Continuing from the previous two posts, my blog’s focus for the next several days is to raise awareness about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada's (TRC) Calls to Action. A summary of the whole report can be found at Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Today, we read the 7 Calls to Action aimed at Education: Calls to Action 6 - 12.

Education 

6) We call upon the Government of Canada to repeal Section 43 of the Criminal Code of Canada. 

7) We call upon the federal government to develop with Aboriginal groups a joint strategy to eliminate educational and employment gaps between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians. 

8) We call upon the federal government to eliminate the discrepancy in federal education funding for First Nations children being educated on reserves and those First Nations children being educated off reserves. 

9) We call upon the federal government to prepare and publish annual reports comparing funding for the education of First Nations children on and off reserves, as well as educational and income attainments of Aboriginal peoples in Canada compared with non-Aboriginal people. 

10) We call on the federal government to draft new Aboriginal education legislation with the full participation and informed consent of Aboriginal peoples. The new legislation would include a commitment to sufficient funding and would incorporate the following principles: 

        i. Providing sufficient funding to close identified educational achievement gaps within one                        generation.

        ii. Improving education attainment levels and success rates. 

        iii. Developing culturally appropriate curricula. 

        iv. Protecting the right to Aboriginal languages, including the teaching of Aboriginal                                   languages as credit courses. 

         v. Enabling parental and community responsibility, control, and accountability, similar to what                 parents enjoy in public school systems. 

        vi. Enabling parents to fully participate in the education of their children. 

        vii. Respecting and honouring Treaty relationships. 

11) We call upon the federal government to provide adequate funding to end the backlog of First Nations students seeking a post-secondary education. 

12) We call upon the federal, provincial, territorial, and Aboriginal governments to develop culturally appropriate early childhood education programs for Aboriginal families.

TRC Calls 1-5

Flowing from my first post yesterday, the blog’s focus for the next several days is on the TRC’s Calls to Action. The whole report can be found at Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. Today, we read about the 5 Calls to Action aimed at the Canadian Child Welfare system. 

Calls to Action

In order to redress the legacy of residential schools and advance the process of Canadian reconciliation, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission makes the following calls to action.

LEGACY 

Child welfare

1) We call upon the federal, provincial, territorial, and Aboriginal governments to commit to reducing the number of Aboriginal children in care by:

i. Monitoring and assessing neglect investigations.

ii. Providing adequate resources to enable Aboriginal communities and child-wel- fare organizations to keep Aboriginal families together where it is safe to do so, and to keep children in culturally appropriate environments, regardless of where they reside.

iii. Ensuring that social workers and others who conduct child-welfare investigations are properly educated and trained about the history and impacts of residen-

tial schools.

iv. Ensuring that social workers and others who conduct child-welfare investigations are properly educated and trained about the potential for Aboriginal communities and families to provide more appropriate solutions to family healing.

v. Requiring that all child-welfare decision makers consider the impact of the resi- dential school experience on children and their caregivers.

2) We call upon the federal government, in collaboration with the provinces and territo- ries, to prepare and publish annual reports on the number of Aboriginal children (First Nations, Inuit, and Métis) who are in care, compared with non-Aboriginal children,

320 • Truth & Reconciliation Commission

as well as the reasons for apprehension, the total spending on preventive and care services by child-welfare agencies, and the effectiveness of various interventions.

3) We call upon all levels of government to fully implement Jordan’s Principle.

4) We call upon the federal government to enact Aboriginal child-welfare legislation that establishes national standards for Aboriginal child apprehension and custody cases and includes principles that:

i. Affirm the right of Aboriginal governments to establish and maintain their own child-welfare agencies.

ii. Require all child-welfare agencies and courts to take the residential school legacy into account in their decision making.

iii. Establish, as an important priority, a requirement that placements of Aboriginal children into temporary and permanent care be culturally appropriate.

