How Do You Make A Holiday Out of Reconciliation?

Jeff Green | Sep 29, 2021

Like many others, I did not pay much attention to the federal legislation to establish a National Truth and Reconciliation Day, and make it a federal statutory holiday.

For most of you reading this in our print, it is a day later than normal, because September 30 fell on a Thursday and the Canada Post was not operating yesterday.

It turns out that the legislation establishing the holiday was passed only a few months ago, on June 3rd, in the waning days of the previous government.

The timing coincided with the discovery of mass graves at residential schools in several locations across the country. The first discovery, near Kamloops, had been widely announced a week earlier, on May 27.

But neither the holiday nor the mass graves were a surprise to those who had been paying attention.

The graves were discussed in the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commision (TRC) in 2015. In fact, 6 years earlier, in 2009, while the commission was in an earlier stage of its work, a request was made for federal funding to fund projects to identify the sites, but the request was denied by the federal government of the day. The TLC report also called for funding to discover the mass graves

Another of the TLC report recommendations was for a national day of a commemoration for residential school survivors. A private members bill calling for such a day was tabled in 2017 but died on the order paper when the 2019 election was called.

A second bill was tabled, this time by the government, in September of 2020, and took until June, 2021 to work its way through the system.

It it odd to think of a holiday in honour of the victims and survivors of systematic abuse over 100 years, but Truth and Reconciliation Day is mare akin to Remembrance Day than to Victoria Day in May or Family Day in February. And while Remembrance Day, for most of us, is marked by a ceremony at 11:11, there has been a call for a moment of silence at 2:15 on National Reconciliation Day to commemorate the 215 graves that were found at the Kamloops Indian Residential School. Each year on Remembrance Day, there are also assemblies at schools to talk about historical events from the World Wars and more recent conflicts, and similarly holding Orange Shirt Day and devoted school time to programming around the history of residential schools in our public schools is a feature of National Truth and Reconciliation Day.

Most of us do not know what we are being called upon to do for Truth and Reconciliation. We have lived our lives, oblivious to what was going on in our names for decades, enjoying the benefits of a country whose land base had been stolen from the people who lived here before European Settlers arrived.

Many of us are from families who came later, and our family histories are about learning the language, scratching out a living since immigration in Canada was all about filling labour shortages for most of the counties history. It has been a land of opportunity for wave upon wave of immigrants, and all of this has been done while the indigenous peoples were being marginalized, systematically, it turns out.

Because of the discovery of the graves in the late spring and early summer this year, 2021 has been a big year for the Truth about our collective past. We can lean into that, because it is important to internalise that truth and make it a part of the Canadian story that we keep with us and pass on, just like Vimy Ridge and the Canada-Russia hockey series.

Reconciliation will be long and hard. Canada is moving forward at a tremendous pace and there are issues to deal with collectively that are ever evolving. Meanwhile, indigenous communities continue to struggle for survival as they are continue to evolve.

In our own communities there has been a land claim process that has been proceeding, hidden in plain sight in many ways, for just under 30 years.

Will it bring some form of reconciliation to places like Sharbot Lake, where a complicated mixture of indigenous and settler heritage has never really been explored fully, and where aspects of the land claim itself have caused much confusion and conflict.

And what is the role for those of us who arrived in these communities over the last 30 years from elsewhere?

Truth and Reconciliation Day is a symbolic day for us to confront the truth, a necessary condition for reconciliation, which is a long way off.