Every Child Matters
Darlene Daniels (Area Reference Person for Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada) recently led a webinar, “Every Child Matters,” for both Native and allies-to-Native people, about the boarding school graves of Canadian Indigenous children. (You can view the webinar here <www.youtube.com/watch?v=0rOG1rpyjVY>.)
Darlene spoke with great clarity about what had happened to Indigenous children and their communities for three generations. She gave us non-Native people ideas for healing, and the following are some things I heard her say:
This issue is important, because each child matters. Also, if we are going to have a chance of living on a planet that is regenerative and thriving, we must heal from what has happened and resolve what gets in our way of acting with integrity.
Healing is the work of both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. The people and communities that have been hurt by oppression get to heal from the hurts, and those of us who have been on the oppressor end get to heal from whatever set us up [predisposed us] to act in the oppressor role. Healing is good for everyone. After we heal, the hurts won’t keep affecting us emotionally and physically and we will be able to work more effectively to end the systematic oppression and oppressive policies that still exist today.
The Canadian government identifies over a hundred boarding schools, but there were over a thousand. Darlene spoke about her mom’s experience in boarding schools and the experiences of leaders who kept sharing their boarding school experiences throughout their lives.
Here are some examples of boarding school cruelty: The Canadian boarding schools were designed to force “the Indian out of the child.” Children were removed from their families and communities and beaten, humiliated, starved, forced not to speak their languages, forced not to play, sexually abused, forced to do dangerous work. People in the home communities lived without the sound of children, and when the children returned, they no longer knew how to play. Thousands of children died from the abuse. Native people in Canada were given the equipment to find the graves of the children; the government did not help. Although children officially began attending the schools at age six, graves were found in which there were much younger children.
Here are some ways we can heal, and act with integrity:
- We can learn, talk about, and feel the details of what happened.
- We can face that our government, churches, and community withheld information and lied to us.
- We can discharge what gets in the way of acting with integrity. (I think of integrity as treating everyone and the earth well.)
- We can discharge about how non-Native people have benefited from the oppression and genocide of Indigenous peoples.
- We can reach out to religious institutions (that we are members of or that are part of our cultures) so that they can be part of reconciling with our histories and making amends.
- We who are the European peoples of the world can work together to be part of the solution. We can develop a tradition, or return to traditions, of acting with integrity as a group and having each child matter.
The following is a goal adopted at the 2017 World Conference of the Re-evaluation Counseling Communities:
Backing Indigenous
Existence and Leadership
That non-Indigenous members of the RC Community work to heal from the effects of all past and current genocidal policies that humans have enforced on Indigenous peoples. That we stand against and work to end these policies of genocide in the present. That we discharge any distresses that interfere with our ability to learn from, support, and follow the leadership of Indigenous peoples, whose lands we all occupy and use resources from.
I would love to hear from others who attended Darlene’s webinar. I only captured a wee [small] bit of it.
San Francisco, California, USA
Reprinted from the RC e-mail discussion list for leaders of wide world change
(Present Time 205, October 2021)