The Trauma Experience of Mennonites and First Nations Compared

The Trauma Experience of Mennonites and First Nations Compared

In the last 30 yrs or so we in Canada have heard a lot from our First Nations neighbours about the abuse many of them and their ancestors experienced in residential schools. We have also learned how the intragenerational transmission of that has affected so many more. The First Nations are looking for support from their fellow Canadians in addressing this issue. There is also discussion of a broader atmosphere of racism towards First Nations in so many areas that they are also bringing up.

Many Mennonites themselves or whose ancestors came from The Ukraine and Russia after 1914 have also reported sometimes horrific traumatization experiences. However, most of these people have done much better in this country as a group then their First Nations neighbors. That makes some of them suggest, even if not explicitly so, that there is something intrinsically deficient with the First Nations peoples in that they can't, to use a much maligned, appropriately so, phrase, "get over it" and move on the way the Mennonites seem to have done for the most part.

Perhaps a detailed analysis of the experiences of these 2 peoples will help point to why the Mennonites generally have done better than their aboriginal counterparts in this country. Let me say at the outset that this essay at this point is simply going to be a reiteration of knowledge that most students of First Nations and Mennonite history will know. It is not going to be a footnoted thesis. Nor is it meant to be exhaustively comprehensive in terms of details. This may need to change. It is really an attempt to begin an exploration of this area, as much as it may need looking at. I do it being entirely open to correction on facts and opinions stated, omitted, misunderstood, downplayed or perhaps exaggerated. I should also say that I will somewhat indiscriminately use  the terms First Nations, aboriginal, indigenous, native and Indian, as they have all been used in serious discourse at one time or another.

As one of the European Mennonites by descent, even though my ancestors came here well before 1914, I am still more familiar with the story of my Anabaptist brothers and sisters in some ways so identify with them, then I am with my indigenous neighbors. Therefore, I will start with a review of what they experienced. I hope my Europeanness does not carry with it such a strong bias in site of my upbringing and self-concept that it shows through. Please forgive me if it does. I am addressing this to Mennonites, realizing that what I am saying to my co-religionists applies equally well to many others in Canada.

We could start the story in the Netherlands, perhaps even in Switzerland and surrounding nations in the South. Our Mennonite forebears were severely persecuted by the Holy Roman Catholic Church as well as the Reformed Church And Lutheran Church. This persecution included significant torture and killing of many individuals, male and female, young and old. As a result, the Mennonites from the southern area mentioned above by and large moved to The United States Of America. Those from the north moved eastwards, ending up in Prussia. They experienced some difficulties there but essentially became quite established, successful and prosperous. Their farming prowess in particular attracted the attention of Catherine the Great, the monarch of Russia at the time. She invited them to come and help populate and develop the lands that Russia had recently freed from the grip of the roving Tatars.

So, on the one hand, here the Mennonites were already moving into the area that had been home to another group of people who were no longer that welcome there. By and large, they were also moving into an area where it appears that many of the folks dwelling there at the time were technologically and culturally inferior. This included both those with some of these more Asian roots such as the Tatars as well as some of the Ukrainians who were the real residents of that area which is now part of the Ukraine. I'm referring to the area north of the Crimea and Black Sea, which is where my ancestors settled.

These dynamics did play a significant role in the negative experiences Mennonites suffered during the Russian Revolution and all the way through to World War II and beyond. Some of it was opposition from the state that had become communist and did not want anything religious going on. However, initially, before the new Bolshevik state really gained control of the area, a good deal of the atrocities perpetuated against my people had a somewhat revengeful motive. There was an element of retaliation against those who had moved into this land that had not been theirs. There was also an element of simply taking from those who had been more successful now that the control of the czars was gone and the communists had no yet firmly established their rule. In some cases, we know there was even an element of payback as those who had worked for and perhaps suffered harshly at the hands of Mennonite employers sought revenge.

All of this took a great emotional and even spiritual toll. However, it never became as demoralizing as what happened to the First Nations in the Americas. Why? I think part of the answer is that, in a way, the Mennonites were moving in an area that was still part of Europe, of which they had always been members. They were also those who had the advantage in terms of economics and education. You could say that they were privileged. They kept up ties with the rest of Europe and as they settled and prospered, they introduced many of the more cultured and progressive aspects of life in Western Europe into their communities.

