“I humbly beg forgiveness for the evil committed by so many Christians against the Indigenous peoples,” said Pope Francis on July 25 in a former site of a residential school for Canada’s Indigenous children. Pope Francis is the first prominent member of the Roman Catholic Church to publicly acknowledge and claim the responsibility for the “cultural genocide” of Indigenous peoples, or the policy of forced assimilation of the Aboriginal population into mainstream Christian culture. Though the Pope’s apology holds monumental historical import, many members of the Native community remark that words do not carry what is truly needed to heal — an infrangible guarantee that such an atrocity will never be repeated nor forgotten.
Below Canada’s soil, lie the unmarked remains of thousands of Indigenous children who expired in the residential schools the Canadian government and the Catholic Church tore them into. Though estimates of the exact number of casualties vary greatly from source to source due to the furtiveness in which the deaths were treated, the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation approximates that around 4,000 children died in Canada’s residential schools over the course of a century. Though the Canadian government formally recognized the events and apologized in 2008, the Roman Catholic Church has not given a public showcase of regret before Pope Francis’ apology.
History Behind Forced Assimilation
The policy of forced assimilation is not a uniquely Canadian cruelty. Professor Kim Sung Yup (Department of Western History, Seoul National University) defines forced assimilation as a “systematic state-led process” to facilitate the colonial endeavors of settlers at expense of Indigenous peoples, as infant states such as Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and Australia intended to “diminish the collective identity and strength of indigenous communities through attrition.”
The residential schools are the most conspicuous branch of settler colonialism in modern times. In the initial stages of settlement, colonizers would commit unmitigated slaughter and mass displacement of Aboriginal societies; the preferred method of settler-based expansionism, however, took a more pernicious turn starting from the late 19th century. The schools were a much more deleteriously effective attempt at firmly uprooting potential threats posed by Indigenous tribes and usurping their property, all under the façade of the benevolent provision of education.
Conditions in the schools were beyond horrific, as students were forced to denounce their language, culture, and religion in lieu of that of the majority Christian culture; disobeyers would face wide-ranging forms of abuse. The schools additionally forbade children from connecting with their parents and relatives to efficaciously alienate them from their culture, and families would mostly not be informed even if the child had passed away in the school. Many would lose their lives in the schools due to the excruciatingly hard labor and unceasing abuse, and survivors continue to suffer from lifelong physical and mental repercussions.
“A Pilgrimage of Penance”
Though the ‘phasing out’ of residential schools began around the 1950s, it would yet take four more decades for the last official residential school to be nullified. Even when absent, however, the indelible generational trauma and foundational threats to aboriginal communities left by the schools persist to this day. Families were torn apart, the capacity of combined resistance was critically hindered, and generations of Indigenous individuals were to be placed in a harrowing juncture between their original upbringing and the Christian culture they were forced to ingest, unable to feel peace in either of them.
Indigenous communities have continuously demanded appropriate reparations from both the Canadian government and the Catholic Church. The Pope’s July trip to Canada has solely been made with the intention of issuing an apology, with himself naming the trip as a “pilgrimage of penance.” Pope Francis visited multiple sites of residential schools across the nation, from Alberta to the Arctic Circle, standing on mass graves where missing indigenous children are believed to be buried en masse. He wore a traditional feathered headpiece gifted to him by the Chief of the Ermineskin Cree Nation as he spoke, with the crowd full of survivors or their descendants weeping, cheering, or remaining woefully conflicted towards his words.
“I ask forgiveness,” the Pope iterated, according to an official recount by the Vatican News, “for the ways in which many members of the church and of religious communities cooperated, not least through their indifference, in projects of cultural destruction and forced assimilation promoted by the governments of that time, which culminated in the system of residential schools.”
A Watershed Moment
The indigenous community’s reaction to Pope Francis’ apology remains mixed. Some have focused on the historical momentum of the address, while many more find it hollow, as words cannot possibly nullify the barbarous violence targeted specifically to a certain demographic for the goal of demolishment. Additionally, the Pope’s apology fails to reach a more systemic problem that lies within. The residential schools and the policy of settler colonialism were not an isolated case of malfeasance of contemporary rulers, but rather one embedded in the history of European colonization and one that continues to exert its implicit influence within social structures.
It is critical, however, that the Pope’s apology is treated not as an isolated incident worth neither minute criticism nor praise, but rather as a watershed moment in the continuous trend of atonement and reparations. “If we focus on passing moral judgments about what the Pope did or did not do,” commented Professor Kim, “we risk relegating indigenous peoples to one-dimensional, passive victims.” Instead of focusing on the meticulous morality of the Pope’s statement, more emphasis should be gathered on the will of Aboriginal communities, and which direction they wish their former colonizers would take towards restitution.
The Pope’s statement of self-imputation was not the result of altruistic twinges of conscience on his part. Rather, it was the hardly achieved victory of multivarious Aboriginal individuals who consistently fought for the implicit perpetrators of cultural genocide to be held properly accountable. Heeding the Pope’s precedent, implicit parties in the tragedy of the residential schools should “engage in sustained and wide-ranging dialogue with indigenous peoples,” as affirmed by Professor Kim, to develop a transformative framework to truly expunge the vestiges of colonialism. As society recoils from the pernicious remnants of colonialism, an unequivocal social priority should be to grant autonomy and self-determination to Indigenous individuals, giving back the values that were systematically ripped from them.
