The Impact of 215

Sadness, anger, horror, incredulity, shame, regret, and repentance are just a few of the emotions and responses that cycle through my soul since hearing of the discovery of 215 children’s bodies buried at an Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Read it here.

These are people that died away from their homes and communities; people that disappeared without explanation and without record. It is the ultimate evidence of an arrogant, racist, and elitist system that married governments and churches into one deliberate machine intended to erase a people and to eliminate identity and to destroy any residue of ethnic sovereignty.

There are at least four categories of people impacted by this shocking discovery: the families connected by blood, community, tribe, ethnicity; the dominant governing society of the nation; the uninvolved observer citizens of the dominant nation; and the individuals that actually were physically present as workers in those institutions while they operated.

Many of my readers are part of a Christian church. Many of you live as members of a society that is both religious and governmental. Most of you are comfortably and safely settled in that dominant place that allows you to view the atrocities of the world from behind the judge’s bench.

Me too.

One difference in my experience is that I was an unwitting participant in the crimes of the nation in its marriage contract with the churches in an attempt to deal with the “Indian problem.” I played a small role in the underlying goal to destroy the sovereignty and identity of the indigenous peoples of this nation. I was there.

I don’t have the privilege of sitting on a white throne pronouncing empathetic, remorseful, self-righteous condemnation of what my people did in history–including the national and religious efforts that led to atrocities such as the disappearance of 215 individuals in one single institution. I was there.

That’s because I was a worker at an IRS, an Indian Residential School. For three school-years I did maintenance and repair work to help keep one of these institutions operating.

What am I to do with that?

I have to own it. For more than 20 years I have been consciously owning it and working to redeem what can be redeemed of a story that includes priceless, respectful, lasting relationships with indigenous people–all shrouded in a cloud of dark, destructive, hidden agendas of cultural imperialism and societal assimilation. I own it.

As a young adventure-seeker barely out of my teen years, I volunteered to be part of an enterprise of which I knew absolutely nothing. The conservative Mennonite folks with which I was associated had entered a contract with the provincial ministry of education. The best version of the story is that they were responding to requests from communities and families that had no formal education options in their home communities or on their traplines.

No one told me the worst version of the story: that the government national agenda was to “kill the Indian in the Indian.” None of the Christian collaborators I knew were intentional in that goal. Most of the Christians I worked with really believed, in a naïve simplicity, that the Mennonite version of faith and the Mennonite version of work ethic and lifestyle would benefit any and all–no matter their culture or history.

I’m not alone in my story. Thousands of my people supported this effort with dollars, labour, food, volunteerism, and deep passion for doing the “work of missions.” Very, very few ever questioned the underlying collaboration of church and state, and the sinister goals that fueled the national agenda behind it.

It is very easy to look back on history and sanctimoniously condemn those who didn’t see what was coming; to righteously affirm, “I’d never have done that, had I been there.” That kind of repentance is not. That kind of indignation all feels very different to someone like me.

I do. I do repent for participating in something I didn’t understand. I drafted an apology statement that was adopted by the agency where I’m a member, and a statement that is still an official reflection on a convoluted history. Read it. It is history that is complicated and that is a troubling mix of complicity with evil and many good intentions.

I have literally spent long, torturous days in talking circles with indigenous people who came through the Mennonite schools. I have heard enough stories and experiences of pain and neglect and loss to last me for several lifetimes. I have cried with, I have expressed my deep regret for the feelings and outcomes. It is never enough. Really, it is not enough.

I call on my people, especially those in my story and my personal realm of relationship and association to lay down the determination to defend and protect the residential school history. What value is there in writing the story from only one perspective? What will we gain by declaring that my good intentions were enough to negate the underlying evil design and the personal scars that suffering individuals will never lose?

I don’t care if I was innocent, personally. I don’t care if much of what I did had some good results. With Jesus Christ as a model, I will try to identify with the pain and loss and injustice that others experience as a result of what I helped to perpetrate. I will help to carry the burden of those affected by my part of the story. I don’t live in shame, but I do live in a state of repentance and empathy.