Let us compare this then with what happened to First Nations peoples in this regard. They were living in what we could grant them was their land, it not having been populated by anyone else in known historical memory. Then the Europeans came. Because they were different in terms of the First Nations in some technological ways that they saw as mechanistically superior, they considered themselves to be on a higher plane. They also believed that, as Christians, whatever one might want to say about type of Christian they were, they were also in that area above the people they found on these continents and islands. It really does not appear that the settlers really ever give credence to the fact that this land was not theirs for the taking, and that they were moving into unfamiliar territory that did not belong to them. For reasons including the couple mentioned above, they simply claimed these lands for their overseas monarchs. To begin with, they regarded the First Nations people they met simply as races to be brought up to speed with respect to civilization including religion. There was some, perhaps unspoken for the most part, acknowledgment to begin with that they needed these peoples help to learn how to survive and make sense of living in this land, learning what it had to offer. However, it was not long before the European newcomers were in the driver’s seat and dictating what happened as they advanced ever westward in larger and larger numbers. Those early beginnings, and perhaps some of the more noble ideals that still inhabited the minds of some of the individuals at that time, had seen the signing of a number of treaties between the settlers and their representatives from there governing bodies and First Nations leadership. However, for the most part, right from the beginning, these treaties simply became means of the invaders getting what they wanted without experiencing a lot of resistance and hostility.

Things are not nearly so dire, for the most part, for First Nations peoples in North America between 1492 and the time of the US revolution in the early 19th century as they were in what we sometimes refer to as Latin America. The attitude of the mainly Spanish and some Portuguese explorers there was much more one of simple conquest of the natives. There was much more fighting and bloodshed from early on. To be sure, there were skirmishes and smaller battles in North America as well, but it wasn't until the US, and then Canada, really began to "open up the West" as the newcomers put it, that things became untenable for the indigenous peoples in North America as well.

The newcomers wanted land. In part, no doubt, because the indigenous people were judged as not being on par with the Europeans in terms of the technological, business and spiritual areas of life, the aboriginals were not seen as equal partners to work together with in this process. Especially in the US, where it was more overt, there was much more of an attitude of simply raiding the land of the Indians. The sought after outcome in Canada was really the same, and perhaps one can say that it was, although I believe that was really unintentional, even more malignantly carried out, because the First Nations continued to be dealt with in terms of making treaties with them so that the settlers could move on to the land without, to put it simply, getting into any fights with those who were there before them. This was quickly achieved by having the first nations leadership accept tracts of land, the infamous Reserves as we call them in Canada, where they could supposedly live in peace and carry on their livelihood as they wished under the protection of the government while the newcomers did what they wanted to with the land around them.

So, increasingly, the Indians, as they were erroneously been called, were really seen as being in the way of the progress of civilization in this, as the Europeans arrogantly called it, New World. Various schemes were carried out to hinder the Indians. Sometimes this took a turn of making them ill - the famous stories of “smallpox blankets.” At other times it took the form of actually preventing them from selling crops and making a livelihood versus the settlers about them. There was the relentless push to make their religion and cultures unacceptable and pagan or even as the church tried to Christianize of them. There were the endless controlling strictures placed on them even in terms of freedom of movement by the Department of Indian Affairs under the Indian act of 1876.

So, what was going on with the Mennonites in Russia that compares to this? I think we would need to compare the various revolutionary armies and finally the full force of the Bolshevik and Stalinist governments to the settlers in North America, and the Mennonites to the Indians. There was a lot done to destroy the Mennonites economic base, but this was mainly the uncontrolled ravage of the rebels that ran rampant during the early years of the Communist era. However, then the Communist authorities themselves moved in to take over the land and turn private property into communes. During all of this time, many Mennonites fled westward successfully, but many were also displaced eastward into Siberia and places of that nature. They were put in prison and labor camps and many did not survive. They were not allowed to practice their faith. Whereas they had generally gotten by still on German uptill then, they now had to learn Russian and use it daily.

