by Sara Chu and John McLaren
Reconciliation is a challenging concept—not simply an end point, but a pathway for the church and its members to walk together with Indigenous people. It means listening to their concerns and their vision, telling the truth about past and present events, and finding a way forward in a spirit of brotherhood and sisterhood. With this in mind, St. John the Divine, Victoria, held a workshop series in spring 2018 entitled “Walking Together: A Journey with Our Indigenous Neighbours.” It was described as a program of learning, understanding and respecting the cultures, experiences and aspirations of First Peoples.
The series began during a Sunday service, with a moving speech by Florence Dick, CRD Liaison for the Songhees Wellness Centre in Esquimalt. Florence brought us back to a time 200 years ago, before colonization. Each Sunday we acknowledge in words that we meet on the unceded lands of her people; but this day she told us about the burial and ceremonial sites that had for centuries been used by her people in specific places where churches, legislative buildings and apartments now stand and how important these and their memory are in local Indigenous culture and relationships.
The series continued with five Wednesday evening workshops, designed to cause us to reflect on the past, present and future of Indigenous and non-Indigenous relations in this country. Between 60 and 90 people attended these sessions.
The theme of the first workshop was “Understanding the Impact of Residential Schools through the Childhood Art of Survivors.” Decades ago, a teacher named Robert Aller travelled to residential schools to give children a chance to express their suppressed culture through painting. Mark Atleo, a survivor of the Alberni Indian School and one of Aller’s students, showed us his beautiful painting depicting fishing that his family valued so much. Andrea Walsh, an anthropologist at UVic, spoke about the efforts to collect the artwork of survivors from across Canada, and how Mark’s story and others are helping to heal survivors and their communities.
The second session took on the issue of dealing with the continuing racism in our society. The focus was a documentary about Jane Elliot, an American teacher who runs workshops in which “blue eyed” people selected from the dominant group in society are challenged to experience the racist attitudes that “brown eyed” people, representing minorities, face today on a regular basis. The film was controversial and even shocking, but a blunt reminder of a reality that we, as Christians who are committed to reconciliation, need to confront.
The third session looked to the future. Val Napoleon, Chair of Aboriginal Law and Justice at UVic and one of the prime architects of the unique program in Indigenous legal orders at that school, shared with us some of the differences between Indigenous law which is often embodied in custom and stories, and our more adversarial and linear way of proceeding in Canadian law. She referred to the hope arising from the program that Indigenous communities would recover their law ways, refine them, use them in their relationships, and share them with non-Indigenous Canadians.
The fourth session focused on the past with law professor Hamar Foster presenting and commenting on a compelling documentary film about Canada’s poet of the wilderness, Duncan Campbell Scott, who was also a leading bureaucrat in the Indian Affairs Department from the 1890s to the early 1930s. He was responsible for the administration of the residential school system and relations with the churches that ran them, including the Anglican Church of Canada, during the most aggressive phase of the schools’ operation. The film pointed out the irony of Scott’s failure to see any connection between the fate of Indigenous children who died in the schools and the death of his daughter in private school, and of his celebration of a timeless landscape from which Indigenous culture would be erased.
The fifth session took place at the Tribal School in Saanich. Jacqueline Jim, a young teacher in the immersion program in the SENCOTEN language, spoke of efforts to revive and restore Indigenous languages. She mentioned the importance and use of their own language to the mental health of a people, and of the scarcity of resources and native speakers after such a long period of colonial suppression. The ability to work with young children in helping to develop their language (and thus an understanding of their culture) is a wonderful gift. Jacqueline described her life’s journey, from early days, as one of “decolonizing her mind.”
On the following Sunday, Bishop Logan gave us an inspiring sermon at St. John in which he picked up on Jacqueline’s reference as a mantra for our church going forward in reconciliation, that is “decolonizing our mindset.” Only then will we be able to engage faithfully and respectfully in this most important journey.
Sara Chu and John McLaren are parishioners at St. John the Divine, Victoria
Photo: Jacqueline Jim’s presentation at the Tribal School
Photo credit: Pauline Majcher