The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...

Selective Hearing

There is a weary awfulness in the way mainstream media handles reporting on any events and consequences that are the outcome of deliberately destructive policies. In part because most of the people working in it seem to spend more time trawling "social media" for scandal and rubbing the more obvious parts of press releases off prior to reproducing them than investigating and writing up real reports. They are also fond of certain types of press conference, especially the ones held not too far from the central offices of the corporations they work for. Indigenous nations and organizations end up spending more time and effort than they would like on public relations to counter the sloppy racist memes and accusations the mainstream media mindlessly echoes in between bouts of performative apologies for amplifying racists over all others. It does not seem to be a corporate value to maintain basic coverage of complicated stories that must inevitably unfold over time, unless said story is something for capitalists to follow or sports. And these days, even sports are losing their grip on corporate media resources. The purpose of the mainstream, corporate media is to inflame feelings and shore up racism and sexism, but not to contribute socially constructive coverage, which by nature is ongoing, not necessarily exciting, and demanding of the people doing it. So it is sadly unsurprising that the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada is more often presented in caricature than in its actual meaningful impacts. It didn't just produce an eight volume stack reporting its own results, supplemented by two briefer but in some ways more potent research reports. One is titled "'In a Moment of Reflection:' Report on the Archivum Generale O.M.I. Romae (AG) – Oblate General Administration Archives, Rome," and documents the many forms of resistance the oblates have presented to providing full access to their documentation of the residential school system. The other is titled simply, "Where are The Children Buried?"

No matter how many rationalizations settlers try to make for the residential school system, they remain utterly incapable of explaining why basic education could not have been provided for Indigenous children by building schools local to their community and helping members of those same communities to help provide that education. Now there is too much undeniable evidence of why the colonial governments and their auxiliaries in the various christian churches refused to do so. Their priority was not education. They knew what they were planning to do would have terrible consequences, as every residential school was planned from the start to have its own cemetery. The founders of the system knew it was going to be run on a shoestring, such that poor ventilation, worse food, and forced labour would wreak havoc on the imprisoned children's health. They knew what was going to happen, and were so determined to avoid returning sick children home if they could that a parallel system of "indian hospitals" and similar facilities were set up and maintained, also on shoestring budgets, to sweep up those children instead. As often as possible, they shipped children far from home, determined to make it impossible for the children to make a run for it, either because they would not know the way, or the weather conditions would stop them. When chief medical officer of the indian department Peter H. Bryce alerted the "indian department" of the ways in which ill health was being actively fomented in residential schools, he was forced out of his job and ostracized. The canadian federal officials of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century knew what was going on.

Logo of the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools, june 2022 to present.

There is nothing pleasant about facing up to the reality of the horrifying residential school system. Its existence and impacts defies every pleasant image of the settler state of canada being an epitome of civilization and justice. The survivors who determinedly saw through the legal action leading to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and to the subsequent Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor for Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools (OSI) have done more than anyone could have dreamed or ever had a right to ask. Many of them were left out of the court settlement, and it was all too clear many elements of the residential school system were left out in an attempt to limit liability. Despite an already infamous settler history of bulldozing, and building or sowing crops over african canadian cemeteries, many settlers did not want to face up to the reality of Indigenous children who were never able to go home. Children who were buried in unmarked graves, or deliberately buried far from home rather than return them because as always, the colonial authorities are obsessed with minimizing costs. Pennywise, pound foolish, and incapable of seeing Indigenous peoples or any other racialized group as human, those authorities have left a terrible legacy. The residential school survivors and their families are continuing their determined quest to put these matters right, including especially finding the children so they can be properly honoured and whenever possible, brought home. There are settlers seeking to help, which is important and beautiful to see. But we don't get to see nearly as much about what they are doing, as we do of the atrocious behaviour of residential school denialists who spread lies, game "social media," and even go so far as to harass Indigenous communities and show up at sites under investigation with shovels. Somehow, the mainstream media has remarkably selective hearing, it always picks up and amplifies denialists and their attempts to call the whole notion of unmarked burials a hoax.

