Charlene Jacobs’ shoulders shake as she covers her face in her hands. Her plain gold wedding band clinks against her glasses as she moves to collect herself. “After how many years, the pain still surfaces,” she says, her round brown eyes glistening as she sits across the table from me.
Upon moving his family from one small community in northern B.C. to another, Jacobs says the prejudice her step-dad experienced as a result of being First Nations got to be too much for him; as a result, he eventually took his own life.
“He drank, you know, and couldn’t take it no more,” Jacobs says. “He just checked out.”
And it wasn’t just her father who was socially ostracized. Throughout her life, Jacobs says she has had to deal with feeling alienated on account of her skin colour: “It’s just cruel, like little remarks and stuff like that,” Jacobs says. “My sister Christine was ashamed of being Indian I think at one time. Because it was so cruel, the racism.”
Canada — a country that prides itself on its multiculturalism — has a history steeped in oppression towards First Nations, Inuit, and Metis peoples. It’s not only lived out in the day to day, as Jacobs’ story illustrates, but it has been at the helm of public policy virtually since Canada’s inception.
But I don’t remember hearing about any of it until university. Sure, growing up we learned about hunters and gatherers and buffalo and the fur trade. I recall sitting in a teepee once, huddled around a fire.
I also remember when my classmate Erik found an arrowhead in his backyard, how my grade five teacher told us matter-of-factly that many of our houses were built on historical Aboriginal land.
And I never really questioned why houses were built on top of ancient arrowheads, because it seemed as though it didn’t really matter; we only talked about Aboriginal peoples in the past tense. Like they had somehow disappeared.
Except (also in grade five) when one of my friends told me she thought all “natives” were a bunch of lazy alcoholic whiners who got a free ride from the government.
I remember knowing in my gut there was something wrong about what she said. But I didn’t know any non-white people at the time who could tell me otherwise.
As European settlers moved into what is now known as Canada, the colonization of indigenous people led to the dispossession of their land, furthering their subjugation to the colonizers. Canada’s first prime minister, John A. MacDonald, even sanctioned the starving of Aboriginal peoples in order to make way for more Europeans to move in.
Starting in the 1840s, the Canadian government, through its policy of “aggressive assimilation,” apprehended Aboriginal children from their families and put them into residential schools: church-run facilities that taught English, Christianity, and Canadian culture with the goal of having native language and traditions substantially dwindle within a few generations.
The conditions of these schools were often in disrepair, and there are countless stories of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Many were ashamed of their culture and where they came from. The last residential school closed as late as 1996.
(Jacobs told me she was one of the lucky ones; because her parents had lost their Indian status, her and her 11 siblings were never sent to residential schools.)
Then there’s also what’s known as the “Sixties Scoop”: when government social workers removed a massive amount of Aboriginal children from their families and put them into the child welfare system. In 1970, about a third of the children in foster care were First Nations, Inuit, or Metis.
And the injustice isn’t just a thing of the past.
Indeed, the statistics are staggering: according to a 2013 report co-written by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives and Save the Children Canada, about half of all status First Nations children live in poverty. And for those First Nations children who live on reserves, the poverty rate is three times higher than non-indigenous children.
The Canadian Alliance to End Homelessness also says that in 2013, First Nations, Metis, and Inuit peoples are overrepresented in homeless populations in most communities in Canada. And although Aboriginal people make up about four per cent of Canada’s population, they consist of approximately 23.2 per cent of the prison population.
These numbers feed the stereotype; they create this distance between “us” and “them,” without really understanding the why behind it all.
“You go down to skid row and you see all the drunken Indians there,” Jacobs says as she points her chin towards the restaurant window. “But they’re there for a reason. Something happened in their life.”
“Nobody ends up on skid row for nothing.”
I’m overwhelmed. I have been since I started learning about Canada’s dark history in university, since I started talking with people who don’t look white like me.
These feelings of being overwhelmed most often translate into guilt, which later morph into helplessness, leading — more often than not — to paralysis.
But how do I move past it? How do we, as a Christian community, move past ignorance and non-action?
Terry LeBlanc, as the director of the North American Institute for Indigenous Theological Studies, is well versed in trying to shift the paradigms present in mainstream Christianity.
He tells me about a friend of his, who was trying to bring reconciliation between a church group and a First Nations group. The church, years before, had encroached upon First Nations land and built not only worship facilities but other buildings on it. When the church asked what they could do to restore the relationship with First Nations peoples in the future, LeBlanc’s friend told them that once the buildings have been decommissioned from religious purposes, they could simply return the land to First Nations peoples.
LeBlanc says this caused quite the stir in the church.
“If it’s a now-but-not-yet experience of the fullness of Christ, why would we be so doggone concerned about a chunk of land like that?” LeBlanc says. “If you look carefully you’ll find that Christians are deeply entrenched in the same kinds of enterprises as people who are not Christian. As if somehow this is all there is.”
So LeBlanc says churches need to re-examine their theologies, and to actually live out what they say they believe. That, as members of the kingdom of heaven, works need to accompany our faith, and material possessions, such as land, should be held loosely.
He also encourages Christians to support some of the movements that are taking place in the First Nations, Metis, and Inuit communities — such as advocating for education equality, or looking into the history of the land beyond the superficial.
On the one hand, I’m grateful for these ways in which I can use my privilege. On the other, it means I can no longer plead ignorance.
I won’t ever fully understand what Jacobs means when she talks about her ancestors fighting and dying for their land. I can’t undo the fact that my suburban home where I grew up was probably built on appropriated territory.
And I won’t ever really comprehend what it feels like to be an outsider, everyday fighting against assumptions and stereotypes.
I can’t. Not completely.
But I can start to do something about it.
This article originally appeared in the January/February issue of Converge Magazine.
Photo (Flickr CC) by University of the Fraser Valley.
