Reconciliation is not for the past Guest: Nergis Canefe

IE: Hello and welcome back to another episode of We Can Find a Way, a podcast about conflict resolution. My name is Idil Elveris. This is a podcast that pioneers a culture change in handling conflict because conflict is everywhere. It is also the only bilingual podcast that addresses conflict on an international scale.

We Can Find a Way is sponsored by Koc Attorneys at Law, the Istanbul and Antalya-based boutique law firm. Founding partners of Koc Attorneys at Law are staunch believers of using dialogue and finding common ground to resolve conflicts. They're very happy to be supporting this podcast in the hope that it will help advance the much needed discussion on de-escalation and reduction of polarization in conflict situations within the legal practice as well as in the public discourse.

Not much is known about a conflict that involves residential schools in Canada. Basically, the Canadian government, in cooperation with the churches, has taken away for a very long time indigenous children from their families and never returned them, assimilated them, changed their religion and names, a practice that has occurred until the end of 1990s. My guest Nergis Canefe explained much more in this episode. She and I explored how, after all the pain and loss for the indigenous communities, there can be reconciliation between the Aboriginals and Canadians of all sorts, including those who arrived in the country recently, and whether there can be reconciliation only through governmental action.

Professor Nergis Canefe is a scholar trained in the fields of political philosophy, forced migration studies and international public law, with special focus on critical human rights and state-society relations. She has over 20 years of experience in carrying out research with displaced communities and teaching human rights and public law globally. Her research experience includes working with the Muslim and Jewish diasporas in Europe and North America, refugees and displaced peoples in Turkey, Cyprus, India, Uganda, South Africa, Bosnia and Colombia.

Prof. Canefe joined York University in 2003 and she has been a full-time faculty member, teaching at various departments. Prior to joining York, she worked at LSE in UK and Bilgi University and Bosphorus University in Turkey. Prof. Canefe holds a PhD and has an SJD degree in public international law, both granted in Canada. We can now move to the interview.

Dear Prof. Canefe, thanks so much for agreeing to talk to me. Not many people know the legacy in Canada of the residential schools where children were forcibly taken away from their families to assimilate them. When did this start? What did happen, how many people we are talking about and how did all this come about?

NC: Thank you for having me. This particular development is quite recent but you do need to go back to the times of Canada being part of the Commonwealth. But unlike the United States, it stayed within the domain of Great Britain for a long time, and then they were very loyal. In fact, constitutional separation was as late as 1982. The country was created by an act of parliament of the United Kingdom dating 1867. It's also known as the “Constitutional Act”. The act itself united many of the British colonies and created this particular Commonwealth entity called Canada.

The Canadian state is not a unitary state, it's a federal state. This is very important in the reconciliation process. The reason being for something to be nationwide, it has to be produced at the federal level. The constitutional law framework of the Canadian state also has quite a few anomalies. Since 1982, these anomalies actually multiplied in the sense that the federal parliament deals with issues concerning trade between provinces, national defence, criminal law, patents and postal services, but all the other aspects of constitutional governance and policymaking are determined at the provincial level, except the three territories which are Yukon, north-west territories and Nunavut. In addition to the several provinces that Canada has, in addition to the Quebecois problem, which are the French-speaking Canadians, there's also the territorial issue. These are independent territories with limited governance rights but within constitution politics they have a separate status and the federal law allows for these territories, which are populated by indigenous populations, to elect councils with powers very similar to provincial legislatures. If they do have issues with the legal framework,  historically constitutional court has been quite unwilling to get involved, whereas for all other provinces they would get involved. So what I'm trying to say is, historically, the territories whereby the indigenous populations were pushed I'm not saying relieved but pushed have been somehow marked away from the constitutional system. Judges are flown into the territories for conducting investigations, court cases. Healthcare is a major problem, so it's almost like the third world of Canada. This is an important background for us to consider because all of a sudden there's an environment created which suggests that all Canadians are united to engage with the indigenous problems and they're all open to embracing the past mistakes of the Canadian state.

But if you only went back 10-15 years, no one cared. It wasn't there as an item. It was mainly emerging here and there in terms of land rights and individual corporations or municipalities trying to build things or the federal government trying to establish a pipeline that crossed indigenous territories and then the groups were actually seeking their civil rights and property rights, saying, “no, you can't do that. This is our burial site”. So, 10- 15 years ago at the law school, when you talked about indigenous law, indigenous politics, these were the kinds of things that were discussed. Nobody discussed missing and murdered women and girls, or nobody discussed residential schools. So this is actually quite a recent development.

The indigenous peoples of Canada have different types of government. The first nations can have a range of governmental powers over reserve lands. Under the Federal Indian Act there is a term which is “unseeded territories”. That means that disputed land. The Canadian state claims that in the context of Indian Act, they actually gained possession of that land and then the indigenous populations say “no, this was just your interpretation of what's happening and it wasn't necessarily something that you gained”. The negotiation has never finalized and many of these unseeded territories are actually pieces of land where the burial sites are or where the spiritual sites are, and there are threshold requirements as an indigenous population for you to make a land claim. Many of the claims are tested against maps that were created by white Canadian colonizer. There are only like six of them, and then they're famous maps that the Canadian courts use to counter indigenous land claims. Even the dynamic is off. Here you have descendants of people who lived in those lands and who know every rock and every tree, and then they're saying, “no, this is where we used to live, that's what we used to do”. And then you pull out maps prepared by colonial explorers saying, “no, you didn't live there, we didn't see you when we passed that river”.

