Walking in Reconciled Relationships: The Challenges of our History

by Terry LeBlanc

I’d like to set the stage for this piece with a story I have told many times. It is definitely a story of cultural perspective. But it also sets the tone for a different theological trajectory than the one more common to the western Church’s notions of reconciliation. The story is rooted in a soteriology that has reconciliation at its core.

When I was a young boy, my grandfather, father, and I travelled some distance from our home community to go fishing at a spot ‘known only to my grandfather.’ Having driven as far as roads would take us, we got out of my grandfather’s old beater, and gathering our gear, set out on the trail toward this favourite fishing spot. We soon found ourselves in the middle of a deep, dark woods making our way along a narrow trail where, with each passing step, the way ahead and behind became less and less perceptible. On more than a few occasions I expressed my concern to my grandfather; each time he sought to reassure me.

Finally, unable to hold in my anxiety, fearful about what lay ahead of us, even more anxious that the way back would never again be found, I tugged frantically on my Grandfather’s arm. “Grandfather, Grandfather,” I cried out, “We’ll be lost! We’ll be lost!” Sensing the rising fear in me, my Grandfather knelt down, and after reassuring me more fully, taught me a lesson, one that has guided my thinking and actions from that day to this. In the mixture of languages that was his habit of speech, he told me that each new trail we take could seem like it leads along an uncertain path; the way back can seem unclear, obscured by the landscape. “But,” he said, “When you set out on a new trail, if you spend twice as much of your time looking over your shoulder at where you have come from as you do where you are going; if you fix the landmarks behind you in your mind the way they will appear to you when you turn to take the trail back, you will never become lost – you will always be able to find your way home.”

That day my grandfather gave me the ability to find my way to and from all of the various destinations in life that would lie before me; all of which, as I set out on each new trail, were initially unknown. Contemporary societies – not just North American – are no longer used to looking at where they have come from. They are far more fixated on an as yet unknown and unknowable future – on what comes next. Rather than use the past to help determine where they are on the trail of life in relation to where they started, they plunge ahead, frequently blindly, expecting that the future will correct any mistakes they make in navigation.

The Way Ahead Lies Behind Us

As far back as 1973, Dr. Karl Menninger, quoting Daniel J. Boorstin, director of the National Museum of Science and Technology, noted that,

We have lost our sense of history…lost our traditional respect for the wisdom of ancestors and the culture of kindred nations…we haunt ourselves with the illusory ideal of some ‘whole nation’ which had a deep and outspoken ‘faith’ in its ‘values.¹

Menninger went on to say that this loss was deeply rooted in the now well-established human ability to ignore various kinds of behaviour when it was politically, economically, or socially expedient. It was clear that euphemisms had replaced more incisive vocabularies; terminology became more socially managed, more soothing of the individual and collective conscience. One outcome of this shift, he noted, was that social consequence was postponed to the future. He observed that this deferral was focused through the lens of an unrealistic expectation that ‘it’, whatever ‘it’ was, along with any further complications, would get ‘fixed’ in the future.

It takes only a brief examination of history to know that this does not typically happen. Rather than the passage of time dealing with the consequences of the initial behaviour or problem, one of two things happens: the behaviour gradually becomes normative; or it compounds, further complexity accrues to it, and to turn a biblical phrase, “the last estate becomes worse than the first.” This new, more compounded possession, we might understand to be a reference to an essential estate of un-repented sin. The book in which Menninger quotes Boorstin has the telling title: “Whatever Became of Sin?”²

According to Menninger, by 1973 the field of clinical psychology had witnessed the collapse of any sense in which humans actually sinned. Increasing numbers of behaviours or attitudes began to be described more inoffensively with the language of developmental psychology. Paul C. Vitz, in this same period described this shift in human thought away from a Creator to whom they were accountable, to the moving target of a generic humanist spirituality with psychiatry as its priesthood, as a deeply religious shift.³ The social evolutionary language used performed the double duty of condemning the behaviour of the original perpetrators while simultaneously assuaging the consciences of the contemporary beneficiaries.

We might be tempted to say, “That was then, this is now!” “What has that to do with reconciliation – or any other contemporary issue for that matter?” In fact many reading this might retort, ‘That was the 50s, 60s, or 70s, time has moved on, we have a better understanding of the complex array of underlying factors out of which human behaviours and attitudes emerge.’ Unfortunately, it is not that simple. In fact, in the case of some people, such thinking provides sufficient evidence for Menninger’s now decades old thesis. The answer in our search for a foundation upon which to build reconciled relationship is not located in the unknowable future, but rather in the complex, intertwined constructions of our past.

