Michael Ignatieff’s latest book is On Consolation: Finding Solace in Dark Times.
I am a politician but I am not here for political reasons. I am here because I used to teach human rights at Harvard and attended the amnesty hearings of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, in 1997.[1]
The central task of the Residential School TRC is to help Canadians come to shared truth about these schools. The question is what shared truth is possible, divided as we are. This was the question the South African Truth Commission had to confront. The Canadian Commission will have to answer it too.
Democracies cannot function without some shared truth: the truth that we should live in peace with each other, that we should try to understand each other as best we can, that we should obey just laws and change unjust ones peacefully; and that we should share the land we love together.
This much we must share, but we must be truthful about what divides us. Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians have not lived the same history. They have barely lived in the same country. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is an opportunity to bridge a gap between two Canada, two histories. This is its most important task. Let us not underestimate how difficult that may prove to be. When wrong has been done, when we are divided into victims, perpetrators and the silent beneficiaries of wrong, shared truth is very hard to come by.
The first thing I learned in South Africa is: We cannot find shared truth unless we are honest about what divides us. Equally, we cannot turn the Commission’s hearings into a full-scale purging of all the bitter history that divides Aboriginal peoples from non-Aboriginal ones. Let us hope the commissioners will be modest and let us hope that their hearings will stay specific. The Commission will do much good if it keeps its focus on the 87,000 living survivors of residential schools, their stories, their needs. The historians, the bureaucrats, the commissioners of RCAP, the lawyers, the affidavit-filers have all had their day in the sun. The Commission should belong to the men and women who went through the schools. It should belong to the teachers, the administrators, the parents.
The South African Truth Commission succeeded because it kept its focus. It did not try to put apartheid in the dock. It kept its focus on individual rather than collective guilt. It showed how the apartheid system functioned in very concrete acts of oppression. The Commission established forensic truth: who did what, when, to whom. The public establishment of this forensic truth mattered intensely to victims. For too long their truth had been denied the right to be proclaimed in the public square. The Commission’s hearings gave them their day, and the black community came out in the 1000s to listen to each and every word.
To establish the forensic truth of what happened created knowledge where it had not existed before. Knowledge in turn generated acknowledgment. Acknowledgement—through public proceedings, media reports and a final published report—accorded victims public and official respect. The hearings told South African society: The victims matter and the victims are telling the truth. Let us hope that our Canadian Commission achieves the same.
The South African TRC did not necessarily achieve a shared truth between whites and blacks in South Africa. The old divide remains. But at least the South African Commission forged a consensus in South African life that some lies had to be driven out of public discourse: The lie that apartheid was not really bad after all, and the lie that if apartheid was bad, the abuses were the work of a few bad apples.
By focusing on specific cases—how this young boy’s head was smashed against a radiator; how that young activist was burned to death; how this individual was tortured—the Commission established that it was not a case of a few bad apples. The whole barrel was rotten.
These lies were impermissible for a political reason. Lies of this sort, if left unchallenged, would have legitimized among the white minority a morally blind nostalgia for a discredited system. If this nostalgia had taken hold, it would have made a successful transition to a new South Africa impossible. Moreover, if the lies had been left unchallenged, the resentment of the majority might have led to revenge killings, or legalized expropriations against the white community. Public condemnation of impermissible lies helped South Africa to make a successful transition to democracy.
In addition to the lies of the perpetrators were the lies of the victims. These, if anything, were harder to confront, since the victims were now the victors. The lie that in a just war of national liberation all is permitted. The lie that victims can never do wrong.
The TRC forced the black majority government to confront the acts of terror that its people had committed in the just struggle against apartheid. In doing, the TRC—with the historic help of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu—helped to reconcile black majority rule with the crucial idea that no one, not even victims, should be above the law.
The South African TRC’s essential message was about taking responsibility for the past. Everyone—black and white, victim, perpetrator, bystander—must shoulder responsibility for the past. South Africans would remain divided, by race and history, but once joint responsibility is taken, once guilt is acknowledged, once compensation is paid, people, divided by the past, can learn to live together as a single political community.
The South African TRC was not an exercise in catharsis or group therapy. Hurt people cannot be made whole in public sessions. Hurting can take a lifetime to overcome. A truth commission is a political process. It is about power, establishing who has power over the past as to determine who has power over the present. When a commission is appointed, its function is both to discover the truth that victims know, but more important to make this truth prevail. Truth is shared when perpetrators admit they were wrong; when impermissible lies are given up, when the truth of victims becomes the accepted public version of events. In return, the victims have to tell the truth as well.
Let us recognize that in facing up to the reality of the Aboriginal schools, we are doing politics. We have to live together, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. Self-determination is one thing; separation is another. We ca not separate. We have to share. We ca not share unless we tell each other the truth. We ca not move forward until the impermissible lies stop, until we can look each other in the eye, move beyond guilt, beyond recrimination, beyond shame, to the practical work of politics: building a place together where we can both be at home.
What lies must the Commission help to remove from our public discourse? The first is that it all happened a long time ago, and that we should stop dragging up the past and move on. Besides, the victims have received compensation. why do we need a TRC at all?
The Commission needs to remind Canadians that the last residential school was not closed until 1996. More than 80,000 Canadians alive today still live with the effects of these schools. Compensation does not change the fact that their stories have not been told. Their truth is not yet part of the shared historical record of our country and until it is we will continue to talk past each other.
