Signs of discord, but also of hope, as Indigenous leaders prepare to meet Pope

National Post, 26 March 2022

At an official level, there will be official disappointment. But there are also reasons to be hopeful

“Our elders teach us that we have choices in life,” said Chief Phil Fontaine in 2009, in an address to Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican. “We can build up, or we can tear down. We can forgive with generosity of spirit and with the hand of friendship, or we can seek sustenance from bitterness and vengeance.… Reconciliation and friendship is what we seek. The time to rebuild a better and brighter future together is upon us.”

As an Indigenous delegation heads to Rome to meet with Pope Francis next week, those noble and magnanimous words seem from another time. We don’t hear very much reconciling rhetoric these days. Indeed, while Fontaine will be part of the delegation, the current chief of the Assembly of First Nations (AFN), RoseAnne Archibald, has refused to join the delegation meeting Pope Francis in Rome.

In 2009, Fontaine, as AFN national chief, headed the Indigenous delegation that met with Benedict regarding residential schools. The pope’s 2009 apology was the counterpart to the federal government’s apology in 2008. The first comprehensive Catholic apology was issued in 1991 by the Oblates, the religious order that ran most of the Catholic residential schools. All of this history I outlined last year in these pages.

What changed between 2009 and now? The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

The commission grew out of the residential schools settlement process — as did the apologies issued by Benedict and former prime minister Stephen Harper — but followed a much different path. The TRC made acceptable, even widely accepted, the view that Canada, both pre- and post-Confederation, was an illegitimate enterprise, a toxic cauldron of hatreds that boiled over into the genocide of Indigenous peoples. One does not extend the hand of friendship to genocidal tyrants. They are to be overthrown, or torn down, as are the statues of Sir John A. Macdonald.

The TRC, when it reported in 2015, demanded that Pope Francis appear in Canada within a year to offer another papal apology to Canada’s First Nations. He had already done so that year in Bolivia regarding the Indigenous peoples of Latin America.

When Pope Francis said that he had no plans to come to Canada — he has not visited Germany or Spain or even his native Argentina, either — Canada’s Catholic bishops began to work on another encounter with Indigenous leaders in Rome, to renew and deepen the apology of 2009. That was to have taken place in 2020 but was delayed by the pandemic.

The meeting with Pope Francis would have taken place before the residential school graves were discovered last spring, so next week’s meeting is not in response to it. Nevertheless, it will be shaped by the rawness of that experience and the rancour that surfaced, which resulted in the burning of numerous churches across the country.

What might be expected? At an official level, there will be official disappointment. The AFN statement in advance of the meeting called on the Pope to, more or less, confess to genocide and renounce the presence of Catholic missionaries in the Americas over the last five centuries.

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