every child does matter. That saying came after the Black Lives Matters slogan swept North America. Black lives do matter. Everyone matters. The Constitution and the Charter of Rights states that all men and women are equal. It protects everyone and the sinister politicians want to take that away from us.