Front Burner - Confronting the dark side of Canadian history

Episode Date: June 29, 2021

Indigenous people have spoken of deaths and unmarked graves at residential schools for years. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission also wrote a whole volume on the issue. Still, many Canadians are shocked. Today we look at why that is, with the hosts of The Secret Life of Canada.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. At sunset this past Saturday, 751 solar lights lit up the site of the Maryville Indian Residential School in southeastern Saskatchewan, on the territory of the Cowessess First Nation. One light for each possible unmarked grave recently discovered there using radar technology

and marked by neon orange flags. We bought a pack of 200 flags. After the second day, we ran out of our flags and we still had a lot of square metres to go over. This is Cowessess First Nation Chief Cadmus DeLorme. So as we started to do more and more and more, started to get more emotional and people started to show up and like what are all these flags and trying to explain to the local to the community and passerbyers it was getting very

heavy and emotional and when we finished that number was just heartbreaking. The news of these graves in Saskatchewan, it comes, of course, after the discovery just a few weeks ago of as many or more than 215 unmarked graves at the Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia. Even though the painful stories of the children who never came home or the graveyards at these institutions have been talked about and felt deeply by Indigenous people, and there was

a whole volume of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report dedicated to these stories six years ago, for many Canadians it has still come as a shock. And today, we're going to look at why that is. I'm joined by Phelan Johnson and Leah Simone Bowen. They're the hosts of the very excellent CBC podcast, The Secret Life of Canada, which looks into a lot of the history of this country that you may have never learned about. Hello to you both. Thanks, guys, for coming on. No problem. Thanks for having us. Hi, Jamie. So, look, over the last month, as the revelations about these unmarked graves at these two residential schools have come to light,

we've seen a lot of Canadians going through a lot of shock and a real reckoning with the realities of what Indigenous children went through at residential schools. And I'm wondering for you both what it's been like to watch the ways that people are reacting and starting with you, Phelan, and for context for our listeners who don't know who you are already, you're Indigenous, you're Mohawk and Tuscarora from Six Nations of the Grand River. Yes, that is where I'm from. And so these revelations, while they're revelations for the majority of a lot of Canadians, they aren't

revelations for myself or for many Indigenous people in this country. You know, we all have ties to residential schools, many of us do. You know, many of us have family members who went, you know, I grew up hearing stories of the residential school in my community, the Mohawk Institute, also known as the Mush Hole. And, you know, I had the opportunity to walk through that building with survivors and have them share stories of what happened to them and things that they saw. So many Indigenous people have been holding these stories for a really long time. So we aren't shocked. It's still hard to hear it. But having this, like having the consciousness of the country sort of catch up to us

has been slightly overwhelming. And tell me a little bit more about that. Maybe, you know, I've seen a number of Indigenous people talk about distinguishing between shock and grief about these revelations. Yeah, I mean, it's so hard because there's a part of me that's like, yes. Like, I'm like, yes, finally, people are listening to. It's like, I just don't know why we needed the proof. Like, Indigenous people are always expected to prove things. Like, it's not enough to just believe us. We've been saying these things for years.

These things are not secrets. We have told people, you know, again, you mentioned the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its findings that were reported. These things were known. It's just that they weren't believed. And I think we just need to get to a point It's just that they weren't believed. And I think we just need to get to a point in this country where our word is believed. Just believe us. Leah, what about you? What have you been thinking as you've been watching people

react to these revelations? Yeah, it's been, I think the reaction is good in the respect that it seems as if the majority of non-Indigenous people are understandably horrified. in the respect that we have received messages from people saying they're only now learning, not even about the children who died at residential schools, but they're now learning about residential school. And these are adults, you know, it's fine for kids, but there's so much, I would even say in the media in the past, at least five years. And so it's disappointing because it means people didn't want to engage. At a certain point, it's an active choice to not know if you are not, like I said, a child and, you know, learning about these things in school at this point in time. And I wonder, you know, most kids now would learn about residential schools in school. It's part of the curriculum. But back when I was in school, I wasn't taught

anything about them. And Leah, I wonder if you remember the first time that you learned about the residential school system and what you felt. I, like you you i didn't learn anything in school uh i learned a snippet i remember my my sister came home my eldest sister came home and said that she had seen a tv movie at her friend's house called where the spirit Lives, on residential schools. These are all wildflowers, all local. I found, after I gather them, that I must first scrape every trace of the old soil from their roots and cut them back often. Reverend Buckley, I'm talking about children.

