Why this week’s meeting with Pope Francis is the next step in Chief Willie Littlechild’s ‘healing journey’
Advertisement
Read this article for free:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
To continue reading, please subscribe:
Monthly Digital Subscription
$19 $0 for the first 4 weeks*
- Enjoy unlimited reading on winnipegfreepress.com
- Read the E-Edition, our digital replica newspaper
- Access News Break, our award-winning app
- Play interactive puzzles
*No charge for four weeks then billed as $19 plus GST every four weeks. Offer only available to new and qualified returning subscribers. Cancel any time.
Read unlimited articles for free today:
or
Already have an account? Log in here »
Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 26/03/2022 (1007 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.
Warning: This story discusses residential schools and the abuse that took place there.
It started as a picture in the mind of a teenage boy who had been taken from his home.
Some 60 years ago, as a student in residential school, Willie Littlechild etched a pencil drawing of Pope Pius XII. It was a submission for a scholarship to an arts program at the University of Minnesota, as he recalls.
At that time, Littlechild already had his eyes on higher education — and a possible escape from the world of trauma and abuse he had been thrown into after being taken from home at the age of six and ultimately attending three residential schools over 14 years.
He would go on to become the first Treaty First Nations person to obtain a law degree from the University of Alberta, as well as the first Treaty First Nations person elected as an MP in Canada; he also did work with the United Nations.
As he stares at the drawing in front of him, which his wife recently found while tidying up the house, Chief Willie Littlechild says it feels now like a prophecy.
“I thought, ‘Isn’t that curious?’ When I think back, why did I do this in Grade 12? Why did I choose to draw a picture of the Pope … Was it that (I knew) this was going to happen? That as part of Truth and Reconciliation I would actually be having an audience with the Pope?”
Littlechild, 77, is scheduled to leave for the Vatican this weekend as one of the Assembly of First Nations delegates for a meeting with Pope Francis.
The long-anticipated meeting, already delayed from December due to the pandemic, will let the 32 primary delegates from First Nation, Métis and Inuit delegations, many of them elders and residential-school survivors, share their stories face-to-face with Pope Francis.
They will speak to the pontiff about one of the calls to action that Littlechild himself helped draft as one of three commissioners of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada: For the Pope to come to Canada and apologize for the role the Catholic Church had in running the residential-school system, and for the trauma and abuse that flowed from it.
It was one of the most repeated requests the commissioners heard over six years of testimonies, Littlechild says.
“Many, many of the survivors, either through tears or anger or disappointment, said to us ‘All I want is for the Pope to apologize to me. All he has to say is, ‘I am sorry.’ And then I can begin my healing journey.”’”
Those testimonies, in addition to the likely remains of hundreds of children discovered this past year at former residential school sites across Canada, have added to the urgency of the dialogue between survivors and Pope Francis — and potentially an apology from the Holy See in Rome this week, or a commitment to one in the future on Canadian soil.
Littlechild say he is planning on taking his drawing with him; it’s a sort of snapshot representing how the Catholic church has loomed over his entire life. As that boy in residential school, deprived of his culture and language, chastised for praying to the Creator, he says, he never thought he would one day be travelling to the Vatican to stand proudly before the leader of the Catholic church and call for an apology.
“It’s kind of overwhelming” to look at the drawing, he says on a recent day in his law office in Maskwacis, Alta.
“It’s almost like when you set a goal for yourself, or a dream. And you reach your dream.”
The former grand chief of Confederacy of Treaty Six First Nations’ entire life has been intertwined with the church.
At the Ermineskin Indian Residential School, which was run by Roman Catholics, he experienced physical, mental and emotional abuse; he remembers being punished for speaking Cree despite knowing no English, getting beaten during athletic activities for no apparent reason, and being called “a pagan” or “heathen” for expressing any traditional cultural beliefs.
When he left the schools, the abuse he suffered as a child followed him home. It would take years before he could form a healthy bond with his family, and that trauma would resurface when he himself became a parent.
He found salvation, he says, in sports as well as education, becoming a lifelong advocate of athletics for Indigenous youth and helping to establish the North American Indigenous Games and the World Indigenous Nations Games.
He also took part in a decades-long campaign with the United Nations that saw the international body condemn decrees issued by the Pope in the 15th century — the so-called papal bulls — that authorized Christian explorers to claim “terra nullius,” or vacant lands, based on the notion they had racial and religious superiority.
Work he was a part of with the United Nations led to the establishment of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which was adopted in 2007, and is now becoming closer to being reflected in Canadian law through Bill C-15, which would see the Canadian government overtly reject the papal bulls as “racist, scientifically false, legally invalid, morally condemnable and socially unjust.”
