Will indigenous leaders now apologize to Pope Francis?

The Other Side of the Penitential Pilgrimage

Photo by Karl Raymund Catabas on Unsplash

This article originally appeared in The Western Standard. It is written by Tom Flanagan, Brian Giesbrecht and James Pew.

American economist Thomas Sowell has long held a very simple, but almost universally disregarded idea: “There are no solutions, just trade-offs.”

There may be no better illustration than the situation faced by the new nation of Canada in 1867, when fewer than 10% of the indigenous population were receiving a formal education. To have done nothing and allowed the dismal condition in the indigenous population to continue indefinitely, was as unthinkable then as it is now. Trade-offs had to be made.

There were no solutions to the problems then, as there are no solutions to the increasing problems entrenched in indigenous communities now. There were only trade-offs in 1867, 1920 and 1950 when education standards among indigenous children were not being met, as there were only trade-offs in 2022, when Pope Francis was pressured to apologize for the Catholic Church's participation in last century’s compromises.

That Indian Residential Schools (IRS) are not understood in terms of the conditions and necessary trade-offs present at the time of their inception, that many errors may have been made in their planning and operation, and that they did not unequivocally solve the social and education problems faced by the indigenous, has in recent years become conflated with a crime against humanity. IRS history has been distorted and re-contextualized, and made to appear as if the tradeoff of the IRS program was actually a sinister plot with an entirely different agenda to harm, not educate, neglected indigenous children.

By present standards, IRSs were chronically underfunded, understaffed, and under-resourced. For perspective, the 110-year history of IRS included a great depression, two world wars, and several outbreaks of deadly viral disease  — the brutal devastation of tuberculosis which swept through indigenous communities both before and after the 1918 Spanish Flu claimed many indigenous lives — at a time when vaccines and antibiotics were not available.

These were hard times. And very little about the Pope's recent penitential pilgrimage was balanced or reflective of the harsh realities faced by those involved in the IRS system.

The Pope has come and gone. His apology is being studied, word by word, for what it did, and didn’t say. Already, complaints are being heard that the apology didn’t go far enough, that there was no concrete compensation offer, and similar gripes.

But what about some of the indigenous leaders? Shouldn’t they also apologize to the Pope for their excessive rhetoric last summer that lead directly to vandalism, church burning, and a level of anti-Catholic hatred not seen in this country for many years?

Remember the accusations of Chief Roseanne Casimir and her colleagues in Kamloops last summer? Children clandestinely meeting their deaths at the Kamloops Indian Residential School and being secretly buried with the forced help of six-year-old children. Given the fact nuns and priests ran that school, this was obviously an accusation of the most serious kind made against Catholic clergy. The accusations were made on no credible evidence that any such thing had ever happened, and no evidence has been tendered by that chief or her colleagues since the accusations were made.

And these wild accusations were followed up by even more extreme and baseless accusations from other chiefs. According to Chief Willie Sellars of Williams Lake, priests and nuns committed almost every crime imaginable against the indigenous students at the local IRS. Priests flung the lifeless bodies of children into rivers, streams and furnaces; children were secretly buried, hither and yon, school children were routinely summoned to the school office to be sexually abused and the entire gigantic crime was covered up for decades by the federal government, RCMP and clergy conspiring together to keep the truth from Canadians. Again, absolutely zero substantiating evidence has come forward to back up these irresponsible claims.

There was more such extreme nonsense from people who should know better.

The anti-Catholic bigotry inherent in these baseless claims looks a lot like the virulent anti-Semitism still sadly alive in parts of the world. For a thousand years there have been tales of Jewish rabbis stealing Christian children, killing them and using their blood for evil religious ceremonies. These false stories have done tremendous harm through the ages. What they have in common with the anti-Catholic fables told by reckless chiefs is that they are completely false, and built on hate.

That vulnerable children were abused and at times suffered from terrible feelings of isolation from being away from their families is a sad and tragic story. That many died from disease before the availability of life saving treatments and vaccines is a particularly tragic chapter. But a version of this story that considers the trade-offs and the conditions at the time is needed in order for perspective to be returned to the prevailing narrative.

All institutions that housed children have been shown to harbor predators. This sad fact of humanity was not understood in 1877, and barely understood in 1950. Even so, less than 10% of all abuse claims in IRSs were against priests and nuns. More than 90% of abuse came from support staff (many of whom were indigenous) and from older students.

The belief in an elusive solution, instead of understanding trade-offs, leads inevitably to an impression of failure in the minds of those expecting solutions, when they should be weighing trade-offs. The decision to build the IRS system was based on careful consideration of the trade-offs and material conditions faced by both indigenous and non-indigenous Canadians at the time. That isolated children would become the victims of depraved predators who hid amongst clergy and staff at IRSs, or that years of loneliness experienced by many would lead to so much suffering and unanticipated trauma, was not part of the original IRS plan, for either the Canadian government or the Catholic Church.

This perspective is not spoken of by the Pope. There is no reasoning with the activists who are convinced the Catholic Church is guilty as an organization for the crimes of individual sinners who broke their oath with the Church and committed atrocities against children. The attempt by the Pope to placate indigenous leaders and activists will not prevail against the arrogance of many of those the pope has apologized to — an arrogance that precludes them from ever realizing that they too owe the Pope an apology for their exaggeration of crimes of past church members, and the damage this inspired both to physical churches and to the reputation of the Catholic Church.

In his apology at Maskwacis, Alberta, the pope said "An important part of this process will be to conduct a serious investigation (or search) into the facts of what took place in the past and to assist the survivors of the residential schools to experience healing from the traumas they suffered."

Before conducting that investigation into past events, it's necessary to conduct professional RCMP investigations into the current claims of the murder and secret burial of thousands of indigenous residential school students made so sensationally by some indigenous leaders last year. If those claims turn out to be baseless, those chiefs will owe an apology to the pope — and to every Canadian.