Raymond J. de Souza: Reconciling with history on National Indigenous Peoples Day
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Thirty years ago, the Sacred Assembly, a national meeting on Indigenous affairs organized by Elijah Harper, called for a 'National First Peoples Day,' the first of which was observed the following year on June 21, 1996. It coincides with the summer solstice, highlighting the importance of the sun in various Indigenous religious beliefs. It has been observed ever since, now using ' Indigenous Peoples ' rather than 'First Peoples.'
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Four hundred years ago, in June 1625, French Jesuit missionaries — Jean de Brébeuf amongst them — arrived in Quebec, whence they would launch their religious and cultural work in Huronia, northwest of what is now Toronto, amongst the Wendat (Huron) people.
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Exactly a century ago, on June 21, 1925, Brébeuf and his martyred Jesuit companions were beatified in Rome, with a contemporary celebration at what is now the Martyrs' Shrine in Midland, Ont. They were canonized five years later, in 1930.
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Ten years ago this month, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) released its executive summary and 94 'calls to action.' Justin Trudeau, then the leader of the third party, announced that he would accept the TRC report and all its claims without exception. By December 2015, when the entire six-volume report was released, he was prime minister.
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The TRC was massively influential. Eighteen months after its full release, the 2017 celebrations of the sesquicentennial of Confederation were relatively muted. The TRC recasting of four centuries of history through the singular prism of the residential schools made the entire Canadian project out to be an unrelenting campaign of genocidal brutality, a massive criminal enterprise. What then to celebrate at Canada 150?
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In 2021, the apparent discovery of 'mass graves' in Kamloops set off a global firestorm, the flames of which were fanned by the prime minister himself. Statues of his first predecessor, Sir John A. Macdonald, were splattered, shattered, scrapped and shuttered.
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A new statutory holiday was rushed through in a matter of weeks, the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, observed for the first time on Sept. 30, 2021.
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That was the TRC's impact. In the 1990s, Indigenous leaders had called for a day to celebrate Canada's aboriginal heritage. It is a day of commemoration, but not a statutory holiday. The TRC statutory holiday, in contrast, says, in effect, that the residential schools are the most important thing in Indigenous history.
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Just four years ago, the future of Canada's history seemed to be definitively different from its past. And then much changed.
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In 2022, the exaggerated false claims about Kamloops were exposed — not least by journalist Terry Glavin in these pages — but not as a whitewash of Canadian history, and certainly not as exculpatory of the residential school policy. Quite the contrary in fact.
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That summer Pope Francis visited Canada on a 'penitential pilgrimage' and offered apologies, but he also said things that had not been said for a long time, praising the good work that the European missionaries did, not least in preserving Indigenous languages and defending them against the depredations of colonial authorities.
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The upshot is that now, four hundred years after the Jesuits' arrival in New France, three hundred years after their beatification, 30 years after the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples, 10 years after the TRC, a more truthful — and thus more reconciling — history is now being told.
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A significant step came last year with the publication of Crosses in the Sky: Jean de Brébeuf and Destruction of Huronia by Mark Bourrie, who writes meticulous history in bracing style. (He recently published a biography of Pierre Poilievre.)
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Attempting the 'first secular' biography of Brébeuf, Bourrie is not writing hagiography. It's not obvious that a 'secular' telling can capture the lives of saints, who are, almost by definition, outside the usual historical categories. His assessment of Brébeuf would offend many pious ears, even as he insists that we ought not 'judge the people of these worlds through a 21st-century lens.'
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It is a worthy project, history seeking truth, rather than today's politics shaping history. The truth can be difficult to read. Bourrie shows how the Huron and Iroquois were war-making peoples, and that the gruesome martyrdom of Brébeuf by the latter followed their usual practise of torture. The 17th-century was like that; Brébeuf left Europe in the midst of the bloodletting of the Thirty Years War. The Europeans were war-making peoples with their own tastes in torture.
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Would Biblioasis, the impressive new publisher in Windsor, Ont., have published Crosses in the Sky just five years ago? Perhaps, as they seem a doughty band. Would it have been received to critical acclaim then? Unlikely.
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Earlier this year, the Jesuits from Martyrs' Shrine took the Jesuit relics across Canada on a tour to commemorate their anniversaries. The relics were received with honour by Indigenous leaders at the Seven Chiefs Sportsplex near Calgary. A more complex, more accurate, history is now being told, 10 years after the TRC buried its own research under a political agenda.
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