Taking up Menninger’s cry for a better connectedness to our past so as to understand the reality of our present, Gregory Boer addresses himself to the increasingly common conditions of depression and melancholy in [North] American society. In his 2008 PhD thesis, he observes,

We have lost our sense of historical thinking in modern times. With this loss of historical thinking (or imagining historically) we have lost perspective, that is, an inclination to think in both breadth and depth and analyze critically. We must address at least two significant ways of losing our imagining of history. One is our manic focus on the present, so that the present becomes a defense against the knowing of the past, and what is past is concretized, placed in a literal framework, rather than critically examined…. The other is that we lose history through what has come to be known as biased historical knowledge. An example of this bias is …a general written history of Western civilization that has excluded significant contributions of people of color. Again we find memory the faulty mechanism in the keeping of historical evidence.⁴

Though approaching it from this very different tack, Boer further buttresses Menninger’s 1973 argument with his observations of the increasingly common human condition of depression and melancholy. He argues that this condition is related to the human tendency to create a less factual, more palatable history so as to cope with what has become unfathomable about its consequences in the present. He notes,

Currently, we understand that memory serves us only in the sense that we do remember, and not that we remember accurately. Stern (1985)⁵ instructed us that “historical truth is established by what gets told, not by what actually happened,” and like Hillman (1983),⁶ Stern thought that “the past is, in one sense, fiction” (page 15). We therefore invent histories, condemned as a bar to obsess on the past, looking back as if to enable us to see forward – history becomes a saviour, a place to solidify our present idioms or ideologies, and a place to rectify what is currently unrecognizable to us, even dilemmas we cannot fathom. We replay our own personal history to better understand and accept ourselves in present time. Our distortions of the past, our reinventions of history, are our attempts at reinventing ourselves, and thus creating our future. And yet we need our historical thinking.⁷

If Menninger and Boer were correct, they would appear to describe at least two potential causes for Euro-North American difficulty in reconciling with Indigenous peoples. The first, quite possibly, is the loss of any sense of the wrongfulness of colonial North American history – not just its events, but its attitudes and policies. This created, and then maintained an unwillingness to change. It was either drive blindly toward the future, the past fading into obscurity, consequences dealt with in the hoped-for future, or idealize the past so that it becomes something that never was, thereby neutralizing any need to address its errors. A second option might be that the loss in the dominant western society of a sense of sin, and the attendant prevalence of melancholy, somehow fostered the constant re-packaging of the plight of Indigenous peoples as anything but sin! As a result, Euro-North Americans were provided the means to avoid responsibility.

The Face of the Issue here

Many times I find myself looking at someone who is looking at me and thinking to myself: “I wonder what she or he is thinking?” And – while admittedly I do not look overly Indigenous to many people – the same reaction is nonetheless true for those of us who do look Indigenous. There is a suspicion of Native peoples born out of an ignorance of our common history, framed in stereotypes. With respect to knowing and understanding Indigenous people, most Euro-North Americans are otherwise well-informed people who, when they hear their local MP or Congress person, read their local news editorials, when they listen to commentators or to sound-bytes on their favourite radio or TV station, with no other frame of reference into which to place the issues, nonetheless appear to assume the worst and adopt the stereotypes.

It is not simply a lack of knowledge of North American history, however, that is the roadblock to a significant effort for all of us to be reconciled, rather it is the absence of any real and intentional personal experience to provide a real context into which to insert one’s ideas, values, and opinions about that history. It is not a stretch to suggest that this historic ignorance, embedded in interpersonal apathy, captures the vast majority of Euro-North Americans. So when it comes to conversations around reconciliation, and just what that might mean, one must inevitably begin with the need for a fuller education concerning how we got to this place in our common history. Yes, I know that sounds trite and probably something you have heard before, but it is what is necessary – and it is, in significant measure, what the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Canada has been all about.

What compounds the issue today, unfortunately, is the shift in immigrant demographics. Newcomers to North America are no longer of largely European descent and the or, Euro North American colonial is therefore not something with which they can easily find a personal, albeit distant, ancestral connection. Whether earlier immigrant or more recent however, many, if not most Euro-North Americans, continue to labour under the myth that, “this is Canada”, or “this is the United States”, and it is therefore different than India, Africa, or other parts of the world with respect to the colonial experience of its original inhabitants.