I assure you, Kathleen, so am I. And I remember her telling me, like like I could see that her mind was expanding and after that I heard nothing until I really got to university and met Indigenous artists and friends and they started telling me about their parents' experiences or their grandparents' experiences. But again that was not taught to me in university either through coursework. Phelan, I know you mentioned that you grew up, obviously, with these stories. I wonder if you can recall a moment where you might have discussed the legacy of residential schools with someone who didn't know very much about them or knew nothing about them and what that was like. I mean, those incidents in my life have, you know, I think, thankfully, they happen less now. incidents in my life have, you know, I think, thankfully, they happen less now. You know,

I think depending on where I was in my life there, I may have tried to be more generous with them and give them the benefit of the doubt. But a lot of the time it you know, you get frustrated. The thing that really strikes me or the thing that I I've been thinking, I've been thinking a lot about survivors that I've had the opportunity to work with speak with. And some of them, there was this, there's this one guy from my community. He was friends with my great grandma. My great grandma went to residential school. And she never really mentioned much about it. And one of her friends, he, he also didn't mention much about it. But the one thing that he would say was, those buggers were mean. And that was it. And so the thing that's hitting hard for me, I find in this time now is all of the stories that just were held in people's bodies that they never shared. Because while we're seeing this tip

of the iceberg, and we all know it's the tip of the iceberg, or at least I hope that we're all starting to figure out that this is the tip of the iceberg and things are going to get a lot worse. We'll never fully understand or grasp the scope of what happened and how it's still reverberating through our bodies currently. You know, do you think a large part of how we haven't heard many of these stories is because people weren't really given the opportunity to tell them? I don't think anyone was really listening. I mean, you know, I think Indigenous graces are still undervalued in this country. I think things are getting better.

I want to be optimistic about that. But I think also it was a part of history no one wanted to look at, which is a thing that Lee and I have experienced a lot working on the podcast is, you know, there's a pushback against it. There's a pushback against a comfortable narrative, the comfortable narrative of Canada. And so I think to have your notions of history and history's identity, to have those notions of your identity challenged, can really shake a person. And so I think there is some willful ignorance and willful denial that's been going on. And now, with these discoveries, these horrifying, terrible discoveries, we can't really deny in the same way.

I don't think people can deny in the same way. You know, it's interesting that you say that because I was thinking about that too over the weekend. The idea that when a lot of people think about Canada, even around the world, right, they think about Canada, the good, a peacekeeping country, pluralism, a deep belief in social safety nets, more recently, a country that supports Syrian refugees. And so, you know, maybe Leah, I'll bring you in here as well. Do you think this way that we have seen the country makes it harder for people to reconcile with this dark past?

Yeah. And I mean, I think people need to consider that the government of Canada throughout history has been an excellent marketer. That's why many of us in this country and around the world only see those things, the things that Canada wants to show. And yeah, the ads have been excellent you know like it hid a genocide but i feel like the marketing of canada is a you know a kind of a nice polite place is like it's like one of those drug commercials where life looks really great when you take the pill um but without like it's like without the side effects disclaimer at the end. And so it's perfect. You know, we're now suffering those side effects. And it's a side effect of a colonial past

that's now brought us to the colonial present. And I just think we now have a choice to make. And so, yes, I'm sure for a lot of people, it is very hard. My parents are immigrants. When I started learning really about Indigenous people in general, I spent a year reconsidering really what my relationship with Canada was and who I was as a Canadian and what that meant. who I was as a Canadian and what that meant. And it was, you know, I kind of went through a grieving process for the Canada that I thought I knew and that I thought I was a part of. And then through it, I got to a better place where I was actually activated to do something and to actually create this country that we say we are. We can do that, actually.

But this marketing, it's not. Yeah, we need the disclaimers. That's all. That's all I want to say. You know, talking about that marketing and sort of the lack of the disclaimers or the side effects, one example that really struck me the other week was our colleague, reporter Jorge Barrera, was on the show to talk about the Kamloops Indian Residential School. And he was talking about this historian, John Malloy, who uncovered documents where Canadian officials actually wrote about how one of the purposes of residential

schools was to prevent Indigenous resistance movements. Like, they actually said that Indigenous people wouldn't be likely to give trouble if their children were in the custody of the state. Remember, we're building these residential schools in areas which have not been yet fully pacified. You know, this is one reason why the Kamloops School is developed in the 1890s, because the situation in the area is tenuous for the government to effectively manage. Essentially, they were using the kids as like bargaining chips. And I was really surprised that I had never heard this before. And Jorge even said that he hadn't either.

And, you know, Phelan, what does that say to you? I think what it says to me is when we think, when we talk about residential schools, perhaps our focus of what the impacts were can be kind of narrow. Like we can think, so it was about religion. It was about assimilation. You know, and if you're far enough in your thinking, you can reconcile the fact that it's genocide. It was genocide. It was genocidal, which I know is a word people have a real hard time using. But the thing that we don't think about necessarily, and that I hope we start to think more about, is the prongs of what happened coming out of residential school.

