Western Standard - Hymie Rubenstein on the Pope's visit & apologies

00:00:00.000 The Indian Residential Schools has been an issue as you've been writing a lot in your newsletter

00:00:04.360 and in the Dorchester Times, as well with columns here in the Western Standard occasionally.

00:00:11.320 And it's going to be in the news scroll quite a bit right now as we have Pope Francis visiting

00:00:16.920 right now and making a number of apologies for the Indian Residential Schools.

00:00:23.020 What's your interpretation on how is this visit going to help towards reconciliation?

00:00:27.460 I doubt it, because the end game is not reconciliation.

00:00:35.180 It's never been about reconciliation.

00:00:38.760 We would have had reconciliation decades ago if that was the ultimate goal.

00:00:44.720 Even the Pope admitted in his speech, in his apology, that there's still a long way to go.

00:00:52.200 He said, we're at the beginning.

00:00:54.180 Everybody's, you know, first step.

00:00:55.580 He said, this is the first step.

00:00:57.280 My apology today.

00:00:58.720 It's always a first step.

00:01:00.180 There's never a second step.

00:01:01.360 I wonder why.

00:01:03.160 Well, and that's part of what I've seen, you know, some reactions to, though, with people,

00:01:08.180 even if the Pope legitimately wants to end this, it's never enough.

00:01:13.380 I mean, people are already saying, yeah, it is the first step.

00:01:15.800 But when does this ever end?

00:01:17.820 And there just doesn't seem to be any resolution.

00:01:21.460 We just keep reopening an old wound.

00:01:27.100 I didn't catch the last part.

00:01:28.840 Sorry.

00:01:29.480 Oh, that's okay.

00:01:30.320 I'm going to adjust my microphone here.

00:01:35.680 My earphones, I mean.

00:01:37.600 If that helps.

00:01:41.300 Sorry for that.

00:01:42.260 Oh, that's okay if you're hearing me a little better now.

00:01:46.580 Look, this is only one.

00:01:50.400 There have been dozens of these apologies within the Catholic Church and in other faiths,

00:01:59.600 faiths for many years now.

00:02:01.600 But we're still at a stage where we do not have the basis for the apology, namely the factual basis.

00:02:09.980 The Pope himself admitted that when he said, you know, more research has to be done.

00:02:17.220 Why did he say that?

00:02:18.700 Yet his apology accepted all of the accusations made in the six volumes of the Truth and Reconciliation Report of 2015,

00:02:29.420 including accusations directly, indirectly, and in his address about children being forced to attend the schools.

00:02:39.280 150,000 children were forced to attend Indian residential schools.

00:02:45.080 There is no evidence of that.

00:02:47.880 The evidence is on the other side, that most of the children who attended, attended voluntarily,

00:02:53.880 based on both the law and on the will of their parents.

00:02:59.660 There was a 27, a 28-year period between 1920 and 1948.

00:03:08.920 I'm sorry, it's probably a 24-year period when Indian residential school attendance was mandatory,

00:03:16.180 if and only if there was no day school, Indian day school, on the particular reserve.

00:03:23.980 And in fact, over the entire period of the Indian residential schools,

00:03:29.320 only a third of actual children attended these schools at most.

00:03:37.240 Through the entire 113-year period of the Indian residential schools,

00:03:43.280 most children either attended day schools or no school at all.

00:03:49.960 And even up to 1940, something like 40% of Indigenous children were attending no school at all.

00:03:57.740 That is the tragedy, Corey.

00:03:59.700 Yeah, and then when you see broad-based apologies, though,

00:04:04.640 and if we aren't even sure exactly what it's for,

00:04:06.880 it kind of opens one up for a lot more follow-up and liability, unfortunately, though.

00:04:11.740 Like, I mean, any lawyer will advise you often, I'm afraid, you know,

00:04:15.500 if something wrong has happened, if you're worried about liability,

00:04:17.940 the first thing, don't apologize yet.

