Page 43 - Presbyterian Connection

Connection
RECONCILIATION
Witness and Legacy:
Residential Schools and the PCC
presbyterian.ca
SPRING 2023
PRESBYTERIAN
43
By Allyson Carr, Justice Ministries
Much of the work of “doing jus- tice,” to which the church is called, involves identifying and admitting where things have gone very, very wrong. Sometimes faith-based justice-related work can be speaking a vision that ech- oes the wholeness God intended, spoken of through the Gospel and the prophets. But more often than not, it involves acknowledging and attempting to address injus- tices—including, and especially, those in which the church was involved. This is nowhere more evident than when addressing the church’s history of colonialism and its complicity in the Residen- tial School system.
One of the workshops the Life and Mission Agency offers to con- gregations, presbyteries and other groups is a history of the PCC’s involvement in running Residential Schools and the witness and leg- acy the schools created. Though the workshop is updated every few months to ensure it remains connected to the church’s pre- sent context, it always involves a look at excerpts from a variety of church documents—letters from missionaries, committee reports to General Assembly, as well as official policies or church state- ments. In this way, everyone can see what the church was saying then and what the church is say- ing now. The words are there in black and white.
These records still only give a handful of representative quotes from the archival material, but the picture it shows of the church’s
witness is clear: there was a con- flation of the church’s mission with a particular form of western European culture, despite the fact that the church has never only comprised one culture. That this conflation was accompanied by racist beliefs also becomes clear when looking at the archival ma- terial. Somehow, “sharing God’s love” became tied to enforced as- similation into western European culture, as though one could only experience God’s love or find God through that specific culture. This is, in fact, part of what the 1994 Confession—where the church confessed its role in running Residential Schools and asked for forgiveness—admitted. In the words of that Confession, “We acknowledge that the roots of the harm we have done are found in the attitudes and values of west- ern European colonialism, and the assumption that what was not yet moulded in our image was to be discovered and exploited.... In our cultural arrogance we have been blind to the ways in which our own understanding of the Gospel has been culturally con- ditioned, and because of our in- sensitivity to Aboriginal cultures, we have demanded more of the Aboriginal people than the Gospel requires, and have thus misrepre- sented Jesus Christ.”
There is a lot in the Confession that should sit heavily with us, but that last line quoted above is cer- tainly among the most unsettling lines for me, the idea of misrep- resenting Jesus Christ. And with each new Indigenous community that announces anomalies locat-
ed in their searches for unmarked graves, whether at a former Pres- byterian-run school or not, that line hits me harder.
In learning about the Doctrine of Discovery that tried to justify taking land; in learning about the Residential Schools that tried to justify taking children; in learning about colonization and the effects of intergenerational trauma today; in seeing the harm that still exists in Indigenous communities today because of all this, I am always
brought up shor t. There are so many lives affected, so many fam- ilies, and so many communities. Evensayingsimply“livesaffected” is inadequate to the compounded trauma the schools have caused and would still have caused even if there had been no physical or sexual abuse within them. And we know there was such abuse. The schools were harmful by their very nature because they were a key part of a system purposefully intended to sever Indigenous People from their culture, lan- guage, spiritual practices, fam- ily suppor ts and identity so that they could be—as the Confession aboveacknowledges—“moulded” in the image of something else.
That is the sin the church has as part of its witness to who Christ is. That is what “misrepresent- ing Jesus Christ” means in this context. There is no way in which trying to sever a people from their identity and all cultural suppor ts would not create lasting intergen- erational damage. There is no way in which doing so in the name of Jesus does not represent Jesus as something wholly other than what we find in the Gospel accounts.
The church participated at a
foundational level in creating and sustaining conditions that led to the announcements of anoma- lies and unmarked graves that we are seeing. The church also helped create conditions where the effects of intergenerational trauma—the increased statisti- cal likelihood of experiencing violence, the increased statistical likelihood of housing and food in- security, and the increased statis- tical likelihood of difficulties with mental health and addictions, just to name a few—are still the reality experienced in many Indigenous communities today.
There is so much work to be done to address the injustices the church helped create. Our first task is to continue to listen to the voices of Indigenous People within the church and outside to hear how the church can address this legacy. Even as the church does so, it is good to remember words from Living Faith, which reminds us that justice “seeks the best way to create well-being in every society” (8.4.4). That is the justice we are called to as we listen; the work of reconciliation requires that we attend urgently to this work.