So yes, you have all of the things that it set out to do, sort of its main objectives, but then you also have things like the nutritional experiments that were carried out, you know, where kids were fed vitamins and, you know, what they wanted to see was what kids could live off of. What was the minimal amount of nutrition a child could live off of? amount of nutrition a child could live off of. I also think about just wealth. I think about, I think about wealth and I think about money because those schools didn't run themselves. It's not like they had people, there wasn't Mr. Farmer on the residential school. It was the kids running those schools. So the kids would devote half their day to education. And I even feel like wrong using the word education because that doesn't encompass what happened there. But then they also would be out in the fields,

they'd be milking the cows, they'd be, you know, picking apples in the orchard. They ran, they'd be doing the laundry, they ran those places. And that equates to wealth, because it's not like it was just self-sustaining. Things were sold, right? Money was made. There was money made off the lives and deaths of those little bodies. And so while it's easy to see, you know, the narrow, sort of the narrower version with the mandate was of these spaces, it branches out into ways that I think we're still starting to understand. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection.

Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here. You may have seen my money show on Netflix. I've been talking about money for 20 years. I've talked to millions of people and I have some startling numbers to share with you. Did you know that of the people I speak to, 50% of them do not know their own household income? That's not a typo,

50%. That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. You know, Phelan, I want to pick up on one thing you mentioned, sort of the use of the term genocide or genocidal. And certainly, you know, to me, one party who definitely bears responsibility here is the media. I know, Leah, you did mention that there has been a lot of coverage of these issues in recent years. But I also remember back in 2019, when the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls put out its final report, there were so many media outlets that were focused on the use of

the word genocide, right? Like in that report, and whether or not it was appropriate, CBC included. And it did seem, especially looking back at it now, that that debate really overshadowed so much other information that was in that report. And so I wonder what you both make of the media's role here. And Leah, maybe I'll start with you. Well, I think, I mean, the media is, the Canadian media anyway, is a byproduct of Canada itself. The Canadian media, anyway, is a byproduct of Canada itself. And so, like Phelan was mentioning earlier of, you know, how much proof do you need to really listen to Indigenous people? I think that extends to how much do Indigenous people have to prove to Canada and the Canadian media that they are human, that they are people with full lives and full stories that deserve empathy. And I truly believe that the change that I feel like I'm seeing a little bit in media now is due to the heavy lifting of Indigenous

journalists, who I know fought against, you know, the powers that be, having even this conversation about genocide or not genocide, you know, it's ridiculous. So there are a lot of good folks, Indigenous journalists, Indigenous people that are pushing for complex storytelling and framing and trauma-informed reporting. But at the end of the day, there's still too few Indigenous journalists and Indigenous people inside these media organizations to cover these stories. I mean, I feel like Canadian media asks too much of the few Indigenous journalists that it has to do this kind of reporting and to push this ball forward. And really, it's everyone in the media's responsibility to do this. And Phelan, let me bring you in here. Thoughts on that? Well, I mean, what a great magic trick it is. You know, it's like it's sleight of hand,

it's diversion. Look over here diversion look over here look over here so that we're not looking at the thing that we need to be looking at and i think you know i just for me i think about indigenous journalists who you know when i'm listening to the morning news and i have to hear an indigenous journalist say 751 unmarked graves. And I just think about how hard that has got to sit in the body. And what that feels like to have to say, you know, once like on the hour or on the half hour, it's a weight, right? I mean, I think it's a weight no matter where you are as an Indigenous person in this country. I'm seeing it in people I've never seen it in before. I'm seeing people react in ways that I've never seen them react that way to news.

Because, you know, as an Indigenous person, you get hit with hard news pretty frequently. Like the news is not great a lot of the time. is not great a lot of the time. And so, you know, just witnessing Indigenous people sort of in my circle really getting hit sideways by this has been hard, especially during pandemic times when we can't be together in the way that we normally would. And I wonder, you know, when Leah said that, that there's a sort of tremendous burden on Indigenous journalists, I wonder,

could I, if you would mind, if I asked you, if you feel that? Well, I mean, it's tricky. We didn't come to the CBC as journalists. We came without a journalistic background. And, and, you know, as we've sort of moved through it, that the pressure to be more journalistic is definitely,

um, is definitely something I feel, but I do feel, you know, mostly I, I consider myself a storyteller. Um, my background's in playwriting,

you know, Leah and I are both playwrights and writers. We're storytellers. And so for me, the thing that I've always thought is important in my storytelling is how do I keep people listening? And that's what we do with the podcast. We find ways to keep people listening so that it's not constantly just devastating, hard, you know, finger-waggy Canada is bad. But so that people can listen, right? Because it isn't easy. This is not easy, but we do want to, I think, we want to change this place. We want to make this place better and look at all of the problems that it's had, reckon with them, and then

come out wiser, smarter, and better on the other side of it. Leah, I'll bring you in there if you have any thoughts. You know, one of the points that we make in the podcast is that we are not historians. For the most part, the subjects we cover on the podcast, we had to learn about ourselves. And we can do that now because this information actually is out there and it is accessible. So, you know, the thing I know and want to say to people is I know a lot of this information is very hard and it's very difficult to process if you're hearing it for the first time. But if you're open to it, you will be changed and that change will be for the better.

All right, Leah and Phelan, I want to thank you so much for joining me today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening to FrontBurner, and we'll talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.