Madam Speaker, I want to thank the New Democratic Party for bringing forward this topic on its opposition day. This is the kind of thing we need to do. We need to discuss this. We need to talk about it. We need to clarify and get to the truth of everything.
I know my colleague, the Minister of Indigenous Services, just said that he could not put himself in the place of those families and children. When I think of the residential schools, I think of what it would be like for my three boys to have been taken away from me when they were five or six years old. I think about them being told I was a bad parent and they would never see me again. I think of them being made to believe that everything they believed in, their family and their parents, was a lie or was untrue; making them feel ashamed of who they were, never knowing what it was to have been loved by a parent and living in an institution where they were abused. That makes me tear up because it must have been horrid.
When I think of those children who were buried in the mass grave in Kamloops, I think how they must have longed to see their parents, longed to be home, feeling ashamed every single day about being Indian and having to change who they were. I am just thinking about that.
In 2010-11, I chaired the status of women committee. We looked at the issue of violence against indigenous women in society, on reserve and off reserve. We went across the country, members from all political parties. We listened to the testimony of the women, the grandmothers and the elders. Every member of that committee did not have a single day in which they did not have tears unabashedly streaming down their cheeks, hearing those stories and the injustice of it all. Some of them came in saying things that they heard from other Canadians, such as “Oh, look at me”, that they had come here with no money in their pockets and they had survived. They wanted to know why these people were not able to do the same. They stopped saying that after the second meeting. They could not bear to listen to that truth.
I want to also note that during these committee hearings, I do not think we ever had more than two people in the room who were non-indigenous. Canadians did not care. They did not want to come and they did not want to listen. This was not an important thing for them to hear.
I hear people say that when they were in school, they were not taught this. That is the collective responsibility we bear for not caring, for pretending we did not know or for not wanting to know. That is important thing I want to park here. The facts are that most Canadians do not know and that most Canadian contribute to societal discrimination against indigenous people, calling them names, thinking they are, in fact, unworthy of the help or of anything. They do not understand the intergenerational trauma.
I have to mention South Africa. South Africa began apartheid because people came here, they saw what we were doing, they saw the carding system to be an Indian. They saw the residential schools and the reserves. They went back and did that in South Africa. They borrowed that for the way the Afrikaners treated the majority of that community. When we look at the parallels between South Africa, they learned apartheid from us.
However, we also learned something from them. We learned about truth and reconciliation. We are now talking about truth and reconciliation. We have been talking about it for a long time. When the people, the survivors, went and spoke, they mostly spoke to an indigenous commission. There still were no Canadians there, listening, learning and feeling heartbroken by what they heard. I do not believe there is a Canadian who would not be heartbroken by those stories. We have talked about reconciliation, but I want to talk about truth.
I want to make sure as we use this opportunity to speak together as a Parliament, we resist the tendency to want to have a quick and dirty fix and then go about our business and have feelings of “look at us, we just did all the right things”, that we can just feel not guilty and can assuage all of the feelings we have.
We should not do that, and we should not take this horrible, tragic, painful finding of the bodies of children in Kamloops to become partisan and political. We would actually be desecrating the bodies of those children if we built partisanship out of this, if we made political gains out of this.
I would love to hear us talk about this and would love to not hear us say “and this is what you must do”, because are we not then doing what the colonials and the churches did, which is to tell everybody what to do? Do we not think we have told indigenous people what to do for long enough? Do we not think that reconciliation is a long journey? We learned that from South Africa. It still has not finished that journey. South Africa is still on that journey.
The point I am trying to make here is that we have to be very careful about how we use this tragedy to impose on and continue to pretend we know best for indigenous people. Reconciliation is taking a long time because we have to work and, for the first time, listen and respect what indigenous communities want.
Indigenous communities across this country have different journeys right now. Some of them are ready for reconciliation and self-government and some of them have a long way to go. We need to be patient and work with them in respect. As government, we love to say, “Let us get this done tomorrow; let us get this bill passed”, but this is not what this about. This is about a journey.
I want to talk a bit about all the tears, flowers and outpouring of grief by Canadians. This is good and is cathartic for everybody. At the same time, we know everybody will move on to a different site at the next tragedy that comes and put flowers, and that the grief will be just as great for that new thing as it is for this one. This is not simply an incident we must grieve over. This has been going on for a long time.
There has been intergenerational pain and grief. As Canadians, never mind government or institutions, but as Canadians, every day we judge indigenous people. We are responsible, as Canadians, for the systemic discrimination of “Look at that person. They're probably drunk.” I heard from the witnesses in committee about how people would be taken to the hospital in pain, and someone talked about an incident where a young man had an abscessed tooth and was in such pain he was just crying all the time and the nurses and doctor said to bring him back when he was sober.
We are responsible for that. This is not just about what a government did. This is not about what churches did. This is about what everybody did because they thought they knew best. I do not want us to do that. I do not want us to always know best. I want us to heed, as we are already doing, the path to reconciliation and take the patience to walk with indigenous people, to listen to indigenous people and to heed what they are telling us. Not just to listen, but to heed it. We need to go at the pace they are ready to go at, and in the interim, to support, heal and make sure we build together a new society.
I want to talk about the truth part. We have talked a lot about reconciliation. In the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, the truth was told in public fora. The truth was told by witnesses who came to say what they had suffered under that horrible regime, and everybody heard. The Afrikaners heard, the white population heard, everybody heard. It was broadcast on television and everybody heard that truth.
What we need to do is now go back to the schools and teach that truth. What we need today, other than teddy bears, flowers and quick fixes, is for every single Canadian in this country to own that truth. We need to own that shame. We need to own that guilt. We need to say to indigenous people that we have continued to do this and are sorry, not just that we are sorry but that we want to take the burden of guilt onto ourselves and that we want to take that shame and carry it with them. That is how it should go.
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