Canada Day 2021

Today is Canada Day 2021. The first day of July. Remembering the signing of the articles of confederation 155 years ago. Often called “Canada’s birthday”.

This year Canada Day is more sober than joyful. Discoveries of more than a thousand unmarked graves at former residential schools in Saskatchewan and British Columbia make for a difficult celebration. I have a calendar of African Proverbs. The proverb for July 1 reads, “The road to freedom is full of thorns and fire, yet happy is the one who follows it.” Our road to freedom leads through the thorns of fire of the residential schools.

I cannot reflect meaningfully on the history of Canada’s residential schools, still less on the experience of being indigenous to Canada. I am a recent immigrant from the United States of
America, and I do not understand at all fully the experience of having one’s culture and language and family torn out from under one’s feet. I can listen and learn, rather than try to describe.

This brief essay, then, does not probe the Canadian reality more fully. Instead, I dig into my own memories sparked by the descriptions I am hearing.

I was sent to a residential school when I was a boy – in Zimbabwe, then Southern Rhodesia and part of the British Empire. I was seven years old when my parents took me from our home in the Matopo Hills to Hillside government hostel in Bulawayo. I lived there for the next 18 months until we moved for a six-month stay to Pennsylvania. On our return to Bulawayo, I moved to a missionary children’s hostel (Youngways) next door to our home. From age 7 to age 15, for nine months of the year I was in the hostel and for three months in my home.

There are fundamental differences between my experience and the residential schools in Canada. Two differences stand out: 1) Our family was fully agreed to the process, and 2) I was allowed to keep my language and identity. Indeed, my memories of the government hostel are generally good, and my memories of Youngways Hostel are even better. Even so, I remember one basic fact that reminds me of the residential schools in Canada.

In 1958, my Uncle and Aunt (Arthur and Arlene Climenhaga) were the head of our mission work in Zimbabwe. They lived about a mile from the school where I was in the government hostel. Soon after being placed in the government hostel, I walked away from school during the day and headed for their house. When I arrived, they took me back to the hostel. No escape that way!

Uncle Arthur may well have understood my feelings. About 40 years before, when my grandparents lived at Matopo in the 1920s, he was sent to school at Milton Junior School in Bulawayo and lived at the school hostel there. He also was homesick, and one day he walked away from the school and headed for Matopo Mission. The trip took him two days, and when he arrived at Matopo, my grandfather took him back to Milton.

I have heard several of our indigenous people in Canada tell their story, and often their stories include running away from the residential schools. Except that they were caught by the RCMP and returned. My parents and grandparents supported the schools we went to. We were willing participants in the process. Even so, young children miss their families, and my Uncle and I both tried to run away and go home. How much worse was it for our First Nations children when it was the state and not their own families who confined them to the residential schools. The description feels more like prison than like school.

Again, there is no real comparison between my experience and the experience of indigenous children in Canada’s residential schools. But there is a small point of contact, a moment in my life in which I can sit and consider that sense of loss I felt, magnified many times over to encompass my whole generation. I can’t wrap my mind around it, but I can live in it for a few moments.

Canada Day 2021. A time to celebrate, and a time to remember – even the thorns and fire that we walk through on our way to freedom.

Postscript: The above does not explore the complex blend of good and evil that  is part of every human institution. That there was good in the residential schools I do not doubt, and that there were good people involved I accept readily. I am noting only the basic loss fundamental to the hostel experience. Even when much more was good -- as in my own experience -- one is taken from one's family, and that hurts. A lot. In the case of Canada, the blend of good and evil is problematic at best, and we must explore the evil fully on the path to national healing.