Meanwhile, the OSI, led by Kanehsatà:ke Mohawk Nation citizen Kimberly Murray, has undertaken a program of research and community outreach that has crossed what is currently called canada east to west, south to north, and back again. The point of her work and that of her team is to support the ongoing process of search, recovery, ceremony, and healing of the missing children. They have partnered with canadian geographic to create and update a map of the Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites Associated with Indian Residential Schools. As always, they have produced a series of reports which will be capped by a final report. The preliminary reports include interim summaries and accounts of the community gatherings. The most recent instalment, and perhaps the most gruelling to read, is Sites of Truth, Sites of Conscience: Unmarked Burials and Mass Graves of Missing and Disappeared Indigenous Children in Canada. It is hard to read and see reproduced documents demonstrating how residential schools were the visible store front to a much larger system, a system which by the time the last school closed in 1996 had in many ways been recreated within the canadian child apprehension and foster care system combined with the interlocking system of provincial and federal prisons and jails.

Just because this entire colonial system fundamentally intended to destroy Indigenous families and futures has been moved into different structures does not mean matters are hopeless. Quite the reverse, as the residential school survivors and their communities lead the way to uprooting and ending the system utterly. Finding the missing children is one part of that. Honouring their memories by taking down the replacement for the residential schools is another. Multiple First Nations and Métis governments are negotiating and implementing new systems so that Indigenous families are not unfairly targeted for the removal of their children and to ensure children who need to move to another home stay with other family or at least within their own communities. Gitksan citizen and lawyer Cindy Blackstock has led a major portion of this change via her legal work and the First Nations Children's Action Researcha nd Education Service. Some of the actions under way may turn out to come from unexpected directions. For instance, in 2022 Patty Krawec, Ojibwe Anishnaabe, released her book Becoming Kin: An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future (Minneapolis: Broadleaf Books). In that book, she illustrates how social workers and the prison system often treat Indigenous families, and how their set up eerily mimics many of the same physical separation structures and rules formerly enshrined in residential schools. She guides the reader, especially the non-Indigenous reader, to better understand the origins and impacts of those structures, and why they fail and must be replaced. Krawec touches on many themes that have grown in importance in the OSI reports as their work has continued. For instance, the ways in which Indigenous people have been blocked if not guided away from menial labour which is hard on the body and earns such poor wages it is difficult for the worker to support themselves let alone a family. Through much of the late nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, federal officials and missionaries selectively heard only what supported them in their efforts to recreate Indigenous peoples from independent nations into a homogeneous and permanent servant underclass ready to provide menial labour to their "white betters." There is still pressure on Indigenous students to leave school early or abandon more academic fields regardless of their interest or potential for trades, and then trades where they can expect to have difficulties reaching management positions. These are shadows of the residential school system still impacting the present.

The missing children whom their families and fellow students are searching for and honouring are not shadows. They are, as the logo of the OSI suggests, a part of the lights. The detailed description of the logo on the OSI site explains in part,

Representing strength, family and healing, bears are the primary element in the Office of the Independent Special Interlocutor’s logo. The larger bear represents the parent, family and community, while the smaller bear symbolizes the children who were stolen and never returned.

The Northern Lights in the night sky are the Spirits of our ancestors dancing. The dancing guides the children to reunite with their ancestors.

The stars depict the connection between the children taken from their communities and the parents left behind, who would stare at the same stars longing to be reunited.

The Stó:lō Nation have a word in their language, Halq'eméylem, Tómiyeqw, which means both ancestors and descendants. In another of those synchronicities the world is occasionally blessed with, the Sun has been especially active. So far this year, the solar storms that have been such a concern for the people running massive technical infrastructure have been contributing to Northern Lights of extra brilliance and unusually south reaching visibility. The ancestors are reaching out to help find the children and guide them home.