Much of this is not that different from what Indians experienced at the hands of whites. However, although the Mennonites were moving largely from a position of privilege and superiority to one where their land and livelihoods were taken away from them, they were not so much losing the knowledge of whom they had been. Many still managed to retain their language and faith. They were still Europeans. Although they did not accept or agree, for the most part, with what was happening in Russia, they understood how European society worked and were successful in that milieu. First Nations peoples, on the other hand, were being overwhelmed by a different society, one which was very different from theirs and which they did not really understand in terms of being able to cope with it or integrate into it. As we have already mentioned, even when they might have wanted to or made an attempt to, there were obstacles placed in their way.

The whites, for the most part, to this day, do not really acknowledge or accept that the First Nations of these continents and islands had adapted reasonably well to their environments. They had their own spirituality, their own economies and interactions, which had served their purposes satisfactorily for millennia. As we have mentioned above, mainly because they were different from the Europeans in terms of the supposed superiority of the latter, if one wants to call it that, in terms of having things like the gun, the wheel, and written language, the Europeans considered the natives inferior. Unfortunately, that attitude has really not changed on the part of many Canadians, including too many Mennonites.

Then, if things weren't going badly enough for the increasingly decimated populations of indigenous peoples, the governments of the day became increasingly frustrated with what they regarded as the aboriginals' failure to adapt to European ways. This led to the idea that they had to start with the children to change the Indian, basically to a white European, in every way except perhaps appearance and skin color. Thus was born the residential school movement. It was decided that children needed to be removed from their parents and forced to learn European ways of living which included speaking only English or French, depending on the area, and becoming Christian. Much of the schooling was forced upon the First Nations. Because the natives had by this time already become so demoralized by what our governments and the settlers had done to them, they for the most part put up little resistance.

So, children were literally in many cases pulled from their parents’ arms at a young age and placed in the hands of people whom they could not even communicate with. They were forced to dress differently, wear their hair differently, often forced to have no communication with home or even siblings in the same school and eat different food. Their whole lifestyle was changed. As we have learned, to facilitate this happening, the staff these schools too frequently exhibited extreme measures of discipline against their charges. There were untold cases of physical and sexual abuse, let alone emotional abuse. To make matters worse, governments being what they are, increasingly underfunded these institutions so that many students, and sometimes even staff, were nutritionally deprived. We have recently learned that this even went beyond that in terms of studies done to see what might be the effects of nutritional deprivation. Thousands of children died. Too many parents were not notified. Too many graves are unmarked.

These children were sometimes only allowed to go home during holidays and even that was sometimes brief. As a result they became increasingly alienated from their families and communities, partly because of the actual brainwashing that was taking place in the schools. The divergence between what they were learning and how they had been brought up previously deepened this sense of confusion and loss of identity. Being robbed of their children, their sense of their future, lead to despair for many of their parents who became depressed and turned to alcohol and sometimes suicide. As a result, when the children finished these years of schooling and went home, there was often no supportive family structure or community for them to fit back into or carry on in. There certainly was no attempt made to incorporate them into the white society into which these systems had tried to fit them by this education. Thus, they were really in limbo. As a result, many of them also became depressed and turned to things like alcohol and suicide. They had not grown up with parents and siblings and so had not learned how to be members of the family or parent. Therefore, when they did form family units and procreate, their children often suffered exactly as their parents had suffered in the residential schools. When one is so demoralized, when one is made to feel ashamed of everything one had stood for and been and when the society around us does not really care, there is no avenue to express what one is experiencing or what one feels is happening. As a result, these patterns continued for generations without being brought to light.

Where the Mennonites experiencing similar things back in Russia? Families were frequently broken up, but most often by removal of the fathers. Thus, there was still the mother to raise the children. As has already been expressed in an essay by Sherry Sawatzky Dyck ( http://www.ccpa-accp.ca/Conference2013/ Presentations/ Sawatzky_B19B.pdf), there was still an element of struggle to continue on with their faith, community and language. However, this is different than what happened in North America. Here, the Indians in some way had all of this taken out from under them, but were not given any place in the new society. The Mennonites who were left in their communities knew from where they had come and kept that alive. For the most part, they were still living with their families, such as they were, and such as the circumstances were. They were, albeit probably forcibly, given positions in the new society, as everyone in communism was supposed to have a role. So, at least there was some purpose, meaning and financial reward to their day. Even many in “Siberia” struggled mightily to retain their faith and identity. There was very little of this for most Indians, as we have seen. They were really left adrift.