John Ibbitson in his January 14, 2013 Globe and Mail column, took note of this shift as he offered a backhanded slam to Indigenous people and social justice movements targeting Indigenous issues. He observed that, “While recent [immigrants] may empathize with native Euro-North Americans, most … are willing, even eager, to integrate into Euro North American society. “It would hardly be surprising in that case,” he goes on to say, “If they had only limited empathy for native claims to land and sovereignty, and little sense of collective responsibility for the poverty on many reserves.”⁸

What Ibbitson’s article points out is the significant inability – dare I say unwillingness – of Euro-North Americans, and Euro North American governments, to embrace, understand, and learn from our collective history. I’m not suggesting they don’t read about history, nor study it to some extent in school. What I am saying is that Euro-North Americans are largely unable or unwilling to acknowledge that the compounded effects of hundreds of years of colonial racism and injustice created the current reality and its ongoing manifestations, which they now bemoan. It appears that, in this respect, Indigenous peoples might echo the words of Martin Luther King Jr., “You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place… But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.”⁹

If we are to be reconciled – and that is what the second half of the TRC mandate is all about – it cannot be on the basis of “that was then, this is now, get over it.” Nor can it be yet another expression of “just become like us and fit in.” We are all treaty people, whether Euro- Euro North American, Ghanaian, Sri Lankan, or First Nations. The treaties we, or our forbears, signed together described the way we would live together in this land we now call Canada – and it was not assimilation. We must come to grips not just with how we got here, but why we are staying in this awkward and tense situation in which we continue to find ourselves. 

What has this to do with the church and reconciliation?

When it comes to the wider church’s engagement with peoples in various lands, looking over our shoulder is critical, since cultural conflict arose quite quickly in the early church. In fact, Jesus had only just risen and ascended, the Great Commission was newly given, the church was beginning to realize growth among the nations, and conflict struck. Believers from the sect of the Pharisees came down to Antioch to say essentially, “You must become like us first – and then you can become Christian!” The council at Jerusalem listened to both sides of the argument; finally making a pronouncement that clearly said there is no singular culture into which we must enter to become faithful followers of Jesus. And so the church launched, the cultural issue resolved. 

Within a century, however, the tables had turned and the Gentiles were demanding that the Jews renounce their Jewishness so that they might then be, or become authentic Christians. The pattern is seen to continue throughout the history of the church and its mission activity. In fact, it seems the exception when some form of cultural coercion, often violent, is not present.¹⁰

So that you might understand just a little better what I am driving at allow me, using selected quotes, to recreate the trajectory Canada took that shaped its joint history – a track centuries old upon which it has largely continued to the present day.

Understanding the Roots of our Struggle

In the thinking of the earliest period of contact, we find a clear and telling description of intent. On two of numerous other occasions where he and other early colonials and missionaries would reflect on the purpose for which they had come to the ‘New World,’ Pierre Biard notes, “If they are savages, it is to domesticate and civilize them that we have come here; if they are rude, that is no reason that we should be idle.¹¹ Biard goes on to say, 

So, just as we must proceed with the temporal, as it is convenient to do, so in the same proportion with the spiritual; catechize, instruct, educate, and train the Savages properly and with long patience.¹²

Contained in this brief statement of their mission, Jesuit Pierre Biard captures the core of the problem: thorough assimilation into a Euro-centric, Christian world and worldview, while simultaneously pursuing the task of their monarch – temporal gain. In later years, historical retrospectives would describe the well-established course taken by colonial powers and missionary shock troops – one whose unambiguous intent became eminently visible over the centuries. John Loftus, for example, would note, 

The Jesuit attack pedagogy was aimed primarily at undermining the lifeworld foundations of Indian ways of life…to undermine the Amerindian cultural foundations.¹³

Now, lest we think this was simply a Jesuit issue locked in a particular era, as we move forward in time we can see the same attitudes reflected in those who would follow – Jesuit or not, missionary or politician. Canada’s first Prime Minister, for example, when confronted with First Nations and Métis disagreement with the collusion of his government to continue nation building at their expense, would exclaim in parliament,

