“An inquiry identified at least 1,200 Indigenous women who were murdered or went missing since 1980”
Ottawa, Canada – Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government has championed reconciliation with Canada’s Indigenous peoples, but chiefs say that for all the movement on rights and billions of dollars in compensation the progress comes at a snail’s pace.
“We have a long way to go for true reconciliation with this state of Canada,” Ojibwe chief Gordon Bluesky told AFP on the sidelines of a gathering of chiefs from across Canada last week to elect a national leader.
Ottawa moved in 2021 to align Canadian laws with the United Nations’ declaration on Indigenous rights — after a decade and a half of opposing the framework for First Nations’ survival and well-being.
Billions of dollars have also been awarded to descendants of Canada’s first peoples to compensate for historical wrongs and for reforms of colonial institutions and systems that hampered Indigenous peoples’ self-determination.
But many Indigenous peoples, who represent five percent of Canada’s 38.7 million population, still live in communities marked by poverty, unemployment, poor housing and discrimination.
And many — like Bluesky — do not yet see themselves reflected in the Canadian context.
“Look around,” he said. “What is there that reflects me as an Indigenous person? There’s not even a statue in our capital that reflects one of the First Nations gathered here.”
“It’s like we don’t even exist and that’s unfortunate.”
Many are still processing generational grief and trauma inflicted on them by the state.
Since May 2021, the discoveries of hundreds children’s remains on the grounds of former boarding schools set up more than a century ago to forcibly assimilate Indigenous peoples shocked the nation. It led to an outpouring of grief and sympathy.
Thousands died at the schools, and many were subjected to physical and sexual abuse, according to an investigative commission that concluded the Canadian government engaged in “cultural genocide.”
Two and a half years after the first 1,000 unmarked graves were discovered in Western Canada, searches at other residential schools across the country using ground-penetrating radar have been launched.
“It’s hard to even think about reconciliation when you’re busy trying to find your lost kids,” Nishnawbe Aski Nation grand chief Alvin Fiddler said.
Awakened to Indigenous plight
“We have not yet reached reconciliation,” said researcher Marie-Pierre Bousquet.
“We must first get Indigenous people to a much better stage of healing as they struggle with the consequences of past harms,” the director of Indigenous studies at the University of Montreal.
Although the student deaths from malnutrition, disease or neglect were long known to some, the grisly burial find in 2021 awakened Canadians to the plight of Indigenous peoples.
“People said to themselves, ‘They were right… these residential schools were really terrible. Thousands of children died and didn’t come home,’” Bousquet explained.
Several Indigenous leaders lament a slow pace of change in their relationship with the Crown. But they also acknowledge a greater openness and sensitivity among Canadians.
“People are becoming more aware about what’s really going on in this country, about the colonial history and the violence that’s been inflicted on our people for many, many generations,” said Fiddler, who wears a red dress brooch on his lapel to raise awareness about violence against Indigenous women.
An inquiry identified at least 1,200 Indigenous women who were murdered or went missing since 1980.
But it was the discoveries of the unmarked graves of children, some as young as three years old, that “opened the way for reconciliation,” believes Sioux chief Tony Alexis.
“The country is trying. The government is rolling out initiatives and programs,” he said.
A public holiday was recently created to commemorate the victims of Indigenous residential schools, Pope Francis apologized for abuses at the church-run schools, and Trudeau appointed Canada’s first Indigenous governor general, Mary Simon.
“But we’re still only at the beginning. There’s still more work to do,” said Alexis.
The pain and suffering was intergenerational and reconciliation, he said, will take time. “I think it’s going to take another 20 to 50 years to get to where we need to be.” AFP