Reconciliation is a very popular word these days.
Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images
It comes out of the commission appointed to investigate what
happened to Indigenous people in Canada in residential schools run by the
federal government. The commission
produced a lengthy
list of actions needed to “advance the process of Canadian reconciliation.”
Leave aside the 94 specific actions the commission
recommended. There are really three key
things that must form the basis of successful reconciliation.
The first is a willingness of the people involved to
come to a mutual understanding. Explicitly,
they are going to be involved in something doesn’t just happen instantly. It will take time. The people involved in
reconciliation will need must *want* to reconcile if it is going to be
successful.
The second is a desire to find truth. That’s conveniently mentioned in the name of
the commission: truth and
reconciliation. But it is also important
for people interested in reconciliation to come with the understanding that the
truth to be found isn’t going to sit wholly on one side or the other.
Third, reconciliation is going to take
discussion. Dialogue. Communication.
On all three of those counts, events in Newfoundland and Labrador over the past few months have shown just how far we are – collectively - from starting successful reconciliation.
Let’s start with the bright spot. Both the groups representing Indigenous people and the provincial government seem interested in improving the relationships between and among them. They *say* they want to improve relations so let’s take that as a positive sign.
The same cannot be said of the other two elements.
For starters, the truth that what the Truth and
Reconciliation commission investigated and what happened in Newfoundland and
Labrador are two very different things.
They are very different because relations between Indigenous people and
Europeans were different in Newfoundland and Labrador from the experiences in everything
west of here.
There are some broad similarities, but in Newfoundland
and Labrador, there are some important differences. That history must be understood since the
current situation came out of the past situations. And if we cannot get that
history told fully and honestly, then we are off to a rocky start.
Take residential schools as an example. In Newfoundland and Labrador, residential
schools were not organized or operated exclusively for “Indians” with the
purpose of assimilating the children into non-Indigenous culture. What we have
been hearing in the news
media recently and what came out of the local court settlement presents a
fundamentally false version of what took place in Newfoundland and Labrador.
As for dialogue, the accusations aimed at Perry
Trimper are a good example of how people are not interested in discussion. In both the first and second episodes, no one
dealt with what Trimper actually said.
Instead, they dealt with what some people accused of him saying and that
those assumptions made him a racist.
No one was interested in listening, which is an
essential part of dialogue. No one asked questions, except to wonder why
Trimper wasn’t already dangling from the end of a rope, figuratively at least. People
were interested only in accusing, harming, and silencing. That is true of both
Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The
Telegram offered two excellent examples of rushing to judgment, complete
with misinformation: Pam
Frampton and Martha
Muzychka. It’s hard not to see both
column as examples both of the Telegram’s internal
culture - but also the authoritarian, and in many respects fundamentally
anti-democratic political culture prevalent in Newfoundland and Labrador.
The hard truth is that reconciliation worthy of the
name is not possible in a political culture that deliberately avoids dialogue,
that suppresses dissent, and that rushes to judgment.
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