Those Mennonites who did make it to North America, Mexico, Paraguay and later Bolivia, succeeded because they still knew who they were. They still had a sense of community. They still had their language and faith. As Sherry Sawatzky-Dyck has also pointed out, it may have also been because there were others in their larger community who were looking out for them and wanting to help them. Mennonites as a larger community prayed for them and worked for their relief and escape; they sent them aid.  Ms Dyck talks of the role of the Mennonite Central Committee in this. As we have just seen, the first nations we had none of this. They had nowhere to turn.

When you think about it, it is really almost miraculous of that some of them, I think in the 1980s, finally came forward with what had happened to them and were heard. There were those in our country who were willing to hear and acknowledge this and give it exposure. All of this has led to what we can hope is the beginning of a turnaround in First Nations fortunes. Far from being eradicated, their numbers are rapidly increasing. They are becoming more educated. They are becoming involved in business and running their own lives. However, there are still too many who have been affected by the residential school legacy. There are still too many of us settlers who still do not see the whole picture and still discriminate against First Nations people, even though we live on their land, and, one could say, without their permission.

To me it is also somewhat amazing and telling that it is the First Nations People who are reaching out to the rest of us to make this right with their efforts to correct it and reconcile with the rest of us for all that has been done to them. I think there are comparisons to the uprising of the blacks in the mid-20th century America. It was the victims, such as Martin Luther King, who gave us the inspiration to help end segregation, not those who had brought it about. It is similar to the end of apartheid in South Africa. Again, it is the victims, such as Nelson Mandela, who showed the better way and helped begin to change things.

Let me say one more thing that relates to spirituality and our faith. If we as Christians look at our legacy and what our God has said to us in so many ways over history, we are to pay special attention to the alien, the orphan, the widow and the broken. We are to let Justice roll like mighty waters. We are to love everyone as our neighbor. If we do not do this as a church, and I'm speaking more broadly than just Mennonites here, God can never bless the church in North America as much as he might want to.

We as European settlers, colonizers, and imperialists, for we are all of that, must forget our notions of superiority and look at our First Nations neighbors as equals. We need to accept them, listen to them and learn from them. There are things we can learn from them. That is something the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and particularly Reconciliation Canada is trying to do. We need to move forward together.

(First) Nation(s) or a People? - Thoughts on the Origins of the Jews

There is division and confusion within the Christian community today with regards to the status of The Children of Israel. There are those who claim that God's promises to The Children of Israel as recorded in the first portion of The Bible, in The Old Testament, as part of what Christians sometimes refer to as the Old Covenant, now refer to The Church, to Christians. Other, who come to this position in part because they may be taking a more literal translation of Scripture, perhaps also because of giving Old Testament content and messages equal weight to the New Testament message and what Jesus said, believe that the promises of the Old Testament to the Children of Israel in terms of geography and place with the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the Temple in all its Judaic Solomonic glory is to be fulfilled once again.

I am not a scholar in any of these areas. Some say that this division really only took on a significant role in the church's discourse with the 19th century rise of Zionism. As I understand that, this was a Jewish movement, which received Anglo-American support. The underpinnings of this doctrine were also in part promulgated and given further weight through the publication of the Scofield Bible and the rise of what some refer to as Dispensationalism. On the other hand, the first view mentioned, came to be known as the doctrine of Displacement, referring to the belief that Of the Church has "displaced" the Jews in God's story.

Because of the influence and lobbying of the Jewish population, particularly in the USA, and perhaps also the guilt of particularly the evangelical Christians, along with their interpretation of the Bible as mentioned above, this issue has yielded an increased murkiness of the church-state separation in recent decades in North America.

I am not a scholar of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek. However, I sometimes wonder whether some of the difficulty in this area goes back to the beginning of this story and where the word "nation" first appears. The first English use of the word is when God promises Abraham to make of him a great nation in Genesis 12:2. However, there is nothing in the story of the patriarchs to suggest that God was making a nation here in the geographic location other than in these promises. Indeed, even when The Children of Israel returned to the area Abraham had settled in after their 400-year stay in Egypt, and wanted a King, like the other nations around them, it is recorded that God, through the prophet Samuel, expressed his displeasure with this idea.