[Indians] are simply living on the benevolence and charity of the Canadian parliament, and, as the old adage says, beggars should not be choosers.¹⁴

As Canada entered the 20th century, the architect of much of the federal government’s continuing attempts at assimilation in the early 20th century would, in turn, proclaim that his vision of the future would care for the abuses and inconveniences of the past. Duncan Campbell Scott proclaimed almost triumphantly, albeit prematurely,

It is the opinion of the writer that…the Government will in time reach the end of its responsibility as the Indians progress into civilization and finally disappear as a separate and distinct people.¹⁵

Scott envisioned a future where the “Indian problem” would be cared for through the consistent implementation of government policies, as they had been to date. Time would care for the rest. Nor has it changed in any significant way today. Prime Minister Harper made this quite clear in his inability to assess the true nature of Canada’s history. At the G20 summit, he was heard to say,

Canada remains in a very special place in the world…. We are the one major developed country that no one thinks has any responsibility for this crisis. In fact, on the contrary, they look at our policies as a solution to the crisis. We’re the one country in the room everybody would like to be…. We are one of the most stable regimes in history…. We are unique in that regard. We also have no history of colonialism. So we have all of the things that many people admire about the great powers but none of the things that threaten or bother them.¹⁶

This is a micro-sketch of the Canada you did not study in school history. It is how Canada and the United States became what they are with respect to their Indigenous peoples. It is still what motivates much of the Euro North American drive toward an unrealistic prosperity, even as they continue to ignore the demands for real and authentic consultation required, for example, in Canada’s Constitution Act of 1982. Canadian and US citizen’s benefit from wealth obtained at the expense of Indigenous people – in abrogation, yet again, of treaties and agreements we are all party to. It is this history that is essential to know and understand else we are ill prepared for the reconciliation we so desperately need today for which the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Canada was, at least in part, formed.

Honesty Concerning Motive

Those who are followers of the Jesus Way need to be quite clear that, as often as not, King and country act in conflict with the very real expectations of the King of Kings. Alan Ray’s reflection on the Doctrine of Discovery, one of the principle tools of the state in the colonial era, makes clear just how much this has been true. He observes,

The doctrine of discovery was deployed in the service of property rights, but its continuing power and legitimacy following the end of Christian monarchies depended on assumptions of race that, as we have seen, influenced [people like] the great John Marshall and continue to influence the highest Court.¹⁷

To ignore history is to ignore the colonial period of rape and pillage in the guise of civilization and Christianization; it is to overlook the subjugating economic frameworks within which humanity has and continues to labour; it is to overlook the continued human drive for bigger, better, more, faster – an engine which powered the colonial enterprise from the very beginning, requiring the use of, first Indian, and then African slaves in its plantations, fields and orchards.¹⁸ To deny our need to know the whole story of our Christian past is to suggest that the settler definition of Christian faith, central to the drive of the colonial enterprise, is the one we still hold to and support. It is as if we offer yet again, the threat of God’s judgment – or our own in the guise of God’s agents as in Oviedo concerning the Requerimiento

If you do not do it…then with the help of God I will undertake powerful action against you. I will make war on you everywhere and in every way that I can. I will subject you to the yoke and obedience of the church and of Their Highnesses. I will take you personally and your wives and children, and make slaves of you, and as such sell you off…and I will take away your property and cause you all the evil and harm I can.¹⁹

Or, perhaps even more dramatically, we might be guilty of identifying with one of the church’s “great” theologians, Aquinas who suggested grimly, “Unbelievers deserve not only to be separated from the Church, but also…to be exterminated from the World by death.”²⁰ Since the United Nations has declared the colonial experience to be one of cultural and social genocide, it is not too much of a stretch to imagine such a thing as Aquinas declares taking place were colonial practices to be continued in their current, unadjusted trajectory.²¹

Equally important is that we be honest about the continued intransigence toward reconciliation by many Christians. Countless times, in a discussion about history and the need to be accountable for its impact on the lives of Indigenous people, the first words we get are, “That happened in the past. We are not personally responsible.” Indigenous people regularly hear these words, or ones to their effect, in discussions about multi-generational prejudicial social policies, treaty rights, and wrongs committed against them (over successive generations), and about the possibility of reconciliation. 

