The Church Must Apologize!

Vincent J. Curtis

3 June 21

RE: Give us the full truth on residential school deaths.  Hamilton Spectator editorial of 3 June 21.

As the editorial sagely observed, Prime Minister Trudeau in this episode, as well as others, has been long on symbolism and short on substance.  One reason why the Catholic Church has no need to apologize for at the Kamloops residential school is that Prime Minister Trudeau blamed Canada for it.  “Canada is responsible!” he said on the floor of the House of Commons.

Well, if Canada is responsible, then the Catholic Church is not.  And I’m not going to apologize for insisting that Logic 101 be respected.

Intellectually, today’s generation was born yesterday.  Today’s public would not think to conceive of what life must have been like on Indian reserves in lonely western Canada between 1890 and 1950.  Were children and adults of that era immune to such diseases as polio, scarlet fever, typhoid, cholera, whooping cough, tuberculosis, and influenza?  How did the Indians do during the Spanish flu epidemic: did any of them die of it?  We don’t know.  There are few, if any, records; but one is inclined to believe that some young Indians died of disease during that sixty year period.

Lacking records, we have nothing to compare and put into perspective the findings at Kamloops.  That children died at the school was known at the time, forgotten, and re-discovered as some kind of revelation.

In this day of trigger warnings and safe spaces, the purpose of residential schools was to civilize wild Indians in teeth of resistance that exists to this day.  The reason for the civilizing mission was that the leading thinkers of the day believed that North American Indians could not survive European settlement otherwise.  A western education and western acculturation, they believed, gave the Indian races of North America their best chance of survival.  And they seem to have been right.

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