Truth and Indignation by Ronald Niezen

Author:Ronald Niezen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

At this point, Commissioner Sinclair approached the microphone and called for “health supports” for the person who was still wailing and weeping loudly enough to be heard across the room. He then made a brief statement in which he argued for Brother Cavanaugh’s right to be heard, and he concluded by saying: “We must ask that you be respectful.” The presentation then continued without further interruption as it fell into the expected pattern. Brother Cavanaugh presented a book about a Catholic-sponsored healing initiative and placed it with hands joined with the commissioner into the bentwood box, and this was followed by handshakes and scattered applause.

The Commission’s final report recalls this event, and adds that later the same day Ina

Seitcher, who attended the Christie Residential School that Brother Cavanaugh spoke about, gave a very different account of the experience: “That priest that talked about how loving that Christie residential school was—it was not. That priest was most likely in his office not knowing what was going on down in the dorms or in the lunchroom.” The Commission’s report then attributes the absence of such direct exchanges between survivors and former school staff to the fact that, for many, “the time for reconciliation had not yet arrived.”10

Such interruptions of the pattern, manifested in stress points or ruptures of uncharacteristic emotion, tell us more about the boundaries of testimony than does conformity to them. In this significant moment we have an audience rejecting a narrative truth (“my experience”) that makes a claim to correspondence with a historical truth that wilfully runs against the orthodoxy of survivor experience. It is instructive in the context of this thematic rupture to consider a document that parallels Brother Cavanaugh’s argument—an introduction to a petition, probably written in 1950, addressed to D.M. McKay, then Director of Indian Affairs:

After seeing what is being done in Indian Residential Schools throughout the country, we have come to the conclusion that only a Residential School could be of any utility to us. We therefore hope that you will take into serious consideration the present petition, which has been signed by all the Indians of this Reserve and that you will grant us, in the year 1950, a Residential School large enough to accommodate all our children ... Thanking you in anticipation, we remain, Dear Mr. McKay, Sincerely yours,

The Indians of the Obedjiwan Reserve11

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