Atonement

I don’t remember the exact moment it dawned on me, but I do remember an awareness in middle childhood of the extraordinary improbability of being me. Who I was, where I was. In my only concrete memory, I am sitting on a friend’s front porch—I was probably about eleven—and asking her if she ever wondered why she was who she was instead of somebody else. I don’t think the conversation moved on. 

I suppose that fleeting sense of wonder that, of all the people and places in the world, I would find myself in a small town in the middle of Pennsylvania, a bright, well-fed, white child—instead of a hungry African, or a child of inner-city slums, or a child with mental or physical challenges—was my first sense of privilege. Of course, at eleven I would not have processed it that way. Now I’m being reminded daily that privilege has followed me into old age, and that it has been paid for by others. I think I’m being asked to atone for it. I don’t know how.

A long time ago, a young German girl engaged me in a conversation about collective guilt. Germans think about that a lot, I suppose. The rest of us should more. I answered honestly. “I don’t think everyone is equally guilty. But everyone who is part of the culture that permits it has to take some share of responsibility.” Should I have said that to a German teenager whose grandfather was conscripted into the Reich’s army? Maybe not. I am famous for speaking my mind without considering the consequences. 

She shook her head. “But what if they didn’t even know?”

I didn’t grow up in Canada, but most of my friends did. They didn’t know about residential schools. They didn’t learn about government policies toward Aboriginal Canadians in their classrooms or their Sunday Schools. Most didn’t live close to Aboriginal communities or to the residential schools themselves. Their awareness of this attack on the culture and the human rights of their fellow Canadians emerged in dribs and drabs over the years. The same years when I was becoming Canadian. 

Two hundred and fifteen. 215. Children’s bodies. How guilty are we all?

I am not comparing the residential schools to Auschwitz in scope or intent. But in 2021, ignorance of the Residential School horrors would have to be willful. The recent discovery of child graves in British Columbia should not surprise anyone. We—all of us—have known for years the harm done to children and their families. We have understood that the system ruptured the fabric of previously healthy cultures. There have been scathing reports and attempts by governments and individuals to make amends. Too little, too late? Undoubtedly. Shamefully. But how do you mend a fractured culture? And how do you atone for the errors of the past? And how much of the guilt falls on each of us?

I have some sympathy for those who insist that many involved in the Residential School system believed they were doing good. The definition of good evolves over time—we cannot claim the final word any more than our predecessors could. I have mixed feelings about toppling the statues of flawed historical figures. And yet, from where we sit now, we can only be appalled and ashamed at the almost two-century-long attempt to “take the Indian out of the child”. Appalled and ashamed at how often, even knowing what we know, we—personally and systemically—have judged those damaged children harshly for becoming troubled adults.

In 1972, Jack accepted a teaching position with Algoma College—now Algoma University. At the time it was a tiny institution, housed in a single building: Shingwauk Hall, site of an Indian Residential School that had closed just two years earlier. The building’s history was a point of interest to me, but I did not think of it as a place dedicated to the extinction of a culture. Sometimes I was reminded of its earlier function, of course. For years, the washroom sinks were at child-height. And the grounds included a cemetery with the graves of 120 students and staff, an unusual feature for a university. Not, though, for an Indian Residential School.

Chief Shingwauk himself has been heralded as a proponent of education and famously snowshoed to Toronto (then York) to plead for a teacher for his people. He envisioned a school where the two cultures could learn from one another—the teaching wigwam—ironically, on the very site that became a residential school dedicated to erasing his culture. Some of that residential school’s former students, and their children, returned after 1970 as university students—Jack taught many of them. There was something fitting about the building’s transition, and in recent decades the local Ojibway community has become an active partner in the university’s determination to honour Chief Shingwauk’s vision, and build a cross-cultural learning institution. Institutional atonement?  

As individuals, we do not have such an obvious and symbolic way of making amends for the wrongs of our predecessors. We mourn the 215, knowing there will be more. We try to imagine seeing our own children snatched from their homes and punished for their language and culture, never to be quite the same again, perhaps never to return at all. We struggle with our previous ignorance, our obvious privilege as members of what is now being called “settler culture”, our inability to truly walk in another’s moccasins. And—to be honest—we struggle with how responsible we should feel for the decisions and behaviour of past generations.

Is the struggle itself a step toward atonement? Is it enough?