More often than not, these words are offered by people who, while acknowledging past wrongs, want or need to find personal distance from responsibility for having maintained the environment in which these wrongs originally and now continue to take place. These are words of personal exoneration, which, while they may seem reasonable and even justifiable, give voice to the idea that while they enjoy privileges provided them by the decisions of their forebears, they hold no personal responsibility for the actions that created those privileges. On the surface this way of thinking would appear to be reasonable and understandable. After all, they weren’t alive when this all started. And, this is true! 

When we look below the surface, however, we find that the same ideas that gave rise to the original wrongs and injustices still exist today, albeit in modified form. Often, in the day-to-day behaviours of these very same people we continue to find wilful ignorance, apathy, judgment and stereotyping; we find expectations of cultural assimilation, and support for policies whose ultimate aim is extinguishment of pre-existing Indigenous rights. At best such attitudes ignore, at worst further degrade Indigenous people’s lives, homes, and communities with new thrusts at assimilation. Ideas about the lack of personal responsibility for decisions made 50, 75, 100, or 150 years ago persevere as the foundation upon which contemporary racial prejudice is maintained.

In order for us to actually make progress on reconciliation these ideas must be acknowledged and expunged from our policies, removing the legislative isolation that has maintained Euro North American Indigenous peoples as third and fourth class citizens for well over 150 years. I say third and fourth class because immigrant populations, while often looked upon with varying levels of disdain have, more often than not, been treated better than this land’s original inhabitants.

The second words that Euro-North Americans tend to speak in response to a proposal for reconciliation that is just and faithful to the desire for a renewed relationship relate to cost – personal and collective. Their concern is about what “they” (sometimes meaning themselves personally, other times meaning “other Euro-North Americans”) will have to give up or, go without. Many Euro-North Americans feel that their ability to acquire prosperity and accomplish their goals for life will be threatened or truncated in some way through any act of reconciliation that acknowledges the harm of past policies with a view to justice being done. Some simply feel it an affront to ‘give those people anything they have not earned, which they have had to work hard for.’

If Euro-North Americans’ responses are a litmus test, then the drive for more and better, bigger and faster still has humanity in its grip. For example, notice the penchant for new and better, which is exploited by the marketing techniques of Facebook, Google and every other media merchant who seeks to sell us the latest version of an iPad or smartphone. We are treated as units of consumption by the marketers and promoters of ‘more’, and we respond with enthusiasm. Ultimately this is the same drive that pushed Columbus and others across the oceans of the world in search or treasure. It is a motive for life that militates against authentic reconciliation.

The Road Back

This then is the situation in which we find ourselves. It is the trajectory on which Canada and the United States were set from the very earliest days of the discovery of Europeans on our shores. It is one that sought at every turn to undermine and overthrow Indigenous peoples even if and when the treaties and agreements that were entered into, by their own words, ensured native peaceful occupation of their own lands in perpetuity as with the Haldimand Tract Proclamation of 1784.²² This trajectory ensured one people’s progress, prosperity, and well-being at the expense of another’s. If we are to have reconciliation, however, this drive for progress and prosperity at all costs must be set aside in favour of another way of thinking about life. It must more closely resemble the desires and inclinations of the heart of the First Nations people of old – to live well in the land together! It must more closely align with the teachings of the Creator whom many Indigenous people in Canada and the USA still lay claim.

Having focused earlier in this piece on the motive and ideology of colonial advance and consolidation, reflect now on the early days of North American encounter from a different perspective. Note the observations of two early European ‘discoverers’ who recorded the behaviours and attitudes of the peoples of this land as they observed them. The first, a French lawyer, takes pains to contrast ‘les sauvages’ with those of his European kin. Marc Lescarbot notes,

And, in this respect, I consider all these poor savages, whom we commiserate, to be very happy; for pale Envy doth not emaciate them, neither do they feel the inhumanity of those who serve God hypocritically, harassing their fellow-creatures under this mask: nor are they subject to the artifices of those who, lacking virtue and goodness wrap themselves up in a mantle of false piety to nourish their ambition. If they do not know God, at least they do not blaspheme him, as the greater number of Christians do. Nor do they understand the art of poisoning, or of corrupting chastity by devilish artifice.²³

The second is from Jesuit missionary, Pierre le Jeune. In what seems almost a sense of pride in these primitive peoples he has met, le Jeune describes a character absent from most Europeans of his familiarity. He observes,