As a commissioner for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, he heard thousands of stories from residential-school survivors that mirrored his own.
Littlechild will be joined by many others in the delegation, with their own personal stories and connections to the church and its legacy in Canada.
Ted Quewezance was snatched from his First Nation reserve in Kamsack, Sask., in the 1960s and put into the residential-school system, where he would be kept away from his family for 11 years. His 14 siblings all went through the same ordeal.
Behind the confines of Gordon’s Indian Residential School and St. Philip’s Indian Residential School, physical, emotional and sexual abuse took place and haunted the survivors for years to come.
Some two decades later, when Quewezance started publicly sharing his story of abuse during the residential school days. Initially, he said, no one would believe him.
“Even my elders questioned me about it. And people laughed at me. I was standing alone speaking about sexual abuse in our communities and across the country. I was standing alone. Even my friends in front of me laughed at me,” said the 69-year-old man born in the Cote First Nation.
“People didn’t believe us. They said we were lying. The churches didn’t believe us. Lawyers didn’t believe us. The government didn’t believe us.”
For many years, he said, he was an angry man.
“It was very hurtful, shameful. And I hurt my children and my wife and I had to break that cycle in order to move forward and deal with it,” said Quewezance, who has five girls, 15 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.
Quewezance has chosen to confront the demons in his past, demons that had seen him — and countless other survivors — struggling with substance abuse and broken relationships. For 30 years he has been helping other survivors cope by being their advocate, founding the Indian Residential School Survivors’ Society, a support group offering counselling programs.
“I started something and I think this is close to the finish line, because of my age and my health,” said Quewezance, of his place in the delegation.
There has been so much talk about healing and reconciliation but not enough is done to help the survivors on the ground in the communities, he said.
“I don’t talk about money. I talk about healing, concentrating on where it’s needed. It’s within individuals, in our Indian reserves, with the families and with the community. That’s where conciliation has to happen. Not reconciliation. It’s conciliation,” he said.
“Reconciliation is like they’re asking us to go back when it was good. It was never good in the past. No, we can’t go back there. Never did have it good for we’re always controlled by the Government of Canada, in a colony process through the Indian Act. The colonized process is not getting us anywhere.”
Although he says he has personally learned to forgive and move on, something he describes as the hardest thing to do, many of the 150,000 First Nation, Inuit, and Métis residential-school survivors have passed on over the years without that healing and conciliation.
“I’d like to acknowledge all the survivors we have lost in the last 20, 30 years. We’re lucky if we have maybe 25,000 left. It’s like the veterans. A lot of our veterans are gone. We can’t afford to forget our veterans. We can’t afford to forget all our survivors.”
Littlechild said he would like to see the church “open some space” and express more understanding toward traditional Indigenous spiritual beliefs, and the role it played in them surviving hundreds of years of cultural genocide.
“Where I think we could change that, in terms of direction, is to have the Catholic Church recognize that there’s nothing wrong with spirituality, especially Indigenous spirituality, because that’s when we were called devil-worshippers and heathens … And yet we were praying.”
For Quewezance, an important part of finding closure for the role of the church in his own trauma would also be for the Pope to recognize the inherent rights given to Indigenous people by the Creator.
“We are not atheist. We are human beings like him,” said Quewezance. “I say that on behalf of our survivors and I say that on behalf of our people that have gone by. We got a culture. We got traditions. We got customs and we got a creation story. And that’s our identity. It’s all unwritten and we still practise those today.”
For Littlechild, the upcoming trip is a part of his own healing journey, and in some ways feels like his work coming full circle, in terms of holding the Catholic Church to account for its transgressions against him, his community and to Indigenous peoples across Canada.
Littlechild spent years advocating and lobbying for it, through meetings with the Pontifical Council in Vatican City and presentations to the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops on the importance of the trip and as well his role as a commissioner. As he prepares to see his work come to fruition, he’s feeling hopeful.
“I see that they’re merging, all of my lifetime fast-forward to today, the connection is still through the Catholic faith and through the popes,” Littlechild said. “Whether it’s through their papal bulls, like the doctrine of discovery and terra nullius and that battle we had, and then the residential-school history itself and the traumatic experience as a child. They’re all coming together as one bundle, a bundle of many years of my life.
“Curiously, I think I’m supposed to be speaking to him on April 1, which is my birthday … The stars are lining up. I think it’s going to turn out OK.”
The Indian Residential Schools Crisis Line is available 24 hours a day for anyone experiencing pain or distress as a result of a residential school experience. Support is available at 1-866-925-4419.
Nicholas Keung is a Toronto-based reporter covering immigration for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @nkeung/
Omar Mosleh is an Edmonton-based reporter for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @OmarMosleh