5) We call upon the federal, provincial, territorial, and Aboriginal governments to develop culturally appropriate parenting programs for Aboriginal families.

 

 

Hello Friends! About 35 years ago I began my journey of decolonization, truth and reconciliation. It began quite unconsciously back in the 1980's and 90's when I worked in Band-run schools and lived in First Nation communities in western Canada. I began to understand that my view of Canada and myself as Canadian was biased, limited, and often blatantly wrong. 

After several years of listening and learning, a red-tailed hawk touched me, twice on the shoulder on two separate occasions. I knew that I was being chosen for something. Since then, I have been waiting for Spirit to reveal what it is that I am being prepared for. Now, many years later I am ready and I know to what I am called and asked to do. 

Just before the recent discovery of  the unmarked graves of 215 children who attended Kamloops Residential School, I was drawn by Spirit to share more publicly my commitment to be and act in solidarity with First Peoples in Canada. The purpose of this sharing is for awareness raising and transformation. I want to help raise awareness among my people, settler people, who like me, generally benefit from all the systems in Canada: social, educational, medical, religious, economic, etc., while First Peoples continue to be disproportionately disadvantaged and dominated by these same systems. 

My commitment to solidarity with First Peoples is not unsubstantiated. My own personal journey has been richly blessed with many beloved friends and life-long teachers from whom I learn about Indigenous ways of being in the world. It is time for me to more fully honour the depth of these friendships and to share what I have learnt. I cannot live well if my sisters and those they love continue to be denied basic rights, like clean water, quality education and safety. 

Most Canadians are angry and shocked to hear that many children, as young as 3 years old, did not return to their families from the boarding schools they were forced to attend. However, the discovery of unmarked graves is not a shock to Indigenous peoples in Canada. 

Survivors of residential schools, who were traumatized from the experience have been telling the stories of these missing children for years. Many of the stories were recorded between 2007-2015 during Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Process (TRC). The Report includes 94 Calls to Action, six of which relate to missing children and burial information  (71-76). 

Even though stories about missing children and unmarked graves came out publicly during the TRC, many Canadians are just now waking up to these truths. As nations, we are not yet ready for reconciliation. Canadians are only now beginning to wake up to the reality of some of the tragically horrific truths. We have a long way to go. 

In 2016, Honourable Murray Sinclair, Chair of the TRC, said, “If you thought getting to the truth was hard, getting to reconciliation is going to be really hard.” We must start somewhere and it must be with truth. Indigenous Peoples and Settler Canadians are all here together in the country we call Canada. Settler friends, transformation is needed. We must choose how we want to live our common journey forward. I hope we choose the way that begins with truth.

Where can we begin? Start by filling in the AWARENESS gaps in our understanding of Canada's history. Below are two suggestions to start:

Listen to this 11 minute video: 

Become familiar with the TRC Report, including the 94 Calls to Action: Read Honouring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future Summary of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada 

Silence - An Advent Challenge

On Sunday, Dec. 2, Advent begins. Perhaps even more than other times of year, we need to find some silence in the busyness of the Season. What do we celebrate at this time of year when we stand with all creation at the threshold between light and dark? It feeds my heart to imagine myself at the threshold of the “cave” within, peering out from the “mountaintop” of life in preparation for Christmas. 

I am not actually on a mountaintop, but I have been. I have just returned from the mountains in Tagaytay in the Philippines where I attended a 10 day international meeting. Many years ago when I was in the terrritories of the Tsilhqot’in and Lil’wat Nations, I lived in the Coastal and Interior Mountain ranges of British Columbia, Canada. My travels have taken me to Alberta Canada’s Rocky Mountains, the French Alps, and to the foothills of the Himalayas in Darjeeling, India. Mount Kanchenjunga, pictured below, is located at the border of India and Nepal. It can be seen from the hill station of Darjeeling, and is the highest mountain in India. Mountains are magnificent places from which to gain perspective, especially of the insignificance of human beings.

