Does every child matter to you?

Orange Shirt Day, or the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, is a time to reflect on our residential school survivors and the ones who never made it home, but it’s also a good time to look within ourselves as Onkwehón:we to figure out ways to better protect our children and demonstrate more of that love we all sorely need.

We’re caught between the ways of our ancestors and the non-Native world we’re forced to walk in, so something has to give.

If you’re too rigid with your children, and lead with control over love, discipline over learning and admitting your own mistakes, we will be stuck as a collective in neutral - or worse, reverse.

But if we fight the intergenerational trauma we all suffer from and find ways to spread positivity instead of gossip and jealousy, we will reverse the trends we’ve inherited thanks to a system designed to break us down.

September 30 is a time to reflect on the children who left our communities and came back as shadows of their former selves. It wasn’t their fault. They were forced to be there, away from home, stripped of the little power they had as kids, forced to learn a new culture, language and religion - and to be different.

There is a lot to take from that and so much more healing that must be done in all our communities.

Apologies have been made from governments and from churches, sure, but that doesn’t change what happened.

Besides, the real perpetrators, the nuns and the priests and all of the ones who abused our kids and changed the course of our lives today, never apologized.

They never served time, and their names have been protected for far too long. They died free of the shameful label they should have been forced to wear as mental, physical and sexual abusers - or worse, murderers.

They forced our children to do things against their will and they forcefully changed the unique character of small children. There should be justice and actual truth, before any kind of sham of what they call reconciliation.

Free of any kind of real comeuppance, the majority of the clergy responsible lived out their days peacefully, as heroes to some, but villains to the ones who knew their real dark secrets.

Others, like police officers, politicians and anyone complicit, also got off scot-free.

What this country needs is a deep investigation into what really happened, to silence the naysayers, and to get the actual truth out there.

We know there was abuse and murder on a large scale. Things like electric chairs at residential schools; graves that should never have existed on those grounds; and who got away with what won’t “fix” things, but it’s a vital form of justice.

Use their archives to dig for the truth. Use their own words and notes and the memories of our survivors before it’s too late to paint the real picture of what happened behind closed doors.

Piece together what happened with church and governmental records. It doesn’t have to be in a court of law, but it must be built on the truths we know, the ones we still suffer from.

Residential school survivors were witnesses to major crimes in Canada, yet they have never been asked - or “allowed” - to testify to bring those perpetrators to justice on a larger scale.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission tour over a decade ago unveiled the suffering of our children and their heroic actions just to survive, but the tour never got into the nitty gritty, the who did what, the work that needs to be done so we can all understand residential schools better and use the truth as a form of healing and justice.

Every child matters and every child needs to hear that message loud and clear.

Steve Bonspiel
The Eastern Door