I WASN’T LISTENING TO THE WORD “GENOCIDE" UNTIL NOW - Martha Tatarnic
On July 1st this year, Canada Day, I was at my parents’ house on Bass Lake. Their home is on land that used to hold the family cottage, bought by my great-great-grandfather. Eventually the cottage was torn down by my grandmother and a permanent home put in its place. We were there for Canada Day with my two kids and my niece and nephew. The four of them represent the sixth generation of our family who have been able to receive this sense of home, this embodiment of family, on this piece of land.
Normally, we would celebrate Canada Day by going into town for the parade and then, often, braving the crowds to go in again for the fireworks at night. This year, most communities cancelled their celebrations. Last year, they were cancelled because of Covid. This year, they were cancelled because of the unmarked graves.
We didn’t go into town for fireworks. Instead, we gathered at our family flag pole, lowered it to half mast, and offered prayers of remembrance and sorrow.
In June, a series of stories from across Canada began to come to light. It started in British Columbia, then it was Saskatchewan, then there was more to emerge from British Columbia. Unmarked graves connected to “Indian Residential Schools” were identified at four different sites in June and July. 215 in one place; 751 in another; 182 in a third and 160 in a fourth. We know that burial sites like these exist all across Canada, as well as the United States. We know that the majority of these graves were of children who died in the residential school system. We know that the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee here in Canada, Murray Sinclair, estimates that the total number of children who died in the school system could range anywhere from 6,000 to 25,000. We know that the identification of buried bodies at the sites of these former schools will continue.
Language matters. We can’t say that these graves are a discovery. Indigenous people have been telling us for generations that thousands of their children were forcibly taken and didn’t come home. It is also not new to hear the word “genocide” used to describe what happened to Indigenous people across North America. I have heard it spoken in the midst of sacred conversations of which I have been a part. I have heard it in reference to residential schools, to the violent and clearly documented project that the residential schools embodied: “to kill the Indian.” I have heard it on the news and in the historical accounts that we are only beginning to lift up more widely. I have heard it in the Blanket Exercise—an interactive educational tool to help Canadians better understand the story of our country—where we can viscerally see and experience the targeting and elimination of Indigenous people from this land.
And even with the widespread knowledge of those graves, even with the occasional reference to genocide, I wasn’t fully listening until now. A lot of us weren’t listening until now.
I have read any number of fiction and non-fiction accounts of World War 2. I have gone into the concentration camps through those stories. I have paid attention to the horrors of what was done in that other time and different place. So, too, I have read about and heard about the targeted elimination of the Tutsi in Rwanda and the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. I have shuddered at the accounts of merciless and systematic killing that occurred elsewhere.
But I have been so clouded by my own privilege as a white person living in Canada, so informed by my own experience of freedom and peace in this country, that I haven’t been able to hear that our country doesn’t just have a story like this too, our country is actually built on this story. Targeted and systemic violence and murder and degradation of a particular segment of the population, simply on the basis of race and skin colour, happened here too.
“Genocide is defined in international law as certain prohibited acts or omissions committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group of people.” Over the course of generations, a whole host of political administrations, and embodying many actions and omissions, “Canada has demonstrated a continuing policy, with varying motivations but with an underlying intent that’s remained the same — to destroy Indigenous peoples physically, biologically and as social units.” (How Canada Committed Genocide Against Indigenous Peoples Explained)
Residential schools are just one piece of the puzzle in our country’s story. Starvation, broken treaties, forcible removal from their land, an ongoing project—well beyond residential schools—to remove Indigenous children from their families, lack of access to clean water, housing and food security, not to mention the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women whose deaths were not taken seriously or properly investigated, these are just some of the examples of how genocide has taken place in our country.
This is the kind of truth that is much easier to keep at arm’s length, to believe happens in other places and in other people’s history. Not here. Not us.