I can't help but wonder if what God had in mind all along was not simply a people. The whole story of the Bible, especially the messages of Jesus himself in the New Testament, do not really suggest that God was interested in establishing a nation for any particular reason. Everything that the prophets talk about has to do with a people's and their leaders’ obedience to God and what the results of that could be, and what the results of disobedience are.

However, one way or another, what passed for a nation by worldly standards, occurred with Abraham's descendants. This is not to say this was the original plan. Jesus did not support that. The rest of the New Testament writers for the most part, except for Paul's tortured arguments in chapters 9-11 of Romans, do not really support that concept. In fact, Paul argues strongly that the people God is interested in are those who believe in him. Faith is the mark of this nation, nothing racial or geographic.

My point with this entire here though is not so much to study this issue further. It is rather to come back to the issue of church-state separation that I mentioned had become intertwined with this in recent years. We in Canada had often prided ourselves that we did a better job of keeping this separation than our American cousins in large measure. However, suddenly we find ourselves with a Prime Minister who, like former US Pres. George Bush and others, was at times doing things like ending his speeches with "God bless Canada."

Now, at one level, I am all for that. However, I am equally in favor of God blessing the rest of the world just as much as Canada. Now let me take a turn in the development of my theme and get to the crux of the matter that I want to lead into.

Prime Minister Harper wants God to bless Canada. If he reads his Old Testament carefully, he would see that one of the regularly repeated commands to the Children of Israel, from Moses on through the prophets, is to look after the aliens, orphans, widows, sojourners etc. Jesus himself said, as recorded in Luke chapter 4:18-19, quoting the Prophet Isaiah (61:1-2), that he came to preach the gospel, the good news, to the poor, heal the brokenhearted, preach deliverance to the captives, set prisoners free, restore sight to the blind and set at liberty those who were bruised.

One could point to many areas where the current Conservative government's ideology and programs are not accomplishing this. However, I think the area where our government continues to fail most grievously in this area, covering all of the categories in Jesus' message above, is in Canada's dealings with our First Nations fellow inhabitants of this land.

I do not believe that God can bless this land as much as he might like to as long as we continue to fail to treat the first Nations as equals, making sure that they have living conditions as good as or better than the rest of us. Now, given my beliefs about church and state, I am not so much ultimately concerned though about God blessing the state. However, we have in the last 30 odd years heard increasingly about how the church has been very complicit in this, particularly in the past. I refer to the whole saga of the Indian Residential Schools, which is now being dealt with through the traveling Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its hearings. It is God's blessing of the church that concerns me more than anything else. I do not believe that God can bless the church in this land, unless we as the church do more to carry out Jesus' message as it pertains to the first Nations.

Now, do not get me wrong. I am not calling for a renewed evangelical missionary effort directed at our neighbors. They can tell you that they have been the most “missionized” group of people in this country. No, what we need to do is get to know these neighbors of ours, listen to them and their stories, walk with them and see what they have to tell us about how we together can move to living in equality and harmony in this land. We European colonizers and settlers have long thought we knew best and had the best way, but we do not have a monopoly on the truth. God has not only revealed himself to the white men. God has revealed and is revealing himself to the red man too, and we need to take note of what they understand. God wants one church. There will not be one church, one unity, in this land, until the First Nations are as much a member of the church as the rest of us.

These are my thoughts on this matter. This is not intended as a researched paper or thesis. It is simply another viewpoint on what I hope we can travel together on in a good way.

All my relations,

2013-8-16

Justice for First Nations in Canada – I. Why We as Christians Must Care

I am making an assumption that I am largely speaking to a Christian audience so I will address this topic from that perspective. However, if the reader who is not a believer is interested in this topic, you will find much here that will speak to you too. 

Now, with a title like this, it would appear that it is understood that there is an issue with justice for First Nations peoples. In other words, there may be some INjustice.

1. As Christians, we are called to be concerned about injustice wherever we encounter it. So, maybe I could end this discussion right there. That would not be very helpful though. We need to look at this more deeply than that, particularly as I think some of us wonder really why we should care.

2. There is another aspect to being Christian that I want to name and include in this discussion. That is the biblical Christian concept that we are a people.  It is rally only in the last couple of centuries in the history of the human race that we have begun to think of ourselves as individuals as we do now in our Western Culture. That does not mean that is the biblical way to view ourselves though.

