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‘Hope is such a precious commodity’

Chief Dr. Robert Joseph shares his residential school story and how to work towards a better Canada
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Mike Davies/Campbell River Mirror Chief Dr. Robert Joseph, Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council, shares his view on what reconciliation means and how we can make it happen at last week’s John Howard Society of North Island Annual General Meeting at the Maritime Heritage Centre.

The opening paragraph of the introduction to the 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (PDF) is hard to read.

If it’s read out loud, it’s hard to hear.

“For over a century,” reads the report, “the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate Aboriginal governments; ignore Aboriginal rights; terminate the Treaties; and, through a process of assimilation, cause Aboriginal peoples to cease to exist as distinct legal, social, cultural, religious, and racial entities in Canada. The establishment and operation of residential schools were a central element of this policy, which can be best described as ‘cultural genocide.’” When that paragraph was read out in front of the over 7,000 people in attendance upon the report’s release, Chief Dr. Robert Joseph leapt from his seat.

“I’d been looking for some kind of indication all my life that I wasn’t bad,” he says. “That I didn’t deserve to be treated the way I’d been treated. When I heard those words, I was euphoric. I jumped to my feet along with all 7,000 people who were in that room. Finally, someone said, ‘yes, you were harmed and you didn’t deserve to be harmed,’” he recently told a crowd at the Maritime Heritage Centre in Campbell River.

“Most of us,” Joseph continued, “for most of our lives, have pondered why we had to have these experiences. They were horrific in some cases. There were so many little children – over 150,000 of them over 100 years – who were taken from their homes and families and abused in abhorrent ways. I sometimes shake my head and wonder how it happened in our country. How could this happen in this free, democratic, high-principled democracy of ours? I look back some days and wonder why nobody raised their hand and said it’s not right to treat little children like that – to degrade them and humiliate them.”

The effects of that degradation and humiliation, Joseph says, have been far reaching and long lasting. “By the time they went through this process of so-called education, they were broken. And we’ve seen how those things have manifested in our communities. We hear about our young people taking their own lives almost weekly. The effects of colonization and residential schools still resonate through our communities and through our families.”

Joseph himself was broken for a long time.

“I went to one of those schools for 11 years,” Joseph says. “I was a little boy when I got there. I remember my mother holding my hand all the way to that school – it wasn’t that great a distance, but by God did it feel like forever. And we entered the main landing of that four-storey building and there was a strange man there. I’d never seen a non-Aboriginal man before and I didn’t understand what he was saying. My mother handed me to him. I looked at her and I wanted her to say ‘son, I love you and I’ll come visit you all the time. Sometimes I’ll bring you home.’ But she just turned and walked away.

“For years that haunted me,” he continues. “I understand now that there were consequences for not putting your kids in the schools, but it was so demeaning. We were herded into showers, 30 of us at a time and poked and prodded us in humiliating and embarrassing ways. They painted us with white solutions and doused our hair. The food was bad. But most of all, what I missed was someone articulating my value. I missed knowing that somebody loved me – that someone thought I was precious.”

And after 11 years in that school, Joseph says, it was finally time to “graduate” and go out into the world.

“Even after all the despair and in our brokenness, hope prevailed,” Joseph says. “Hope is such a precious commodity. We have to have it. All of us. That’s how we build our communities and our families.”

But what hope he had was already clouded by alcohol and that cloud would follow him for a long time. And he realized as he stood on the steps of the school and looked out at the world he was to enter, that he had no idea how to do that. He had nowhere to go and nothing to become.

Maybe two days after their graduation “banquet,” Joseph says, he ended up back at the school to pick up his meagre belongings and once again ended up in front of the principal.

“He said, ‘Bob, can I see you?’”

“And I didn’t like this guy,” Joseph says. “This was the guy who’d stripped me buck naked in front of the entire school. This was the guy who quarantined me. This was the guy who took away any scrap of value I might have had. But I said, ‘Of course,’ because I wanted to be polite and respectful.”

The principal took him into the office and told him, “I think you’re going to be alright.”

As it turned out, he would.

But it was no thanks to that principal or that school. It was despite them.

After struggling with alcohol for much of his adult life after leaving residential school, Joseph has now become one of the foremost voices in the fight for reconciliation and cooperation both here in Canada and around the world.

As a hereditary chief of the Gwawaenuk First Nation, a residential school survivor and one of the last few speakers of the Kwakwaka’wakw language, he has earned his reputation as an internationally-renowned art curator, he has received honourary doctorates from both the University of British Columbia for serving the province and the nation as well as from the Vancouver School of Theology for his work on reconciliation and renewing the relationships between Indigenous people and the rest of Canada. He has been appointed to the Order of B.C. – the highest honour the province can extend to its citizens – has received the Wallenberg-Sugihara Civil Courage Award, the Indspire Lifetime Achievement Award and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal, recognizing significant contributions to Canada.

He has also served as the executive director of the Indian Residential School Survivors Society, he is an honourary witness to Canada’s Truth And Reconciliation Commission, chairman of the Native American Leadership Alliance for Peace and Reconciliation with the Inter-religious and International Federation for World Peace.

He’s currently the Ambassador for Reconciliation Canada and a member of the National Assembly of First Nations Elders Council.

So he knows what he’s talking about, and he feels that when historians looks back on us, they will see that the 2015 report from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was “a pivotal moment in time that allowed us begin to reflect deeply – all of us, as Canadians – on who we are.

“One of the beautiful things about resilience is that we still – even though we’ve come through a very dark period – we see the potential to create a Canada that is greater than anything we’ve ever had before if we live up to our values of loving equality and justice, we embrace inclusion and care for each other,” he says.

Because that’s what’s been lost, he says.

We’ve gone from a “what’s best for all of us” world to one where people focus on what’s best for themselves.

And thanks to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report, he says, there has never been a better time to take a hard look at that mindset.

“We’ve never been more able to examine our highest selves and determine how we want to live out our future together, honouring each other, cheering each other on and holding each other up. Every one of us – every race, colour, creed, gender – have a chance to remake this country, to transform this country into something we have always wanted it to be.”

And that starts with opening up the conversation and talking about the problems we have and working through them.

It’s not “an Aboriginal problem” or a “white problem,” Joseph says.

But it’s a problem nonetheless. And we need to talk about it.

Together.