Moreover, if it is a great blessing to be free from a great evil, our Savages are happy; for the two tyrants who provide hell and torture for many of our Europeans, do not reign in their great forests – I mean ambition and avarice. As they have neither political organization, nor offices, nor dignities, nor any authority, for they only obey their Chief through good will toward him, therefore they never kill each other to acquire these honours. Also, as they are contented with a mere living, not one of them gives himself to the Devil to acquire wealth.²⁴

In this and a thousand other such observations contained in early contact literature we are presented with a more balanced view of Indigenous people than the one that most history books portray. In these descriptions, even with period and context considered, we glimpse what has been lost: a way of thought and life that, by colonists’ own admission, resembled the Sermon on the Mount more than European Christians’ unbridled drive for more that once enchanted – and still captivates – Western-influenced ways of life. Taken differently, Indigenous ways of life might have balanced the Euro North American’s penchant for framing current behaviour in light of future gain. They might have invited a more careful reflection on the past as interpreter of present behaviour, thus mitigating continued human destructiveness in the guise of progress and the pursuit of a satisfied life.

Two pictures of Indigenous people are in front of us in history: the godless, heathen savage needing to be civilized and assimilated, reflected in the stereotype of those who do not fit in to “normal” Euro North American society; or a people who, while differing in their technological sophistication, offer a more tempered view of life within a creation about which they understand themselves to be only a part, seeking balance and harmony in their life ways. And so, as discussions about reconciliation are considered a question for Euro-North Americans is this: “To what and to whom would you wish to be reconciled?” Failure to address this question means we fail to understand the heart and soul of reconciliation movements and the focus. Failure to understand this makes achieving true reconciliation impossible and it presages a renewed, albeit more gentle, colonial effort at assimilation.

Unfortunately, we’ve been here before…Canada, as Study!

In 1995, former member of Canada’s parliament, Cree leader Elijah Harper, called for, then convened, a “Sacred Assembly.” Indigenous spiritual leaders and elders, together with Catholic, mainline protestant, and evangelical leaders of Canada, participated in multi-day conversations about what it would take to be reconciled in the land, to live together in peaceful relationship. Together with a representative from each of the Euro North American Conference of Catholic bishops, the Citizens for Public Justice, and the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada, I co-authored two documents titled “Principles and Priorities for a New Relationship,” and “Proclamation of Reconciliation” respectively.

Convened on the heels of the release, in 1996, of the Royal Commission Report on Aboriginal People (RCAP), the Assembly acknowledged the fact that the situation in which Canada found itself – and, to a significant extent, still finds itself today – rests on an unwillingness to stop doing what was done to Indigenous peoples that created the situation in the first place. Hence, the suggestion, “That was then, this is now, therefore I have no responsibility,” is vacuous. The RCAP began 25 years ago; the Sacred Assembly was 20 years ago; all major traditions of the church were invited and/or were participants. Most of you reading this will have been alive at that time. Here, in part, is what that Assembly embraced:

We share the recognition

• The sins of injustice which have historically divided Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples remain active in our society today;
• Concrete actions must be taken by Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal peoples alike to overcome these injustices and to bind up the wounds of those who have suffered.

We share an understanding

• While change must take place at all levels of society, it must be rooted most firmly in the communities;
• Relations based on justice will require respect for past treaties, a fair settlement of land rights disputes, the implementation of the inherent right of self-government and the creation of economic development opportunities and other institutions to support it.²⁵

Since little, if anything was done with the output of the Assembly, and few, if any recall the RCAP, and since many have either not heard of, or not participated in the TRC’s many opportunities over several years, the outlook for reconciliation is still in question. After all, these are activities and occasions that should have contributed to our journeying together in a better way (I am not optimistic that many even recall the events). It stands as a testimony to what I have said in these few pages: our history is still behind us instead of ahead of us. Rather than helping us to understand where we are by describing how we got here, so we might see the road back to right relationship, it is simply an assemblage of vague, long ago events events all but forgotten.

If we are to create a new climate of respect and cooperation in Canada, the idea that reconciliation is an event – like the one that was held in 2008 on Parliament Hill presided over by then Prime Minister Stephen Harper – must be set aside. Instead we must seek to embrace the attitudes, activities and policies of reconciliation in on-going journey that reflects the understanding Europeans and Indigenous peoples agreed to when we set out together. Furthermore, we must shed the notion that economic prosperity and parity are the answer. Economics will always create winners and losers. With no exceptions I can reference in history, has prosperity for one not inevitably meant loss for another. Finally, we must also shed the idea that this did not happen on my watch. It did – because it still does.

