I live-tweeted the Truth and Reconciliation meeting in Halifax back in 2011. It was incredibly moving, profound even, as one Indigenous person after another got up and told their story.
Many of the people had never told their truths before, never spoken it out loud, because they were ashamed, embarrassed, or otherwise frightened of saying the words.
I don't know, my language is probably not correct here, but it strikes me that there was something akin to an inter-generational PTSD in some cases. But the act of speaking, for many, was liberating.
I was invited into private rooms, where more truth-telling was going on, on the condition that I not report any details. I saw grown adults break down in tears, parents and children considering themselves in new ways.
There was an awful lot of pain there. But also forgiveness, and a finding of strength. As I say, I was profoundly moved by it all.
The T&R process was for these people, and I think it had, and continues to have value for them. The truth tellers. It's clear that the rest of us can't even wrap our heads around the "reconciliation" part of the equation.
In the contest of all that profound truth-telling, what comes next is minor, and would be unimportant except it nagged on me then, and it continues to nag on me.
Understand that anyone — anyone at all — could address those assembled. So one white guy got up, and explained that he too grew up at a residential school. He was the child of a minister who worked at the school, in airc, Manitoba.
So this white guy says, and I'm paraphrasing but getting the gist of it, "hey, it was a great childhood, and I made a lot of native friends. So I don't think we should ignore all the positive stuff that came out of the residential schools."
Imagine this. So much pain, so much destruction, on display, and this one white dude somehow thought it was important to say that *he* didn't have it so bad as a kid of a preacher at a school.
The Indigenous people sitting near me, at least the ones I could see, seemed to take it with, I dunno, resignation: just another one of them. They're undoubtedly used to that bullshit.
But anyway, I think about that white guy often. He wasn't just a one-off. He was Canada. He is Canada.
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