Separate and Unequal

The first casualty landed when the Anglican Diocese of Cariboo, in British Columbia, crippled by legal fees, declared bankruptcy. Elsewhere lawyers, sensing a vast opportunity, started trolling for clients. One, Regina’s Tony Merchant, ended up with 8,300 individual claims. As these started to go to court, it became apparent that the judicial system would not be able to handle the load or prevent another injustice: the afn estimated that fifty years of court time lay ahead and that $4 would be spent on legal and administrative costs for every dollar of compensation. White people, once again, would profit from aboriginal misery. The federal government had no choice but to step in.

It was not just the residential-schools question that threatened the quiet sanctimony of official Ottawa. While attempts had been made to ameliorate the worst aspects of the past—everything from recognizing land titles and treaty rights dating back to 1763 to accommodating clauses in the 1982 Constitution Act to the residential-schools settlement itself—the Indian Act of Canada, proclaimed in 1876, remained, by any measure, paradoxical legislation. It at once affirmed assimilationist policies that provided the legal framework for the residential schools while enshrining the segregation that led to the reserve system. Other countries, such as the United States, had struck down “separate but equal” legislation (most notably with the landmark 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education), but Canada had failed to move on to the same degree.

In 1969, the new Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau attempted to push the issue with a White Paper that, in essence, advocated repealing the Indian Act, dismantling the ministry of Indian Affairs, and transferring responsibility for aboriginals to provinces. Almost in unison, the aboriginal leadership condemned the initiative. It threatened, they argued, to shred existing arrangements between the Crown and indigenous communities vis-à-vis treaty rights. Trudeau and then Indian Affairs minister Jean Chrétien were rebuked, the White Paper was shelved, and the status quo prevailed, as it does today.

Meanwhile, Canada was not immune to external criticism. In 1987, the South African ambassador, Glenn Babb, toured a reserve in Manitoba and then told a Johannesburg newspaper that Canada’s criticism of apartheid was hypocritical as it had its own “deplorable situation” on native reserves. It was a publicity stunt but it drew blood. Canadians were infuriated. Some attempts at reform from the inside were initiated; in 2001, Matthew Coon Come, then the head of the afn, scolded the chiefs for alcohol abuse and said that they needed “to clean up [their] act.” He further argued that ballots for his position should be cast not by the chiefs but by individual status Indians themselves, a swipe at segments of the aboriginal leadership thought to be corrupt and not attentive to the needs of their constituents. He was thanked for his trouble by being turfed from office. You could not air dirty laundry in public or suggest such a derogation of power.

Today, though, Babb’s critique and Coon Come’s prescriptions resonate: for many, the on-the-ground reality of the reserves represents the soft underbelly of Canadian democracy, the shadow behind the door, the one big problem never properly addressed or even properly acknowledged.

For nearly a decade after beginning his first term as afn chief in 1997, Phil Fontaine looked on as a series of negotiations on the residential-schools issue produced little of substance. Then, at a conference at the University of Calgary called “The Residential Schools Legacy: Is Reconciliation Possible?” he sensed an opening. “The feds were stymied, and I felt finally they might be willing to bend in our favour,” he told me. It was March 2004. During a break Fontaine approached deputy minister Mario Dion, there to deliver a speech on behalf of the prime minister. “Give us a chance,” Fontaine proposed. “I’ll put the best minds in the country together, and we’ll come up with a plan for your consideration.”

With the federal government’s approval, the afn assembled a group of lawyers, academics, class-action specialists, human-rights experts, and genocide scholars, and got down to business. One of their first stops was Ireland, where the Catholic Church had just made a gigantic settlement with former students of that country’s industrial-school system. Within months they hammered out the fundamental principles of the settlement about to be activated. It has been a long journey from those first lonely moments in 1990. “Here it is sixteen years later,” Fontaine says now. “The government has agreed to a lump-sum payment, agreed to a truth and reconciliation process. The complete package is very just. It will enable us to turn the page on this.”

But how that page turns for the tens of thousands of people affected is less certain. Anita McLeod and Doris Bellegarde were both at the Catholic school at Lebret, Saskatchewan, more than half a century ago. McLeod, a sixty-seven year old with glasses and silver hair, was a student from 1946 until 1953; Bellegarde, now seventy-two, was there from 1941 to 1950. “No amount of money can compensate for what we went through in that place, the physical and mental cruelty. They called us little savages, ‘les sauvages,’ ” McLeod told me. “The nuns and the priests did that,” added Bellegarde.


After graduating from grade ten, both McLeod and Bellegarde fled their home province—Anita to BC, Doris to Manitoba. But each soon returned and, paradoxically, joined the staff of the very institution they professed to hate. Anita signed on as a child-care worker, Doris as a cook, eventually becoming the main chef. There they stayed through the school’s final years under the Catholics, then as the government ran it on a non-sectarian basis, and finally when the local Star Blanket band took over in the ’80s before tearing it down in 1999. The two women offer individual justifications that attempt to right old wrongs. “Nobody was going to hurt the kids like we were hurt,” declares McLeod of her motivation to become a child-care worker. “There’d be no more porridge left over from breakfast served for dessert,” says Bellegarde of her time in the kitchen. The two women remain devout members of the church. “It wasn’t God that did this,” says McLeod. As for the money, it will be like something found, they agree. “It’ll be like money I never had,” says Bellegarde.

As a student at Lebret in the 1950s, George Poitras was abused by a priest. In 1999, he filed a lawsuit, and in the fall of 2004, just a year before he died, he received a cheque for $20,000. Lawrence Poitras is George’s son. His job on the Peepeekisis reserve is to drive the road grader, trying to smooth out the potholed roads. Driving around on the noisy machine gives him ample time to think. He describes his father as a philosophical man concerned about what a windfall of residential-schools settlement money would mean for individuals, families, and the community. “In most cases it will not be enough to do anything really positive,” says Lawrence, adopting the attitude of his late father. “But if you have bad habits—drugs or alcohol—it could be enough to ruin your life. People have to be prepared to handle the money.”