Here we are On September 22 in Vancouver.  Tens of thousands of people walking in the rain across the Georgia Street viaduct, down one side and up the other.

My family and I stood in the rain very near the front of the walk that morning listening speakers talk about what we doing there.  Chief Robert Joseph, who we all call “Bobby Joe” had a dream and here we were living it.  As a longtime voice of the victims of residential schools and then a champion of reconciliation, Bobby Joe had glimpsed a possibility: that if enough Canadians could come together in one place and have an experience of reconciliation through encountering one another and then being together, then something might start.

He formed an organization called Reconciliation Canada to do just that.  He hired good people (many of them friends of mine) to train British Columbians in running circles around the province so that Indigenous and settler could encounter one another’s stories.  And he dreamed of a walk together at the conclusion of a week of hearings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in Vancouver.

And so on a wet Sunday morning, I took my family and we went downtown and we stood near an empty stage in the pouring rain and became part of Bobby Joe’s dream.  And we stood there for two hours, listening to speeches from friends and colleagues like Chief Ian Campbell and Judge Murray Sinclair and Karen Joseph, Bobby’s daughter.  And all the while the crowd swelled behind us and we had no idea how many people had come out in the downpour to be a part of this event until Shelagh Rogers made the declaration that there were 70,000 people and that they stretched up Georgia Street as far as we could see.  That was astonishing.  I held that number in my mind even as I listened to Dr. Bernice King, the daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say her piece.  It was impressive but not yet powerful.

And then Wa sang.

Wa is a ‘Namgis friend I met at a gathering last November.  I’m surprised I’ve never met him before, but we clicked deeply, as Wa does with many people.  He is an affable, funny and important man.  Important because he is a song catcher – he knows probably thousands of songs from his own community and others around him in the Kwakwa̱ka̱’wakw territories of northern Vancouver Island and the Central Coast.  He knows songs from all the neighbouring nations too, whether Coast Salish, Nuu-Cha-Nulth, Haida, Haisla or Nuxalk.  And he helps people, especially youth, catch snippets of melody that float through the coastal air like orographic clouds, hanging in atmosphere ready to be turned into nourishing rain.

Wa sang.  He sang something simple and powerful.  A monosyllabic single line repeated several times.  he sang it from a place of deepest resonance.  If we had been in a big house, he would have shook the poles.  He shook mine – cracked me wide open.

After Wa sang the walk began.  A screen was raised and lowered several times, a thin threshold that separated the 70,000 from a small group of people who were adorned in regalia.  Someone was blowing eagle down back at us.  Drums and cheering were heard everytime the screen came down to reveal this crowd.  And in time we began to walk down Georgia Street and onto the viaduct.

Now the physical location of this walk was important.  Georgia Street leads on to an elevated roadway which at one time in Vancouver’s history was going to be a freeway connection from the centre of the city out to the Trans Canada Highway near the Burnaby border.  Georgia and Dunsmuir Streets were both led on to elevated expressways but before they could get to Chinatown the project was stopped.  Completing the work would have destroyed neighbourhoods and communities, especially the historic urban Chinese Italian and native communities of the downtown eastside.  It was, as many projects like it are, undertaken with a sense of contempt for the communities below.  But it was stopped and there is a story about that and the story is one of repect – literally “looking again” at something and seeing something far more important to protect in the face of “progress.”  Ironically, Dunsmuir Street was named for James Dunsmuir, a former premier and industrialist who was an advocate for raising the poll tax on Asians even as he imported them by the hundreds to work on his railways and coal mines.  Georgia Street was named for King George III who issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763 – 250 years ago today – that is the basis for all treaty and reconciliation law in Canada.  It should be renamed the Reconciliation Parkway.

That was the road we walked out on.  There we all were, some three stories above the ground heading out of downtown.  It was beautiful, but lonely and confining.  From the middle of the crowd I had no sense of how big we were or where we were all going, and so I walked inside myself, reflecting on the act of reconciliation.  It felt like the energy had been drawn out, lost and quieted.

And then something astonishing happened.  The march doubled back on itself.  At the end of the expressway, the crowd walked down off off Georgia Street and did a 180 degres turn onto the Dunsmuir Street ramp.  As they doubled back I could hear them coming and then we met – 50 meters apart, three stories into the air, we met the waves of walkers, led by the survivors in their regalia.  We couldn’t reach them but only watch and call out as we passed one another in the air.  But here we were, finally walking together in a way that encountered each other.  Like the two-row wampum belt, separate paths, but seen and visible.  Honoured and held up.  Survivors waving at us like you do when two boats pass.  Songs filling the space between us, cheers and greetings rising up out of the crowd.  The traditional coastal gesture of raising one’s hands in respect and acknowledgement became a profound way for me to greet people.  I raised my hands to every survivor I made eye contact and I received in return smiles, and waves and raised hands back.  It was irresistible, and in the photo above you can see the people on the Dunsmuir side all pressed to the edge, greeting the bulk of the walkers coming the other way.