1. Karl A. Menninger, Whatever became of sin? (New York, Hawthorn Books, 1973), 181-183.
2. Ibid.
3. Paul C. Vitz, Psychology as religion: the cult of self-worship (Grand Rapids, Eerdmans, 1977), 22.
4. Gregory Boer, “Images of Depression: A Theoretical Study of Depression and Melancholia as Expressions of an Absence of Imagining and an Unrequited Unconscious Need for Transformation” PhD dissertation, (Pacifica Graduate Institute, 2008), 41,42.
5. Daniel. N. Stern, The interpersonal world of the infant: a view from psychoanalysis and developmental psychology (New York, Basic Books, 1985), quoted in Gregory Boer, “Images of Depression: A Theoretical Study of Depression and Melancholia as Expressions of an Absence of Imagining and an Unrequited Unconscious Need for Transformation.” PhD dissertation (Pacifica Graduate Institute), 41,42.
6. James Hillman, Archetypal psychology: a brief account: together with a complete checklist of works. (Dallas, Tex., Spring Publications, 1983), quoted in Gregory Boer, “Images of Depression: A Theoretical Study of Depression and Melancholia as Expressions of an Absence of Imagining and an Unrequited Unconscious Need for Transformation.” PhD dissertation (Pacifica Graduate Institute), 42.
7. Ibid (41).
8. John Ibbitson, “Native protests: Harper needs to stay the course in winter of native discontent” in The Globe and Mail, Monday, Jan. 14, 2013
9. Martin Luther  King  Jr., “Letter  from  a  Birmingham Jail [King, Jr.], (King, Martin Luther Jr., April 16, 1963).
10. See for example, the extensive documentation of this phenomenon in Fletcher, R. A. The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity. 1st American ed. New York: H. Holt and Co., 1998.
11. Pierre Biard, Jesuit Relations, trans. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896), 1611, Vol. 1, 47.
12. Pierre Biard, Jesuit Relations, trans. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896), 1616, Vol 3, 37.
13. Michael Welton, The Christian Delusion (John W. Loftus, 2005), 103).
14. Sir John A. Macdonald, House of Commons Debates, Official Report, Volume 4 (E. Cloutier, Queen’s Printer and Controller of Stationery, 1885) quoted in Jill St. Germain, Broken Treaties United States and Euro North American Relations with the Lakotas and the Plains Cree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 209.
15. Duncan Campbell Scott, Administration of Indian Affairs (Toronto: Euro North American Institute of International Affairs, and Institute of Pacific Relations, 1931), 27
16. David Ljundggren, “Every G20 nation wants to be Canada, insists PM,” Reuters online, September 25, 2009.
17. Allan Ray, “The Doctrine of Discovery and the Conquest of the Americas” from a public address at Wheaton College (IL), October 1, 2012.
18. For a description of the degree to which Indigenous North Americans were enslaved during the first 150 plus years of colonization, see M.E. Newell, Brethren by nature: New England Indians, colonists, and the origins of American slavery (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2015).
19. Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés, Gonzalo, et al., (Historia general y natural de las Indias, islas y tierra-firme del mar océano. 3 pts. in 4 vols. (Madrid: Imprenta de la Real Academia de la Historia. 1851), quoted in Luis N. Rivera Pagán, A Violent Evangelism: The Political and Religious Conquest of the Americas (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1992), 34.
20. Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologica, trans. by Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Benzinger Brothers Printers to the Holy Apostolic See, 1485), SECOND PART OF THE SECOND PART: L.10, C.4.
21. This would be no less the case for Euro-North Americans whether they be Christian or not.
22. Charles M. Johnston, ed. (1964). The Valley Of The Six Nations. The Champlain Society For The Government of Ontario, University of Toronto Press. pp. 50–51.
23. Marc Lescarbot, “Conversion of the savages who were baptized in New France” in, Jesuit Relations, trans. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896), 1610, Vol. 3, 73.
24. Pierre Le Jeune, Jesuit Relations, trans. Reuben Gold Thwaites (Cleveland: Burrows Bros., 1896), 1634, Vol. 6, 66.
25. LeBlanc, Terry, Bruce Clemenger et al. “Proceedings of the Sacred Assembly”, 1995, 3-5