God created us to be a people. When we were redeemed, we were saved to be a new people. This people is to consist of all colours and races and ethnic groups. That includes all of our backgrounds, and it includes First Nations Christians. This is to be a people united as God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit are united. So, as Christians we need to be concerned for our First Nations brothers and sisters and their issues because they are part of us.  If they have problems in our society because they are First Nations, by extension we have to be concerned about the problems that affect all First Nations, insofar as they also affect Christian natives. If we do not see them in our churches, if they do not feel welcome here, I think we have an issue.

There are other factors that we should bring out before we get to addressing the injustices, because they are there, and have been there for hundreds of years.

3. In the first place, as Canadians, we owe the First Nations a huge debt of gratitude. If it were not for them and their worldview and their knowledge of how to live I this land, we would not be here; there would be no Canada.

Think of it. The First Nations vastly outnumbered the European arrivals to begin with. They could easily have killed them all. But that was not their way. They did not immediately anticipate what the later result of the arrival of these white strangers would be. If they had, they might have killed our forefathers. I don’t think so though. It was not their way. First Nations peoples still believed in hospitality and being inclusive. The land was large. There was room for all.

4. Besides that, they taught our ancestors what they needed to know how to survive and prosper in this land. They taught us about things medicinal. They taught us about how to dress here. They may not have had the wheel but they had the canoe, and what better way to get around this land with all its waterways.

5. It was not long though before both sides began to see hat they needed to reach some agreements to go forward. These are called treaties. It was a concept the First Nations peoples were familiar with. However, the difference was that they saw them at a much deep level than the white folks. To the white folks it was just politics and business. To the First nations it was also a process rooted in their spirituality. It was something much more holistic and honourable. It was something ethically binding.

Now, some of you may be thinking – stop! Our ancestors weren’t even here yet when all of this was going on.  Why should we be responsible for what others did? Remember what I said about a people, a community. We are all part of the European race who was meeting the Indian race, as they were first called by us. So, there is a factor there to be considered.

Secondly though, some of the worst things to happen to our First Nations neighbours happened after the British and French colonies became Canada. We are all Canadians. That also makes us responsible as a people, as Canadians. So, as a recent slogan that some of you may have seen has it – We are all Treaty People.   We can’t escape it.

We won’t go into all the details about how the Europeans treated the Indians because the whites thought the Indians were pagan savages, inferior to Europe culturally and technologically. That was the attitude held by many though. To be fair, not all thought that way. There were many who appreciated the First Nations for who they were. There were some who tried to treat them honourably. However, the majority saw them as a people to be subdued so their land could be taken and its resources exploited for the benefit of of the Europeans. Just one example of this attitude is how the King of England in 1670 thought he could just unilaterally decide to give almost one third of North America to what became known as the Hudson’s bay Company for their commercial purposes. The people on the ground, at the front lines, realized they needed to get along with the natives to accomplish this. Hence the treaties.

Unfortunately, our people were not always the most honest when they made the treaties, let alone in how they honoured them. Let’s be blunt. There was a lot of deception gong on. The Indians did not all know what was going on. By the time they did, it was too late. The invading powers were gaining rights to the land and its resources in ways that increasingly and effectively cut the natives out of the loop when it came to the benefits of this.

6. When the white people started to arrive in increasing numbers and push their way westward across the continent, the next step was to establish what we in Canada call reserves, and in the US, reservations. It may have been put forward as a place of sanctuary where the natives could live. However, it soon became a place in which they were in effect imprisoned. It did not help that many of these reserves were on poor land. After all, the whites wanted the better land for farming, which wasn't one of the natives’ strong pints. They were nomadic hunters and traders. It also wasn't long before the reserves became smaller and smaller and some outright disappeared. So much for good intentions and honoring treaties. We stole their land.

7. One aspect of the treaties was that the natives had rights to ground to six feet under. After all, that is all you need to bury someone in. But where did that leave mineral rights? Another aspect was to give the Indians tools to begin to learn to farm. Well, some did learn to farm, and farm well. But then what happened? The whites schemed not to buy their grain as opposed to the whites’ grain and many were forced to give up farming and even starved. The parts of treaties about education and health care that the government was to provide them? 150 years later and we are still seeing First Nations education rates and wellness rates far too low compared to the rest of us. Something is wrong with this picture brothers and sisters. So, we took away their economic base and have not even provided them the same level and utility of education, health and well-being that we have.

