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The long path to truth and reconciliation
Kootenay Crust
By Ian Cobb
“Truth and Reconciliation” … such incredibly powerful words.
It has taken quite some time for human beings to embrace them in their full essence.
Our world, stretching back the mere 12,000 odd years since human beings formed semblances of civilizations (that we’re aware of), has been witness to an endless tide of suffering.
As kingdoms rose, the individual rights and proprietary rights of those vanquished, vanished.
The forceful takeover thing has been occurring, basically, since before the human species figured out it could stand on its own two feet and, by using its thumbs, wield sticks as weapons. The alpha male thing has been going on since fish learned to walk; it’s ingrained in our genetic code to reproduce and eat the weak.
That’s a truism of the human condition.
Another truism of the human condition is community.
Once again going back to the Neolithic, when communal living began to evolve beyond the nuclear family, we humans started sorting out how to get along.
When the going gets tough, we band together and fight. That is how humans took command of the top of the food chain, per se. There are many creatures that open cans of whup-ass on we salty treat humans; it’s when we work together that we survive and thrive.
That led to conquest as greed infused castes and ‘elite’ sects, relying on domesticated livestock and plants, had more time to dream stuff up. Some of the dreams led to great advances forward, such as when the wheel was first contemplated and achieved, or when smelting ore led to advances in tool and weapon technology or the BIC lighter came into being.
Every tribe and later nation of the ancient world fell beneath the marching feet of invading armies. The mere nature of how humans settled this planet is derived from flight; and from the search for a better life.
Such a search led the Vikings to North America; later the Spanish, Italians, British, French, Dutch, Portuguese and Belgians stampeded across the Atlantic Ocean to feast on the available goodies of North, South and Central America.
The civilizations established in the Americas initially showed the good spirited community inherent in the hearts of most human beings and welcomed the invading Europeans. In many cases they nurtured them back to health after terrible voyages or outbreaks of diseases and fed them when harsh winters threatened their existence.
In typical human fashion – that sad duality of our nature – the Europeans soon began to need more and more land and saw opportunity for greater and greater riches and the original inhabitants of the Americas were knocked asunder by technology and ego; by a belief that a so-called superior race was taking flight.
The other side of human nature – the brute ugliness of the testosterone raging egomaniacal man who feels only his own needs – led to genocide.
First Nations people in the Americas have suffered like the Puritans, Irish, Jews, Scots, Ukrainians, Armenians etc. – so many races driven from their homelands to the Americas to escape persecution, corruption and evil.
Many of those immigrants did their part in genocides and attempted genocides here.
And there was no ocean for the First Nations people of the Americas to cross – to escape the persecution. They were the end-of-the-line in terms of human occupation of our tiny, precious planet, which we also treat with disdain and disregard.
The Old World and the old way of doing things are clearly covered by the dusts of time but that doesn’t mean we should ignore the truths of our past.
In Canada, the truth of our recent past is that we European-Canadians have treated our First Nations brothers and sisters terribly.
As a child growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in Winnipeg, a city with a large First Nations population, there was a clear dividing line between our cultures.
The only ‘Indians’ I got to know were kids living in foster homes who attended my school. The ignorance and hatred directed toward First Nations people was disgusting.
Thankfully, I had a mother who refused to tolerate ignorance and bigotry and I followed her lead as opposed to my father’s, which strayed toward the ‘norm,’ or intolerance for those who were not white (or British).
How many millions of we Canadians have come from similar backgrounds? Today I still hear bigotry and ignorance. We all do. Some of us propagate it and others stand up against it.
Education laced with truth as opposed to ‘cultural requirement’ (see also: brainwashing), will eventually lead human beings to a greater understanding that we are all in this together.
So don’t you think it’s time that we accepted the truth as to who we are? Not just as Canadians, but as the offspring of countless generations before us, which evolved from key root-points in the Near East, Mesopotamia, Northern Africa, the Indus Valley, China and a few other lesser locales.
Human beings – of all ilk and form and locales – have been atrocious assholes at times. Complete egomaniac dickwads forcing suffering upon torment upon those they have vanquished.
Nothing has changed. Every current war and ‘dispute’ taking place in the world is being driven by an individual or small group of megalomaniacs seeking to fatten their already bloated purses or empires. Some are driven by the belief in mystical beings; others are driven by lust for riches and fame and the good old, just like back when we are all monkeys flinging poo at sabre toothed tigers, sense of being the king of the castle.
When we accept that truth that we are all guilty through genetic association and through genetic urgency of being human, it should then lead to reconciliation.
It is time to community the heck up and in essence that is what the ‘Honouring the Truth, Reconciling the Future: Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’ is stating.
“For over a century, the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can best be described as “cultural genocide,” states the opening of the report’s introduction.
The truth is Canada has a dark, sorry past in terms of how we approached relations with our First Nations people.
I used to believe “it’s not my fault; I didn’t do anything to them. It was before my time.” Just because I was raised to try and not be a racist fool and despite a lack of fondness for Torontonians I have succeeded, I thought that eliminated me being lumped in as ‘part of the problem.’
But I have been. Everyone has been, beginning with our senior level of government and moving on down.
We didn’t get dragged away from our parent’s loving hands and find ourselves forced into ‘schools’ where all number of atrocities occurred to children, as one belief system and culture was force-fed to suppress another.
We didn’t grow up being made to feel like we were second-class citizens.
As a nation we all owe our First Nations brothers and sisters an apology and not just for the residential schools. We owe it to them to recognize once and for all that they were the maltreated vanquished. And we owe it to them to welcome them alongside us as equals in a land they inhabited first.
“The country has a rare second chance to seize a lost opportunity for reconciliation. We live in a 21st Century global world. At stake is Canada’s place as a prosperous, just, and inclusive democracy within that global world,” the commission report suggests.
In a time when the needs and wishes of the many are ignored to allow for the appeasement and enrichment of a few – and it is crystal clear to all and yet it continues unabated – it is vital that we take this step as a nation. This commission must continue to do its important work and its findings must be heralded by Parliament.
Anything less would simply be another chapter to a story that makes Canada look several shades bad.
And personally, I am sick and tired of our nation’s collective world image being tarnished by spineless sellouts and greedy fools.
This is a chance to really do the right thing. Let’s not blow it.
The path has led to the truth; may the future welcome reconciliation.