Another related myth is that we already know what happened, again, why do we need a TRC? It is true that the abuses have been documented. It is true that affidavits have been filed. It is true that lawyers, bureaucrats and politicians have all spoken. But we have not heard, in public, from the victims, and the perpetrators, and until we do the public record of our country will not contain the basic forensic truth we need—the who, what, when and where—of residential schools.
Until both victims and perpetrators testify, we will not have an answer to the why question. Why did it happen? In addition to forensic truth, we need explanatory truth. This may be the truth that will matter most, if we are ever to put this story behind us. Once we have the “why” questioned answered, we can begin to take the steps to ensure that it never happens again.
A third and related lie is that the intentions behind the schools were good. A few bad apples spoiled a scheme that had the children’s best interests at heart. A more subtle variant: The intentions were progressive at the time. Only now do we realize how much harm they did. Intentions do not excuse consequences and the intentions—religious conversion, assimilation, integration, redemption—were shot through with racial condescension and myths of racial hierarchy as to make them insupportable. Of course, we need to understand the intentions in their full historical context. Understanding does not mean forgiving.
The only way the Commission can dismantle these lies is to do its job, patiently and meticulously, to prevent its hearings from becoming an opportunity for historical rants and ideological tirades and to prove by a dignified and professional proceedings that indeed we did not know all that we needed to know, as a society, about what happened inside those schools.
In Canada, the experience the TRC has to confront was about being taken away from your family, shut in a school, frequently losing your language and culture, and above everything else, being made to feel humiliated, ashamed and degraded. Perhaps above all, the experience of fear.
Victims are right to feel anger. Their communities are right to feel anger. But let us take care not to let the experience entrench victims in victimhood. The point, on the contrary, is political: to empower communities to remember, and by remembering to help them feel able to take on the challenges of the present.
The other challenge is to avoid widening the gap between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. The Indian Residential Schools experience happened only to Canadians of Aboriginal origin. But if offended a moral value that all Canadians, whatever their origin, believe: that no child should ever be terrorized, abused or made to feel shame for their language, culture or origins.
The TRC has to build a bridge between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. It will fail if it talks only to Aboriginal peoples, if its hearings are only in Aboriginal communities, if its message fails to reach our across to all Canadians. It will succeed if it reaches across the divide of culture, experience, language and history to re-assert the common value that every Canadian believes. If we can assert this shared value, then we can begin to follow where it leads us: to the policies that will ensure that this never happens again. The truth matters because it can free us from the past and allow us to escape the trap of recrimination and the compulsion to repeat.
The South African experience leads me to suspect that the most difficult aspect of its work will deal with the question of complicity. What did band councils know about these schools? What did parents know about these schools? What did teachers, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal, know about these schools? What did the federal authorities in Ottawa know about these schools? Why this long conspiracy of silence and shame? We know what happened, but we still have not entangled the skein of complicity—involving parents, teachers, band elders, bureaucrats, and the general public—that allowed this great wrong to happen. In addition to forensic truth — What? Where? When? How? We need explanatory truth — Why?
We owe this to the victims. They know what happened. But they do want to know why it happened. Why were they abandoned? Why were they left alone to face abuse and shame?
We owe the victims more than explanations. Victims are owed acknowledgement, recognition and respect.
Yet we must understand how hard this will be for them. To secure acknowledgement, they will have to talk about very difficult experiences: feeling abandoned by their parents, their people; feeling frightened of teachers, and at the very heart of it, the most painful memories of all: of having their bodily integrity violated by people in authority over them.
In South Africa, victims felt anger. In Canada, there is anger but also shame. The violations were intimate. Things happened that no one wants to talk about: terrible violations of trust, or the body, of personal integrity.
In South Africa, the commissions employed “comforters”, trained women who sat beside the victims as they testified, sometimes wiping their tears away, helping them on the journey back into traumatic memory, and then through to the light of disclosure. The Canadian Commission will have to have its comforters, its counsellors, strong and wise men and women who know how to deal with shame and hurt, guilt and pain. The commissioners will have to be strong and wise too: wise enough to maintain the public dignity and solemnity of proceedings, with the intimate care and compassion that victims will require.
Perpetrators must testify too, though there is no subpoena power to compel them. I hope they will have the courage to step forward and help their country, and the victims understand how these bad things became possible, how they were covered up, and how we are to get over them together. We cannot have the truth if it is only the victims’ truth. The victims’ truth must prevail, but it cannot be complete unless the perpetrators are heard—and the bystanders and beneficiaries are heard too. That means church leaders, bureaucrats, teachers, and I dare say, politicians too. This is a national opportunity. We must do this not for the Aboriginal community. We must do this for Canada, for our future together.
Truth—forensic, explanatory—must also be useful. The Commission will be most useful if it can consider how to improve Aboriginal education, how to make sure that we have an Aboriginal educational system that preserves and strengthens Aboriginal language, culture and tradition, while enabling Aboriginal children the same opportunities we want for every Canadian child: the chance at higher education, good jobs, whether on reserves, in communities or in our cities. All this is easier said than done. How do we do it? How do we take the bad experiences of the past and learn to do better next time? We cannot afford to waste another generation. We owe this to those who suffered. We owe this to ourselves.
Footnotes
[1] Michael Ignatieff “Secrets of the Dead,” South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, New Yorker, November 10, 1997; see also
Jillian Edelstein, Truth and Lies: Stories from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, introduction by Michael Ignatieff, (London: Granta Books, 2001); “Articles of Faith” (on the function of truth commissions),” Index on Censorship, Vol. 25, September/October 1996.
[ ↑ Go back to paragraph ]