Anyone who has been to a mountain, or even flown over one in an airplane, knows something about what it means to have a mountaintop experience. But, a mountaintop experience is not an experience of having our “heads in the clouds”. Rather, a mountaintop experience provokes silence and provides a new and awesome view of reality. Being at the very top of a mountain within a mountain range is one of the most truly awesome experiences we can have. Feeling wonder and awe filling our whole being with an awareness that we are part creation, a very small part. It can be a truly humbling and spiritual experience of belonging to Life.

The Divine has blessed us with so much beauty, such a wonderful Earth home. May we respect every part of land, air, and water. May we walk gently on this earth together. To do so begins by loving our true nature as human beings, loving ourselves as part of created life with a responsibility to the whole. 

This Advent, watch the marvelous film, Love Thy Nature, and show it to friend, classes, family. The message: the way forward for us as human beings is to reconnect with who we are as part of nature and to allow that awareness to shape the technology and future that we create. 

May reconnecting with nature help us to find silence this Advent, and to respect and celebrate the God of Life, Love, Light, Wisdom, and Peace, the God who created us as part of all creation. Did God not come as Emmanuel, God-With-Us, so that all would have life? In light of this may we allow ourselves to be humbled, to be awed, to be grateful, and in our context to ask that which Chief Seattle questioned so many years ago, “How can you buy or sell the sky, the warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them?”

September 23 - Sky Sunday

As summer turns to fall we continue to celebrate the Season of Creation with Sky Sunday. Today the sky is cloudy from where I sit gazing out my window. Yesterday there was a sunny sky and it made me feel happy to be bouncily walking to my destination to be with friends and colleagues. The sky has many moods and the capacity to set the mood of all who live under its quiet influence. Today’s readings are a grim reminder of the reality that all who live under the same sky don’t receive the same respect. There is much inequality and disrespect for people and for the planet. People from all directions belong to the one human race, who with all aspects of creation, live together as Earth community. No one is over the other, all of us live, move and have our being in the Divine. To live with our whole being “in the sky” is not to be flighty or unpractical. Rather, as eloquently put in a reflection on the Let Creation Praise Website, it is “... to live in alignment with the “heavens,” to be people of the “sky,” is to be people who live their lives in harmony and co-creation with the purposes of God—people for whom the “presence” of God is a source of daily joy and awe. To live this way—by grace—is surely a grace itself.”

September 16 - International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer

September 16 - International Day for the Preservation of the Ozone Layer is also called Humanity Sunday. We find this on the All Creation Praise website during the Season of Creation. Humanity Sunday is an occasion to remember our responsibility to humanize the world. This means to ensure that the planet is habitable for human beings and that our communities are welcoming to all. In other words, to create living conditions in which human begins can flourish. But, to be truly human is to also live in harmony with our other-than-human relatives. So, Humanity Sunday reminds us to take our place alongside our relatives of all species and together praise Creator. Yesterday, Sacred Heart Global Service Day was a good example of what it means to humanize the world. How might we continue this work of humanizing the world together?

Sept. 9 - Planet Earth Sunday

Praise God crashing waves! Praise God calm seas! Today I write to you from the New Jersey shore where I have come with my community for the weekend. It is easy for me to be in awe and to praise Creator when I experience being part of Creation so obviously magnificent and beautiful, like the ocean. It’s harder when I’m in the hot, cramped spaces of a big city. But, the reality is that wherever we are, we are always moving in, through, and with God’s Creation. Let all Creation Praise! is a website with several resources for the Season of Creation, including a series of Sunday liturgies for the 2018 Season of Creation. On the website we read: “The Word is a deep impulse summoning forth creation, evoking praise from creation and stirring life in creation. This series (of liturgies) correlates with the Mark series of the church year.” The liturgies are offered for public use, in whole or in part. Each community is invited to adapt them to their context. Pause to join all Creation giving praise!