My own comfortable arm’s length has been challenged at a pace that I am not proud to admit. I’ve been involved for many years now in an initiative across our church to develop partnerships with Indigenous communities for the purpose of securing clean drinking water for all Canadians. I have participated in the national gatherings of our church for the last decade and have heard and seen in a variety of settings the trauma, the poverty, the lack of housing and clean water, in which Indigenous leaders in our church are leading and ministering to their people. I have had the great blessing of walking in some small part with Archbishop Mark MacDonald, our National Indigenous Archbishop, and the Venerable Val Kerr, Archdeacon of Truth and Reconciliation and Indigenous Ministries, watching and listening to them invite us with their strong and honest voices to understand our history, to understand that we are still living with our history, and to hear the resilience and the cry for justice in the voices of Indigenous people today.
And I still wasn’t fully understanding or accepting what has actually happened.
It’s the children who have undone me. It’s their story that no longer allows me to keep this story at bay. Like so many Canadians, I have been haunted and horrified by the front-and-center reality that thousands upon thousands of children were ripped from their homes and the arms of their loved ones with the express purpose of “solving a problem.” That there was inexcusable and awful abuse that went on in those homes, that I knew. That they were subjected to inhumane living conditions, I knew that as well. I knew that their names, their language, their hair, their clothing and their families were mercilessly cut away from them.
But then there are the bodies, dumped in the ground. It is the complete lack of dignity and care that was afforded them, even in death, that made me understand and accept a truth that I haven’t wanted to know.
Shortly after the graves started to be identified, Archbishop Mark spoke to the group he leads regarding safe water in Indigenous communities. He reflected to us the pain and grief triggered across Indigenous Canada by these graves. He noted the fundamental lie at the heart of the residential school system: that if Indigenous people could simply assimilate, learn English, cut their hair, take on the Christian faith, and become like us, then they would be welcomed into the ranks of the privileged, into the job opportunities, the economic benefits, the material stability of non-Indigenous Canada. Instead, their bodies were disposed of—not on consecrated ground, not within the dignity and care of the prayers of the church, but rather thrown out as the gone, the forgotten, the never-existed. Thrown out like they weren’t someone’s child. Like they weren’t a child that should have been loved and protected and honored by all of us.
Archbishop Mark also spoke of hope. He noted that these children’s bodies were speaking prophetically to us all. “Children were herded by RCMP into places where they were decimated by plagues and poverty and hunger and abuse. The residue of this genocide is now being seen in these graves and calling attention to what happened. Evil cannot be hidden. Our task now is to listen.”
I have been too slow to listen. Many of us have been too slow to listen. The truth is sometimes revealed to us on a time scale that is agonizing and horrific. It should not have taken until now for us to hear how a whole people were targeted and killed off and thrown away. Meanwhile, so many of us have such an abundance of freedom and resources that we mostly take what we have for granted, hardly noticing the running water that we waste, treating our religious beliefs and our right to vote as nice personal options—not hard-won freedoms that we should not only value but relentlessly work to name and claim for others, too.
Our family stood at that flag pole on Canada Day expressing our grief for those dishonored children. We stood on land that has been in our family for almost 100 years, passed down generation to generation—this haven of home and stability for six generations. There is something in our gratitude for this land of ours that throws into stark relief the enormity of all that has been stolen from Indigenous people: not only land, but the ability for the gifts of family, community, language, shared story and the connection to the earth to be passed uninterrupted down through the generations.
Non-Indigenous Canadians have struggled with why our generation should assume guilt for the sins of the past. I find guilt to be an unhelpful concept in almost every situation. What I know for certain is that we do bear responsibility. We bear responsibility because we cannot pretend that we are not connected to one another. It is simply not true that my privilege is unrelated to the injustice and cruelty others have suffered, that the good things that I enjoy are not diminished and compromised by the horrors in which others live, that we aren’t all tasked with building a better world for each and every one of us.
What is true is that the way forward in addressing the sins of the past, and the painful and unjust circumstances of our country’s present, demands action. It also demands a whole lot more listening.
It shouldn’t have taken us until now to hear and treasure the voices of these children, or to understand the history of our country. Yet there is a kindness, an undeserved kindness, in having another chance to hear, to understand, and to act.
Martha Tatarnic currently leads a thriving urban church in St. Catharines--the Niagara region of Ontario. Her book The Living Diet: A Christian Journey to Joyful Eating explores the relationships between food, body image, community and spirituality.