8. Then, the whites, the Europeans, the colonialists bean to realize that the Indians weren’t changing rapidly enough to become like us and assimilate into our society that we were creating here. Wait a minute. Whose society being created where? That’s pretty arrogant I would say. Whose land were we on. Or whose had it been?

So, enter phase two of the process of subjugation – the residential schools. Make no mistake about it. By this time there were some in government who talked openly of the Indian problem and how to get rid of it. What they really wanted was to get rid of the Indians. We know that in the US there was a much more violent approach taken. Many were simply massacred and chased off their lands. Our people were watching and taking lessons.  It seems we still think the Americans have something to teach us. Just look at how our current government has followed the American political and military way, and even surpassed them in a negative approach to the environment, not only when it comes to things like global warming, but how our mining companies are abusing people around the world in their attempts to exploit the resources in their lands. You’d think we would have learned by now.

So, it was thought we would start with educating the children to our European Christian values and then they would become good productive Canadian citizens, like the rest of us.

So, let’s stop and think about that. What would your fathers have done if the government had said, OK, give us your children. They won’t be allowed to speak German even though that's all they know. They won’t be allowed to dress the way they are used to or wear their hair the way they are used to. They can’t have the religious beliefs they have grown up with. They can’t see their parents except may be twice a year. Would your ancestors have accepted that?

What does that do to families? What does that do to a people? You are basically destroying the fabric of the whole society. You are destroying their families. Indeed that’s what happened. When you’re taken from your parents at age 5 or 6 and raised by aliens, how do you expect them turn out? How do you expect them to know how to parent when they finish these schools and go out into the world to start their own families? They did not know how to do this. They were strangers to their families by the time they were grown. Not to mention the brokenness of the parents and grandparents who had been robbed of their children.

Nor did they have their religion to turn to for comfort. It was in many ways forbidden. What do you do? What happens? You get depressed. There is no one to help. You are all in the same boat. Where do you turn.  Unfortunately, alcohol was too available.

What do you do when all avenues seemed close to you? You lose hope, you wander the streets, looking for help. You move to the cities to find work or maybe get an education. But you are not welcome. You are not white. You become depressed. You turn to drugs and alcohol. You gravitate to the poorest parts of the city. The First Nations people who may not have been caught up in this are working back on their reserves. Or they are in schools and in places of employment. They are not seen like the unfortunate who have nowhere to turn and nothing to do. Those wandering the streets, drinking, abusing drugs, getting into fights and committing suicide at a rate far higher than the rest of the country; they are the First Nations people that too many of us other Canadians are familiar with. We have come to think that they are all like that. That, unfortunately, is the incorrect stereotype that many of us have of the Indian. But we have not understood, as I have just outlined, how they became like that. We made them that way. We as a nation and a people.

9. And our churches played a major role in that because they ran the schools that committed this atrocity against our Indian brothers and sisters. It would have been bad enough to take them away from their families and culture as we described. However, as we know hundreds and thousands were physically and sexually abused on top of that.  Can you imagine what damage it that does to a person's identity, character, sense of worth and self-esteem?

10. What does that do to a child's overall health? We now know again that hundreds and perhaps thousands died prematurely in the schools and too many were buried without any thought being given to sending them back to their families to be buried with respect. We were probably too ashamed to do that, knowing that they died in our care.  

11. Not only that, but the drinking began to have effects on children yet unborn. Again, we know that the proportion of First Nations children with Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, and all of the disability that that entails, is far higher than in the rest of the population.

12. We also know that because of all of this, many First Nations people, desperate and angry, understandably, have turned to crime and end up in jail. We have heard the statistics. Proportional to their representation in the population, our jails are overcrowded with First Nations People. And, too high a percentage of those people have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and can't function normally in free society in the first place without our support.

Have I said enough? Do you know now why we should care?

All of this is why we should care and should be doing something to turn that around.

NOTE: An extended version of the above accompanied by a PowerPoint of the same was presented to about 35 people in the Adult Education Hour after our Sunday morning worship service in my home congregation in Richmond BC, Peace Mennonite Church, on June 23rd 2013.