00:04:19.520 As soon as you apologize, you're admitting guilt.

00:04:22.040 And, I mean, that's what I'm saying is we're hearing activists,

00:04:24.960 we're hearing others saying, okay, this is just the beginning.

00:04:26.980 That they're going to be coming after the Catholic Church for more than an apology soon.

00:04:31.840 There's a big disappointment this morning, and it was since April,

00:04:36.860 the April 1st apology about reparations not being part of the apology.

00:04:46.320 You know, apologies are something, but they're not enough.

00:04:50.460 What are you going to do to compensate for all the damage that was done to the children?

00:04:56.980 At these residential schools that you are responsible for.

00:05:00.560 The underlying assumption, of course, was that there was horrible damage done

00:05:07.180 to each and every student who attended the residential schools.

00:05:10.940 I am the last person who will deny that some students were damaged at the schools,

00:05:17.160 that some teachers were brutal, that some sexual abuse,

00:05:21.600 I'm not going to deny that some sexual abuse occurred to some children

00:05:27.420 at some schools during certain periods.

00:05:30.980 Many of those individuals involved have been punished.

00:05:34.700 Most of them were not clerical personnel.

00:05:38.220 There were other workers in the school.

00:05:40.260 The bulk of the sexual abuse that took place, took place between students

00:05:44.900 as occurs in residential schools all over the world throughout human history.

00:05:52.240 So, you know, when you start off with the assumption

00:05:54.480 that there was all this damage, and you're not giving the proof

00:05:58.880 of this damage, and you're saying, well, there's this legacy,

00:06:03.620 even among people who never went to a residential school,

00:06:07.700 in communities where nobody went to residential schools,

00:06:11.040 which as much as Eastern Canada, there's only one Indian residential school,

00:06:15.160 yet all of the same pathologies that we see among Indigenous people, 1.00

00:06:19.420 high crime, high unemployment, high suicide, etc., etc.,

00:06:25.160 high poverty occurs at the same rate in these other places.

00:06:31.340 Yeah, and I worry that, unfortunately, even if some of it might be well-meaning and so on,

00:06:35.660 I mean, you know, when we get, again, not getting any closer to any closure,

00:06:38.920 I've been watching the coverage of it, you know, it's been going around the clock,

00:06:42.680 and I see the language and the uncorrected language of activists and others

00:06:45.980 who refer to every one of them as a survivor.

00:06:48.780 Even if you went to a day school, you're called a survivor,

00:06:51.540 as if you'd endured something beyond what anybody else going to school does,

00:06:55.000 as if somebody was trying to kill you, or constantly,

00:06:57.600 and I had that in my opening monologue yesterday,

00:06:59.400 the word genocide keeps putting out there, and there was no bloody genocide.

00:07:03.680 But the more we keep driving that in through the news,

00:07:05.660 and with these apologies, the more people get that misconception that this all happened.

00:07:11.180 What I find particularly interesting about the Pope's apology

00:07:15.840 is it's diametrically opposite to what Pope John Paul II said

00:07:24.100 when he visited Canada in 1985.

00:07:28.380 Let me just read two sentences here.

00:07:31.620 He went to, I'm sorry, 1987.

00:07:34.540 He stopped at Fort Simpson in the Northwest Territories

00:07:38.000 on a particular First Nations Reserve,

00:07:40.480 and this is what he said about the Catholic missionaries,

00:07:43.460 the teachers in the schools.

00:07:45.840 The revival of your indigenous culture and traditions

00:07:49.660 that you know today is largely due to the initiatives

00:07:53.620 and continuous efforts of the missionaries.

00:07:56.540 Your ancestors knew by instinct that the gospel,

00:08:02.480 far from destroying their authentic values and customs,

00:08:05.560 had the power to purify and uplift the cultural heritage

00:08:09.200 which they had received.

00:08:12.080 So, Corey, what happened over the 30 years?