Somehow unwittingly, this march had created a physical container for reconciliation.  We could see each other, greet each other, connect with each other even as we were separated, elevated and moving.

Reconciliation is not a single act at a single point in time.  It is living this dynamic swirl of relationships like this always.

Once we came off the bridge the march wound through Chinatown and at one point stopped in front of Tinseltown, a downtown mall.  A group of about ten women were drumming and singing a well known women’s warrior song, and we stopped to join them.  That song usually gets sung six times through, but as more and more people joined we sang it over and over and over.  Dozens of people arrived, learned the song and sang it at the tops of their lungs, bouncing off the glass facade of the mall and the brick facades of the east side buildings.  It was utter joy, as it is to sing a warrior’s song at the top of your lungs with survivors.  An unleashing of the emotional energy of the day.  A marker.

For something like 100 years, generation after generation of indigenous children in Canada were rounded up at age five and taken away from their families and communities and placed in residential schools, where they were taught English, taught western values and Christianized.  This was commonly a brutal experience, full of physical abuse, exploitation, sexual abuse and the express purpose of eliminating the Indian in the child.

Some of the abuse took the forms of rape, sexual molestation, physical beatings, deprivation of food or warmth, children being forced to work in kitchens or  laundries  or on farms or in stores for no pay (slavery), being forced to speak English (when you had never heard it before, and being beaten when you didn’t), forced separation from your family and siblings…

Many adults, even those who had a relatively benign experience at residential school suffered in the decades afterwards as they struggled to love other humans, to raise their children and to love partners and siblings.  When you have been deprived of good parenting models in your formative years, where do you learn to parent?

Many took to alcohol and drugs to bury the shame of what had happened nto them, because nobody told them that it wasn’t their fault.  Many never recovered from those painful addictions, or if they did they cleaned up and sobered up later in life when the prospects of getting a job or holding a life together were small.

For years there was no support or counselling for people who lived their lives with the post-traumatic stress disorders.  In fact when people went to court to ask for compensation, they were dismissed.  People’s stories were not believed, Churches and governments denied claims and at worst covered up these offenses.  And mainstream society was somehow fed the story that First Nations people were uneducated, incompetent, addicted and violent.

Today, I am in Prince Rupert working with the Native Ministries Council or the United Church of Canada.  THis is a group made up of First Nations congregations in the small communities on the coast where the United Church has long had a presence.  The United Church was the first Canadian institution to issue an apology for it’s role in colonizing North America, back in 1986 (a moment which was defining in my life) and since 1986, the Church has had a focus in it’s work of supporting reconciliation, working with survivors and facilitating healing.

Today we heard stories about residential school experiences, as we do anytime Elders gather.  The process of telling stories is powerful healing, even for people in their 80s who may have told the stories over and over.  To be listened to is a high form of respect and a powerful act of human relationship.  Today also we heard how retraumatizing it is when non-First Nations people respond to these stories with the commonly heard statement “just get over it.”

The residential school experience created a huge and multigenerational darkness in the lives of individuals, communities and families.  The  responsibility  for living with this darkness has fallen to First Nations communities, and especially the men and women and children who have been victimized by the multigenerational trauma.  It has not been a priority for mainstream society to choose to address this issue.  Instead we simply ignore the issue or invite people “to get over” the legacy rape, abuse, shame and addiction.

On September 22 in Vancouver, there will be a walk in support of reconciliation, and I am encouraging every Canadian, whether you have lived here all your life or just arrived to show up there, learn about these stories and how you as a Canadian have benefitted from this historical legacy of policies that spawned the residential school system.

Yes.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a blog post advocating that newspapers should close their comments sections.  In the days since then I have heard from many people agreeing with me, and no one has disagreed.  I have had a twitter conversation with a National Post reporter whose piece about the breaking of a copper on the steps of the Victoria Legislature was – as is typical – hijacked by racist comments.    In that Twitter conversation, Tristin Hooper, the reporter stated that there is nothing he can do to influence this conversation and that “freedom can be an ugly, ugly thing sometimes.”

