Hymie Rubenstein on the Pope's visit & apologies
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Summary
In the wake of Pope Francis' apology for the Indian Residential Schools, many are asking when the Catholic Church is going to move past this painful legacy. In this special edition of the Western Standard's After Hours podcast, we discuss the impact of the apology, the lack of reparations, and what the church should do to move forward.
Transcript
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The Indian Residential Schools has been an issue as you've been writing a lot in your newsletter
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and in the Dorchester Times, as well with columns here in the Western Standard occasionally.
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And it's going to be in the news scroll quite a bit right now as we have Pope Francis visiting
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right now and making a number of apologies for the Indian Residential Schools.
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What's your interpretation on how is this visit going to help towards reconciliation?
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I doubt it, because the end game is not reconciliation.
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We would have had reconciliation decades ago if that was the ultimate goal.
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Even the Pope admitted in his speech, in his apology, that there's still a long way to go.
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Well, and that's part of what I've seen, you know, some reactions to, though, with people,
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even if the Pope legitimately wants to end this, it's never enough.
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I mean, people are already saying, yeah, it is the first step.
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And there just doesn't seem to be any resolution.
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Oh, that's okay if you're hearing me a little better now.
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There have been dozens of these apologies within the Catholic Church and in other faiths,
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But we're still at a stage where we do not have the basis for the apology, namely the factual basis.
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The Pope himself admitted that when he said, you know, more research has to be done.
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Yet his apology accepted all of the accusations made in the six volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Report of 2015,
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including accusations directly, indirectly, and in his address about children being forced to attend the schools.
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150,000 children were forced to attend Indian residential schools.
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The evidence is on the other side, that most of the children who attended, attended voluntarily,
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based on both the law and on the will of their parents.
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There was a 27, a 28-year period between 1920 and 1948.
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I'm sorry, it's probably a 24-year period when Indian residential school attendance was mandatory,
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if and only if there was no day school, Indian day school, on the particular reserve.
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And in fact, over the entire period of the Indian residential schools,
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only a third of actual children attended these schools at most.
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Through the entire 113-year period of the Indian residential schools,
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most children either attended day schools or no school at all.
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And even up to 1940, something like 40% of Indigenous children were attending no school at all.
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Yeah, and then when you see broad-based apologies, though,
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and if we aren't even sure exactly what it's for,
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it kind of opens one up for a lot more follow-up and liability, unfortunately, though.
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Like, I mean, any lawyer will advise you often, I'm afraid, you know,
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if something wrong has happened, if you're worried about liability,
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As soon as you apologize, you're admitting guilt.
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And, I mean, that's what I'm saying is we're hearing activists,
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we're hearing others saying, okay, this is just the beginning.
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That they're going to be coming after the Catholic Church for more than an apology soon.
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There's a big disappointment this morning, and it was since April,
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the April 1st apology about reparations not being part of the apology.
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You know, apologies are something, but they're not enough.
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What are you going to do to compensate for all the damage that was done to the children?
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At these residential schools that you are responsible for.
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The underlying assumption, of course, was that there was horrible damage done
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to each and every student who attended the residential schools.
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I am the last person who will deny that some students were damaged at the schools,
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that some teachers were brutal, that some sexual abuse,
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I'm not going to deny that some sexual abuse occurred to some children
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Many of those individuals involved have been punished.
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The bulk of the sexual abuse that took place, took place between students
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as occurs in residential schools all over the world throughout human history.
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So, you know, when you start off with the assumption
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that there was all this damage, and you're not giving the proof
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of this damage, and you're saying, well, there's this legacy,
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even among people who never went to a residential school,
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in communities where nobody went to residential schools,
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which as much as Eastern Canada, there's only one Indian residential school,
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yet all of the same pathologies that we see among Indigenous people,
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high crime, high unemployment, high suicide, etc., etc.,
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high poverty occurs at the same rate in these other places.
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Yeah, and I worry that, unfortunately, even if some of it might be well-meaning and so on,
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I mean, you know, when we get, again, not getting any closer to any closure,
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I've been watching the coverage of it, you know, it's been going around the clock,
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and I see the language and the uncorrected language of activists and others
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Even if you went to a day school, you're called a survivor,
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as if you'd endured something beyond what anybody else going to school does,
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as if somebody was trying to kill you, or constantly,
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and I had that in my opening monologue yesterday,
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the word genocide keeps putting out there, and there was no bloody genocide.
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But the more we keep driving that in through the news,
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and with these apologies, the more people get that misconception that this all happened.
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What I find particularly interesting about the Pope's apology
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is it's diametrically opposite to what Pope John Paul II said
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He stopped at Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories
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and this is what he said about the Catholic missionaries,
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The revival of your indigenous culture and traditions
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that you know today is largely due to the initiatives
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Your ancestors knew by instinct that the gospel,
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far from destroying their authentic values and customs,
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had the power to purify and uplift the cultural heritage
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when it's all based on the same historical evidence
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which suggests that John Paul II was quite right,
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Inside the classroom, just as in French immersion in Canada,
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you're learning English, you're learning French.
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But outside the classroom and on events and excursions and so on,
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indigenous people were allowed to speak their languages
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and allowed to practice their cultural activities,
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which missionaries took great zeal in recording
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And I'm saying there weren't some rotten apples,
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Yeah, so, I mean, where do we go with this, though?
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They let any student come to these testimonials
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and no, the records were actually very meticulous.
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We knew the disposition of pretty much every child,
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There would have been investigations years ago.
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where you just see some surface ground disturbances,
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Absolutely, and we have those all over the country
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you know, they've come from thousands of miles away,
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Very few students were buried in those cemeteries.
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No, and I appreciate your ongoing work with this.
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We need to look into what really happened in Kamloops.
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Well, I really appreciate you carrying on with this