00:08:15.560 Why is this turnaround

00:08:17.660 when it's all based on the same historical evidence

00:08:21.800 which suggests that John Paul II was quite right, 0.99

00:08:25.000 that students were often instructed by priests

00:08:32.500 who had learned their indigenous language

00:08:34.500 and often spoke it to them,

00:08:36.000 spoke it to them in their indigenous language,

00:08:39.620 whether it was Cree or Ojibwe or whatever,

00:08:42.160 outside the classroom.

00:08:43.840 Inside the classroom, just as in French immersion in Canada,

00:08:46.820 you've got to stick to the syllabus,

00:08:48.560 and the syllabus says it's, you know,

00:08:50.020 you're learning English, you're learning French.

00:08:52.100 But outside the classroom and on events and excursions and so on,

00:08:58.080 indigenous people were allowed to speak their languages

00:09:00.840 and allowed to practice their cultural activities,

00:09:04.740 which missionaries took great zeal in recording

00:09:07.960 and supporting in many cases.

00:09:11.600 And I'm saying there weren't some rotten apples,

00:09:13.900 but the few rotten apples cannot be taken

00:09:17.600 as representative of the entire barrel.

00:09:22.280 Yeah, so, I mean, where do we go with this, though?

00:09:25.200 I mean, this tour is going to go ahead

00:09:26.480 and there's going to be more people

00:09:27.660 looking for more compensation.

00:09:29.240 Getting back to more of the interviews,

00:09:30.840 as I've done with, you know,

00:09:31.920 Brian Giesbrecht and Clifton and others,

00:09:34.720 and I want to keep on this,

00:09:36.360 are we ever going to finally investigate

00:09:38.520 and get the facts on this, though?

00:09:40.240 I mean, there doesn't seem to be will

00:09:41.900 on the part of legacy media,

00:09:43.120 a little bit capping with the National Post

00:09:44.500 and Terry Glavin.

00:09:46.280 But, you know, people just say

00:09:48.160 the mythology is overtaking the reality,

00:09:50.760 and I'm not sure if we could stop it.

00:09:52.840 It's an uphill road.

00:09:54.380 Slowly but surely,

00:09:55.300 some of the data is coming out.

00:09:56.600 It's all there.

00:09:57.240 It's all in the archives.

00:09:58.160 The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

00:10:01.440 did a very sloppy job in collecting the data.

00:10:05.420 They did a very sloppy job

00:10:07.900 in even trying to get a representative sample

00:10:14.180 of the tens of thousands of students

00:10:17.700 who are still alive.

00:10:19.360 They let any student come to these testimonials

00:10:23.700 and to these hearings who had,

00:10:27.700 most of them had a grievance

00:10:29.080 that they wanted to reveal.

00:10:32.360 So we're slowly getting to know that,

00:10:35.040 and we're slowly getting to realize

00:10:37.560 that there are no missing children.

00:10:42.020 This is something that many people

00:10:43.600 are now working on.

00:10:44.780 We're finding them in the archives,

00:10:46.680 archives and data that were ignored

00:10:49.800 by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

00:10:52.640 How can you say there's a missing child

00:10:57.180 when the child who's recorded is dead?

00:11:00.100 The child is just dead.

00:11:01.120 The child is not missing.

00:11:04.120 Yeah, and you'd corrected me on that before.

00:11:06.500 The very first time we had you on the show,

00:11:08.980 because I was under this misconception

00:11:10.160 that while there was poor record keeping

00:11:12.240 and we don't know who was where and whatnot,

00:11:14.540 and no, the records were actually very meticulous.

00:11:17.040 We knew the disposition of pretty much every child,

00:11:19.820 whether they died or went back home

00:11:22.360 or whatever happened with them.

00:11:24.320 But again, a lot of us are under this,

00:11:26.220 we're under this misinformation

00:11:29.980 that children have vanished,

00:11:31.460 and they haven't.

00:11:32.100 There's nobody looking for them

00:11:33.120 because there's none disappeared.

