By ERNIE NEUFELD, Weyburn Review Associate Publisher
"Give us a bottle of wine and a loaf of bread and we're in business.
This was the ruefully whimsical assessment of an Anglican bishop in reply to the implied question about the future of his British Columbia diocese, as it faces almost certain bankruptcy as a result of successful suits by native victims of abuse at residential schools over a period of many years.
Speaking at a Toronto Anglican church supper I had the privilege of attending recently, Bishop James Cruickshank explained that his Caribou diocese has little or no money, as most funds have been drained by legal fees arising from ongoing litigation attaching blame to four leading Canadian denominations - Anglican, United, Roman Catholic and Presbyterian - for grave sexual, physical and mental abuse of thousands of native children, assigned and entrusted for schooling to them by the federal government. The government also has been found liable for about half the damages quantified by the courts.
While the diocese holds some assets in trust, it is contended these cannot and should not be applied to satisfaction of lawsuits. (I sensed that the bishop also had strong reservations about the propriety and extent of "vicarious liability" ascribed by the courts.) The few million dollars of deemed worth of the diocese, I gathered, rests largely in the sprinkling of little churches throughout his sparsely settled area of British Columbia.
He explained that historically, the railway station, the Hudson's Bay store and the church had been the core of many communities. Stations and stores have disappeared over the years, leaving only the church buildings, with limited recovery value to litigants. Native suits and prayers for redress have successfully gone as far as the Supreme Court. Many millions of dollars have been or likely will be assessed against cited churches at national, diocesan and local levels. But it is generally acknowledged that church bankruptcies are inevitable. Complainants thus may be faced with trying to get blood out of stones.
At year-end, churches simply will be locked, and the keys surrendered. The bishop said groups of churches or congregations will be forming independent organizations under the umbrella of the parent church, and will hold services wherever space is available.
Bishop Cruickshank acknowledged that abuses had occurred on a large scale in the church-run schools, and that an abnormally high death rate and other ills that have befallen natives probably are attributable to conditions experienced in the schools.
As good speakers will, he was able to mine the whole odious affair for an ironical angle. He told of a young native who confessed he had grown up watching westerns on television, and ruefully admitted he had been 18 years old before he realized he wasn't a cowboy.
My own interest in the bishop's views was spurred in part by appreciation for good food, and partly by the assumption that anything that has developed in the Caribou diocese respecting Indian residential schools is almost surely to be paralleled in our Saskatchewan diocese of Qu'Appelle.
Additionally, the now well-aired fact of grave abuses that occurred in these schools through much of Canada took me back 25 years - almost to the week - to a time I was obliged to eat crow in this space after having written dismissively about a movie's portrayal of conditions at residential schools in the Canadian north.
The National Film Board production of "Cold Journey" had opened in December of 1976 at the Soo Theatre. Its thrust was to question the effectiveness, and disparage the strategy and objectives, of the residential schools operated by the federal government and four major Canadian churches. In attendance were two native Canadian lads who played lead roles in the movie, there to establish authenticity, say a few words to the audience and mingle at a reception that followed.
Writing with the bold confidence of supreme ignorance, I challenged scenes in which a boy home on the reserve for summer vacation had to converse with his mother through his brother, because she spoke no English and the youngster had forgotten Cree while away at school.
It was my opinion that at worst (or best) the incident represented an isolated situation, and using it weakened an otherwise strong case against the schools.
A friend closer to the situation than I quickly corrected me, attesting that there had been "a deliberate effort on the part of the authorities to remove Indian children from their homes and from the reservation at as early an age as possible and take them away to schools in an effort to integrate them into Canadian society."
After full (if belated) exposure to the facts through the media as a result of lawsuits initiated by thousands of former native students, we now know that, if anything, the NFB's portrayal of the situation was vastly understated; that children were physically, sexually and mentally abused. They were deprived of necessities, exploited, alienated and denigrated. At best the film comes through in retrospect as an understated apology for a well-intentioned, even laudable, initiative that had failed through human error, weak implementation, bureaucratic incompetence and/or overzealous pursuit of questionable objectives.
All of which brings us back to the present and to my new presumptuous assessment based once more on a sketchy grasp of a complicated, multifaceted set of circumstances. Thus stipulated, I believe the church (viewed as a body of people pursuing a common religious initiative) will continue with inadequate, temporary or makeshift facilities under financially and administratively circumscribed conditions. Litigants' financial redress well may be limited to the government's liability, augmented by a degree of satisfaction that culpability of the churches has been exposed and acknowledged. And as Tiny Tim once said (well, look it up).
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