Well no doubt.  But in pondering this situation more, I am left to conclude that newspapers are actually trafiicking in racism.  Take for example this really interesting Globe and Mail piece about the spiritual side of Idle No More. This is a good discussion where people actually learned something in the conversation.  And then you get comments like this:

“What a load of crap. With the chiefs, elders and anyone directly related to them on the take the two spiritual sides of ‘idle no more’ are 1) Hand over more cash,2  ) and dont even think for a second we want to work at an 8 to 4 job. Oh, and add the mantra of Accounting? Accounting? Thats a white mans distraction.
If you dig back far enough you will find the simple hunter-gatherer approach to understanding the cosmos. Toss in the guilt ridden white mentality and the stone age vision of the world becomes an all encompassing stewards of the land ‘religion’. The only way this all flies is that modern society buys into the idea and pays for it.
Settle directly with everyone covered by the Indian Act bypassing the chiefs and elders completely. Give them their home and the land it sits on fee simple, a wad of cash and that is the end of it. It would be way cheaper then continuing this on for ever!”

So.

The Globe and Mail has a polcy at the top of its comments page that reads:

Editor’s Note: Comments that appear on the site are not the opinion of The Globe and Mail, but only of the comment writer. Personal attacks, offensive language and unsubstantiated allegations are not allowed. For more information on our commenting policies, please see our  Community Guidelines page, or read our full  Terms and Conditions. If you see a typo or error on our site,  report it to us. Please include a link to the story where you spotted the error.

The comment above contains two of these three violations and elsewhere in that same comment section Teresa Spence is referred to as “Thief Spence.”  The editor’s policy may be that these are technically violations, but they are allowed to stand.  To make matters worse, replies on the Globe and Mail website are collapsed in threads, making it impossible to address this information and have your objections seen.  Not much of a free market of ideas. A false comment gets more visibility than the reply that aims to correct it.  Want to create a set of misperceptions of First Nations? Just write all manner of comments.  No one will read the replies.

So what is going on here?  The Globe and Mail does not enforce its own polices, or at least does it completely arbitrarily.  An interesting read on the spiritual side of Idle No More gets poisoned by racism, personal attacks and unsubstantiated allegations, and we just keep looking.

The editorial policy says that the opinions in the comments are not the opinions of the paper.  But by leaving comments sections like this open to this kind of abuse the Globe and Mail is sharing an opinion with you.  It is stating that “it is the opinion of this paper that comments like the ones below are not in violation of our policy and contribute to the conversation.”

Furthermore, according to the Globe’s own terms and conditions, when you upload anything to the comments boards at the Globe and Mail you give the Globe and mail a license to use the material any way they want.  By leaving it on their site, they are using comments to drive traffic to their advertisers and therefore earn revenue.  Comments, and especially outrage, represents real cash money.  Racist speech, unsubstantiated allegations and personal attacks all drive comment threads that are hundreds of comments long.  More readers = more revenue.  Racism sells.

Furthermore, also from the Globe’s Terms and Conditions:

When participating in a Forum, never assume that people are who they say they are, know what they say they know, or are affiliated with whom they say they are affiliated. The Globe and/or its affiliates and licensors cannot be responsible for the content or accuracy of any information, and will not be responsible for any reliance or decisions made based on such information. When using a Forum, you may not post, transmit, link to, or otherwise distribute any information, materials or content that do not generally pertain to the designated topic or theme of the particular Forum. Use of a Forum for commercial purposes of any kind is strictly prohibited. Please note that The Globe reserves the right to refuse to post or to remove any information or materials, in whole or in part, that, in its sole discretion, are unacceptable, undesirable, or in violation of these Terms and Conditions.

This is no about restricting freedom of speech. This is not about stopping a conversation in society on First Nations issues.  Quite the opposite in fact.   Every single person who posts in a comments thread has the freedom to start their own blog and post anything they want.  What it is about is this clever dodge that papers use to hide behind the guise of freedom while trafficking for money in hate speech and libel.  And the sheer volume of it plus an insubstantial disclaimer protects them from legal action.

So is there hope for a conversation with editorial boards on the merits of comments sections?  Are their editors who agree with me?  Are their journalists out there who consider this worthy writing about?  Or are we just too tied to the money to turn off the tap?

Public conversation, and by extension, public policy suffers for this rhetoric.

PS…bonus link…the   Globe and Mail allows a personal attack to stand in an article about one man who is addressing racism on Craigslist. WTF?

PPS…The Globe and Mail has, since its inception, had this quote on its editorial page:  “The subject who is truly loyal to the Chief Magistrate will neither advise nor submit to arbitrary measures.”  Going to war against arbitrary measures was the paper’s founding principle.  I wonder if people still talk about what that means around the editorial board?