Posts from — May 2007

I’m looking forward to seeing the upcoming “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” on HBO. (Not that I currently have HBO, mind you…)

There’s an interesting interview with Adam Beach on the HBO site that will be of particular interest to English 182 students. Discovered this site and film thanks to a link today on Rob Schmidt’s excellent Newspaper Rock blog.

Okay. So, I’ve been paying as much attention as I can to the playoffs, although I’ve not watched many games yet. Grading, still ongoing, takes precedence over everything else.

As an Oiler fan, the thrill of last year’s playoffs makes this year a drag every way that you look at it. It’s hard not to see last year’s star Oiler Chris Pronger playing so well for the Ducks and not want to watch just about anything else. Or at least that’s what I thought until I read this….. If the Ducks make it to the Cup, the Oilers get another first-round draft pick. From here on in, I’m cheering for the Ducks in the West, though it’s also hard not to like the Sharks. Once they make the finals, though, I will be cheering for the Eastern team (Go Sens!) to wipe that smile off of the Ducks’ faces in four games straight.

That sounds kind of mean of me, doesn’t it? Given all that happened with Pronger and Edmonton, I just don’t think many of us could take seeing him hoist the Cup this year. I’d like to see the Sens win it all, finally.

Here’s some info from Richard Van Camp on the current state of comics by aboriginal writers. Van Camp’s one of the writers I would love to have squeezed on to the syllabus this semester. His novel The Lesser Blessed is fantastic, as are his short stories. I’ll definitely be including him in one course or another in the near future and hope to bring him to campus someday as well.

I’ve never been a huge White Stripes fan until now. This is pretty cool.

(I posted this earlier tonight on the blog for my English 182 course, which wraps up tomorrow. I thought it would be of interest to the regular readers of this blog as well.)

Over the last week or so, the Globe and Mail has published an important series of stories about the history of the residential school system in Canada. In particular, the stories have focused on what to my mind is an unfathomable, unforgiveable neglect of the Canadian government as it ignored the vast numbers of native children who died of tuberculosis while attending these schools:

“A Globe and Mail examination of documents in the National Archives reveals that children continued to die from tuberculosis at alarming rates for at least four decades after a senior official at the Department of Indian Affairs initially warned in 1907 that schools were making no effort to separate healthy children from those sick with the highly contagious disease.

Peter Bryce, the department’s chief medical officer, visited 15 Western Canadian residential schools and found at least 24 per cent of students had died from tuberculosis over a 14-year period. The report suggested the numbers could be higher, noting that in one school alone, the death toll reached 69 per cent.” (Globe and Mail, “Natives died in droves as Ottawa ignored warnings; Tuberculosis took the lives of students for at least 40 years.” April 24, 2007. I would link directly to all of these articles, but I’m sorry to say that most of them are restricted to Globe subscribers).

On top of everything else that we’ve already talked about in our class with regard to the history of these schools, we learned this week of how many thousands of young children died in this system, which chose not to separate sick children from the regular student body, resulting in an infection rate more dramatic than perhaps we’ve ever seen anywhere else: “How many aboriginal children died from tuberculosis at the schools? Health Canada’s website reports a death rate as high as 8,000 per 100,000 during the 1930s and 1940s — decades after Dr. Bryce’s warnings. To put that in context, the death rates from tuberculosis on native reserves were, says Health Canada, among “the highest ever reported in a human population” — and at 700 per 100,000 people, they were less than 10 per cent of the rate afflicting children in the residential schools during the 1930s and 1940s.” (Globe and Mail, “The Lost Children of Our Schools.” April 28, 2007.)

In the discussions that have gone on about these revelations, we see a number of things of which we need to take notice.

First, if you factor in tuberculosis to what we already know about the physical and sexual abuse many of these students suffered, the systematic and deliberate destruction of culture, language and identity in the guise of “education,” the forced removal of thousands of children from their families, communities, and all that they knew, we’re reminded once again of how devastating this system was to the First Nations peoples of North America. Genocide is not an inappropriate word to use to describe what happened

Second, one of the other things that the Conservative government’s response to the discussion of these issues reveals is the nature of some of the stories Canadians still tell themselves about what Canada did to the first peoples of that land. Quoted in the Globe and Mail’s editorial on this topic over the weekend, “Indian Affairs Minister Jim Prentice said he will not apologize to aboriginals for the government’s role in overseeing the largely church-run residential schools because ‘fundamentally, the underlying objective had been to try and provide an education to aboriginal children.’”

In The Truth About Stories, Tom King reminds us that “the truth about stories is that’s all that we are” and that we can learn a lot from looking more carefully at the stories we tell ourselves, at the narratives we allow to shape our perceptions of the world. The Globe runs with this idea in its Saturday editorial and reminds us of many of the myths some Canadians still hold on to with respect to how Canada has treated Native peoples in the past and in the present:

The myth of Canada’s residential schools for native children holds that the schools had a paternalistic purpose, and that even after all is revealed about them — the physical and sexual abuse, the forced relocation of children, the ban on speaking native languages — Canada meant well. The country was simply limited by the assimilative vision of the times.

The full story of those deaths has not entered the Canadian consciousness. The Canadian Encyclopedia says nothing about tuberculosis under “residential schools” or “native education.” When the Canadian government apologized in 1998 for sexual and physical abuse at the schools, it said nothing about the deaths of children. (Globe and Mail, “The Lost Children of Our Schools.” April 28, 2007.)



For what it’s worth, Jim Prentice has stated in the last day or so that Canada will launch a new effort to learn more about this sad chapter of Canada’s past that remains fresh for many people across the country:

“As for a government apology, the minister said it is better to wait until a new Truth and Reconciliation Commission completes its five-year mandate to tour the country and issue a definitive report on the history of residential schools. Mr. Prentice told the House that his decision to attach “enormous significance” to such a commission dates back to his experience working as a constitutional adviser in South Africa in the early 1990s as the country worked to dismantle its apartheid structure.”

While this is a noble and likely important project, it’s not enough for right now. The Liberal opposition today spearheaded a largely symbolic vote that passed unanimously in Parliament today. It calls for the House of Commons to apologize to First Nations peoples for what the residential school system did to them.

As these recent revelations — “reminders” is perhaps a more appropriate word here, as these details were never forgotten by the First Nations — show us, the effect of what Canada did to the First Nations through the residential schools alone are still an everyday part of life for those people:

“In his opening speech, Saskatchewan Liberal MP Gary Merasty, a former Cree Grand Chief who moved yesterday’s motion, painted a dark picture of the residential schools experience.

‘I stand here for numerous victims whose stories will never be told, whose remains are scattered across our land in unmarked graves, scars on the land and even larger scars on our nation’s psyche,” he said. “According to some reports, students in the early to middle part of the last century often had to help bury their classmates, their friends, their relatives. Yes, children buried children.'”

Reading words like that, like many of the words we’ve read this semester are hard, painful, depressing, devastating even. But they’re also important and words that I hope we all try to remember and not forget. We’ve seen this semester the power that stories can have. Stories are not simply entertainment. They are fundamental to who we are, how we see the world, and to the decisions we make about how we live our lives and what we demand of the leaders and representatives we elect. We’ve seen what can happen when we change the stories we tell ourselves. As King tells us, we can change reality by changing the stories we tell ourselves. Changing those stories is hard, but necessary work.

From the Huffington Post:

The events of the past week in the Vermont legislature mark the beginning of a sea change in American political power. This may sound a bit grandiose coming on the heels of a defeat of an impeachment resolution in the Vermont House, but is true nonetheless.

Read the whole article here.