00:11:34.380 If thousands of students were missing,

00:11:39.180 you would have thousands of families

00:11:40.980 looking for them by name,

00:11:43.840 by name of child,

00:11:45.720 by the name of the individuals

00:11:48.520 who are looking for them.

00:11:50.180 You would have countless police reports.

00:11:52.920 There would have been investigations years ago.

00:11:55.840 It's simply false.

00:11:56.980 You're married in unmarked graves.

00:12:01.220 What are unmarked graves?

00:12:02.600 You go to any cemetery in Winnipeg,

00:12:04.420 you're going to find unmarked graves

00:12:06.520 or in Calgary from the 19th century

00:12:08.860 because poor people did not have money

00:12:10.860 to get a headstone.

00:12:12.000 They put in a wooden cross,

00:12:13.560 which disintegrated within 20 or 30 years.

00:12:17.740 Oh, yeah.

00:12:18.140 At the Calgary Union Cemetery,

00:12:19.620 if you go to the south side,

00:12:20.820 you see a big wide open area

00:12:22.140 where you just see some surface ground disturbances,

00:12:24.740 and that was what used to be called

00:12:25.720 the potter's field because, yeah,

00:12:27.360 there was a wooden cross put in

00:12:28.920 for transient individuals

00:12:30.800 or people who were poor,

00:12:32.060 and the visible record of it disappeared.

00:12:35.100 It's not uncommon at all for old cemeteries.

00:12:39.800 Absolutely, and we have those all over the country

00:12:42.600 for all sorts of groups,

00:12:44.820 not just indigenous individuals.

00:12:48.140 When students died at a school,

00:12:50.520 and many died as students in a school,

00:12:53.260 they were normally not buried

00:12:57.240 in the cemetery adjacent to the school,

00:13:01.260 which was largely for school personnel.

00:13:05.180 The nuns, the priests, the workers,

00:13:07.660 you know, they've come from thousands of miles away,

00:13:10.320 so there was no way to send them home

00:13:12.000 after they died,

00:13:12.700 so they had their own cemetery.

00:13:14.680 Very few students were buried in those cemeteries.

00:13:17.780 The vast majority of them,

00:13:19.260 when they became ill,

00:13:20.320 they were either sent to a hospital,

00:13:23.420 nearby hospital,

00:13:24.740 to a dedicated indigenous hospital,

00:13:28.220 or back to their home community.

00:13:30.360 When they died in their home community,

00:13:32.360 they were buried in their home cemeteries.

00:13:35.600 I mean, this isn't a historical record.

00:13:37.720 This is not a hypothesis on my part.

00:13:40.580 No, and I appreciate your ongoing work with this.

00:13:44.840 So, I mean, before I let you go,

00:13:46.400 and I'm certain we'll be talking again,

00:13:47.780 because this subject just keeps going,

00:13:49.680 and as I've been writing columns as well,

00:13:51.720 and pushing, we need to investigate.

00:13:53.260 We need to look into what really happened in Kamloops.

00:13:55.720 We've got to get the facts out there.

00:13:57.700 Where can we find your work?

00:14:00.040 I know you have a newsletter,

00:14:00.980 and you've put stuff in the Dorchester Review.

00:14:03.220 Where can people track that down?

00:14:04.540 My newsletter is on Substack,

00:14:08.300 and the address is simply

00:14:11.260 hymie.substack.com

00:14:16.480 Great.

00:14:18.060 Well, I really appreciate you carrying on with this

00:14:21.000 and speaking up,

00:14:21.880 and, you know, I'll keep on it too,

00:14:23.520 and eventually we'll find some resolution

00:14:25.360 one way or another on this issue.

00:14:27.340 Thank you for having me on.

00:14:28.820 All right.

00:14:29.300 We'll talk again soon.

00:14:30.300 Thank you.

00:14:30.840 Thank you.

00:14:34.540 Thank you.

Western Standard - July 28, 2022

Hymie Rubenstein on the Pope's visit & apologies

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