Remembering as an Act of Citizenship

Three years ago this week, the discovery of children’s graves at Kamloops prompted an unprecedented response from non-Indigenous Canadians. For many of us, it was the first time that the reality of residential schools sunk in. The first time we let the truth in.

On this anniversary of the event that first inspired the Remembering Project, I want to share some thoughts on the power of truth in what some call the “post-truth era” of contemporary politics.

In an age of polarization and disinformation, one measure of democracy’s health is a shared commitment to truth.  Perhaps the best test of a country’s commitment to the truth comes when that truth makes us uncomfortable.

By this measure, we saw how strong Canada’s democracy was on May 29, 2021. On that day the T’kemlúps First Nation revealed information that forced Canadians to confront the reality of residential schools.

The discovery of 215 potential graves on the grounds of the local residential school prompted a national reckoning. Many erected makeshift memorials to the dead, adorning the entranceways of churches across the country with hundreds of children’s shoes.

The revelations from the T’Kemlups First Nation aligned with the results emerging from exhaustive research conducted by the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation. Thanks to their work, we know that it was official government policy to separate children from their parents on a massive scale, generation after generation. We know that the stated intent was to dismantle entire societies, to replace them with our own society. We know that these policies and the intent behind them meet the international legal definition of genocide.

Canada sought to eradicate the nations to which the students belonged.

But Canada is not unique in having committed genocide. Far from it. A great many countries have committed large-scale systemic abuses of human rights at some point in their history. 

Unfortunately, public discourse in many of those countries is dominated by denials of complicity in human rights abuses. Just think of the “Lost Cause” mythology of the American South, a twentieth-century campaign to recast the history of the U.S. Civil War, from a war fought to preserve slavery to a war fought to uphold freedom.

A small number of nations confront their past with more courage. British civil society has begun to look more critically at the role their Empire played in enslaving Africans, famously throwing the statue of slaver Edward Colston into the Bristol River in 2020. The President of Portugal, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, recently agreed that his country should pay costs for abuses against the peoples his nation colonized up to the 1970s. In Germany, no student can graduate from high school without visiting a camp where their nation exterminated Jews and other fellow citizens.

With these national efforts to confront the past, the goal is not to blame others for the harm one’s country caused. Abuses on such a scale are never the sole responsibility of one party, one sect, or one generation. They belong to the nation.

The goal of remembering such abuses is, in part, to show a different kind of love for one’s country - a love that acknowledges the pain that the nation has caused, and that resolves to ensure it never happens again. This kind of civic education fosters a patriotism committed more to making a nation better in the future than to making excuses about its past.

The experience of these countries shows that confronting the past strengthens democracy.  Continual reminders of a genocidal past create antibodies to authoritarian trends. As the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has risen in the polls, mainstream Germans have mobilized by the millions. British and Portuguese politics have also seen moderates close ranks against more extreme parties.

Which brings me back to our country. Non-Indigenous Canadians owe it to First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples to own up to the truth of residential schools. But we owe it to ourselves as well. Because the exercise of accepting responsibility for the harm our own nation caused creates a group of citizens ready to build democracy on a stronger foundation.

The Remembering Project is not just about the past. It’s about Canada’s future.

- Ben