Kimberly Murray, the Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burials Sites associated with Indian Residential Schools, released her Final Report at the end of October. It is a staggering work, in length and intent. Its 42 obligations focus on what governments, churches and other institutions must do to implement an Indigenous-led Reparations Framework for Truth, Accountability, Justice, and Reconciliation.
This blog post is the second of two open letters I have written to my mother about my work with the OSI. It is not, at its heart, about its conclusions, valid and necessary as they are. It does not directly contend with the contentious subjects of genocide or denialism, important and crucial as these are to understanding what happened to the disappeared children and what needs to happen – and stop happening – for them to finally come home. My aim is more humble, more intimate. I am writing as a son, as a Canadian, as someone who, like my mother (and, I sense, so many others) is trying to keep one’s heart soft, one’s mind open, in a climate of degrading dignity, increasing polarization and weaponized narratives.
Many – I fear most – will recoil from Ms. Murray’s report, if they don’t ignore it entirely. Many will dismiss it as ‘woke’ propaganda, founded on unproven claims and filtered through weak feelings. Heads will snap and hearts will harden against the evidence, the case, the call. I can hear it – booming even within the hollows of my own mean brain, where Survivors’ memories are shredded against the sharp edges of my own disbelief. My own denial.
I offer this reflection in gratitude to all those who are still telling us what happened, what matters, and what must be done, even and especially in the face of so much antagonism. We owe you, at least, our heartfelt listening, our sincere response. And thank you mum :)
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It starts with the drum. Stop talking; you’ll hear it. Every one of us is attuned to this sound. It’s the first we ever heard. It’s the original song. The drum is the heart and the womb; the beat of the first council, the earliest parliament. And this call at the genesis of life is also the call at the genesis of law. This source of love is also the root of obligation.
To understand the Special Interlocutor’s Final Report, you need to understand this. As my mother, you already do. You gathered me into this rhythm; you taught me how to dance. We know these steps: essential, unceasing, unique to each kinship but ultimately attuned to the one human heart.
The Interlocutor’s work heard challenging truths. Her report has outlined a challenging path. Her obligations – like asking Canada to refer itself to the International Criminal Court – would humble many institutions; they seek the inversing of many power structures. Our leaders may see these as humiliations, affronts to the dignity or very DNA of the monoliths they command. We cannot, of course, control what happens at the tops of such pyramids. But we can free ourselves from their fear and arrogance. We can hear – clearly – what the TRC first told us and what Ms. Murray’s work lays bare: that not only were children taken, in their thousands, to be stripped of their identities, languages, relationships and rights. That not only did many die, of causes, in conditions, which in today’s light are unambiguously criminal. That not only were many buried in unmarked graves far from their homes, far from families who were rarely told how, or even if, their beloved little ones had passed to Spirit, and who were never supported to bring them home. Not only all this – but her work has now also shed light on the many whose disappearances into the Residential School system have never been traced, whose grim passages through grim institutions were not disclosed, whose records were hidden, destroyed or never kept. This is what Ms. Murray means when she speaks of children’s “enforced disappearances” by the State sworn to care for them. This is what she means when she invokes international law. This is why she lays out the need for a reparations framework.
We heard the drum at the Interlocutor’s Final Gathering. We heard, as always, from Survivors and from Youth, as one invested the other with the work still to be done. We heard from experts and we heard from leaders. We heard from former AFN Grand Chief Ovide Mercredi, who told us that there are two essential Indigenous human rights at issue here: the right to belong, and the right to be different. Each is a prism through which to perceive what was taken with these taken children. Each is a light that might, just maybe, illuminate how we can help these stolen little ones return.
The right to belong. The right to be different. I’ve thought much about how a country can act to either nourish or imprison these rights, to uphold or undermine them in the places where they need to flourish: within specific communities, specific families, specific, unique human lives. Their brutal assault by the Indian Residential School system is clear enough, obvious to anyone with the heart to look. But what is less acknowledged is how these rights are still at risk, still vulnerable in a state that seeks easy absolution for its wrongs. That has given itself a blanket of amnesty as it offers ill-fitting, pre-cut ‘options’ for those still seeking to close the circle on their children’s journeys.
Our governments and institutions are called to listen to the OSI’s obligations – to, finally, belatedly, take each and every one of these lives seriously, take stock of each and every one of the broken laws that broke these children. Broken lives that, ignored or worse, denied, keep breaking the generations for whom finding, loving and bringing rest to these taken ancestors are their own legal obligations. Laws that, left unfulfilled, fester that initial wound.
And us? We can listen to the drum. We can respond to the steps it still – so generously – asks, expects, shows us how to follow. The path to accountability, the path to justice, the path, perhaps, eventually, to reconciliation and healing – all require attuning to this heart song. This is all much more than bureaucratic work. And the deepest beat, the unavoidable truth, is that there are children who are still missing. It was – and is – a crime under any law that they were disappeared. It is an obligation – under every law – to do all it takes to find them. The drum is singing, loud and clear, for each and every one of them.
Children, as you know, are not lightly taken on. By living, they entrust us with their lives. By learning, they demand we be their teachers. Protection, education – two basic promises the system made and – deliberately – failed to keep. But in the Indigenous societies whose laws I’m learning, there is at least one other obligation. Perhaps the most enduring, it is still, at least in Western lenses, the least acknowledged: it is that children are Sacred. And this Sacred nature, which radiates through and is upheld by all a child’s relations, must be kept central, kept active (as in many Indigenous languages, it is much more verb than noun). We ‘enact’ a child’s Sacred being in how we care, protect, listen, teach, nourish and – in those tragic times when we must – in how we grieve, honour and help them return to Creator.
If I had to simplify it (and I do – the Final Report is almost 1500 pages long), if I had to bring this matter down from the futile and dangerous political levels where I sense it has strayed, if I had to focus us all on a single point of challenge and connection, this is what I would say.
This is what I’m hearing, when I listen to the drum: Our children are Sacred. Many were taken; many remain lost. Let us – help us – find them. Help us – let us – bring them home.
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