There's another threshold which clearly requires that in order to make a land claim, you have to be currently using the land in terms of fishing and providing your subsistence, and then you can have a certain say about how the rivers are used and how the forests are used. But if you are not currently using it for hunting or for fishing or for subsistence agriculture, then you cannot make a claim on the land. Given the nature of the indigenous population, which is both shrinking but also the younger population moved to the urban centres at the borders of indigenous versus Canadian provincial settlements, it's quite difficult to make a claim that we're still fishing and hunting and therefore there's an increasing amount of land grabs. So, the reason why I'm telling you all this is it's not all a garden of roses. There's a lot going on in terms of truth and reconciliation and residential schools, and then that's really worthwhile for our attention, especially in terms of transitional justice measures and the kinds of acts that the state actually can engage with. But overall, it's still quite a mess.

IE: There is not really a priority over land issue, then the health issue or the discrimination issue like nobody has made a decision. They're all flowing from all directions all at the same time and there is a little bit of confusion, if I understand it correctly.

NC: Yes, everybody picks up one part of it. But what's interesting with the truth and reconciliation, which we'll discuss in a minute, is that it is a federal policy. So, at my home university, every time we have a Senate meeting or even a departmental meeting for the last three-four years, we start with a land acknowledgement and the university starts every business meeting with a land acknowledgement. This is a very recent thing that actually is related to the truth and reconciliation. This is my mandatory land acknowledgement that I have to put under each email that I write officially:

“I acknowledge the land on which York University operates and recognize the longstanding relationships Indigenous nations have with these territories. For thousands of years it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Tkaronto is in the Dish with One Spoon Territory and is home to Indigenous peoples from many nations across Turtle Island who continue to care for this land today”. The newer version is much longer and it basically indicates that these are unceded territories, some of these, which means they're still under negotiation. Some other language acknowledgments emphasize the fact that we are only caretakers in a land that's not ours. What's interesting is these are acknowledgments made by public institutions and mandated by the federal government. This is something very unique and I think the only other example of that is actually in New Zealand. It's a language law whereby many things have to be translated into Maori language.

IE: How many people are we talking about overall in Canada, what is the percentage-wise population of the indigenous people?

NC: Total Canadian population is quite small. We actually see a significant reduction in the population numbers because there's a very high rate of teenage suicide. And marriages sometimes take place with a person who is not categorized as indigenous and, as a result, if it's a woman who is marrying outside of the indigenous community, she actually loses her indigenous status. The children do not register as indigenous. It's under a million. As of 2021, the population was about 38.25 million, so they are less than 1%.

IE: I'm really curious, in this setting, how it came to residential schools?

NC: This is a very difficult question in the sense that there is a significant pressure coming from the indigenous communities themselves for the Constitutional Court and Canadian law-making bodies not to intervene with their affairs. Patriarchy is universal, so, for instance, the loss of the status: a woman marries outside of the indigenous community is something that they have been endorsing. Constitutional Court basically said the Yukon, North West and Nunavut “we are not equipped or entitled to intervene with their internal affairs”. Whereas if this kind of thing happened in any other circumstance, they would have said well, there's a gender bias, citizens should be not discriminating against women. But in this case they basically pulled back, saying “sorry, we're not going anywhere near it”. So the intermarriage continues to decimate a total number of population. The other aspect is some of them move to the cities and they don't register anymore as part of the indigenous territories. It doesn't bring them any benefit or they don't want to be recognized as such and in general, population growth is very limited. There has been a very widespread epidemic of alcoholism. Prior to that, obviously very widespread communal diseases that were brought by the white people which critically, almost like a genocide, killed indigenous populations because their immune system was not accustomed to measles or many other diseases, that we now have vaccines for our children, but these were not introduced to the population.

But what's most important is and this is kind of your edging towards the residential school problem for about two to three generations, indigenous families living in up in the territories, but also in the cities, almost by law they had to give their children away. Their children were taken into state custody. Their children's names were changed and their children were taken in mostly very young. They were forbidden to use their mother tongue and they were Christianized. Majority of them never saw their children again. So, you actually have something very akin to ethnic cleansing. This is obviously one of the international criminal law items about cultural genocide which is an increasingly commonly made argument that removing the children forcibly and assimilating them to the larger English-speaking Canadian and French-speaking Canadian public actually amounts to a very definite act of cultural genocide. So, this is where the residential schools come into the picture in terms of state criminality. So, the Constitutional Act itself back in 1867 includes protection for the rights of the indigenous people and then recognizes and affirms their rights related to historical authenticity and use of land, and it also recognizes to a degree their right to preserve their customs and traditions for future generations. But obviously up until 1982, which is the independent Canadian Constitution and the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights, you do not see these kinds of provisions being actualized. They basically remained on paper. What that means is the state criminal acts or the Constitution of the residential schools and the transfer of the authority of the state to the Christian churches which run the residential schools actually took place at a time where, within the constitutional framework, you were not meant to be doing what you did. They basically recognize the rights of the indigenous peoples and their treaty rights and affirm it.

The issue is that about 140 federally run residential schools were opened and operated in Canada between 1867 and 1996. Funding actually came from the federal government but they were not run by the federal government. The main two branches, at least in the Canadian context, is the Church of England and the Catholic Church. The initial wave of the residential schools were run by the Church of England and their establishments and their missionary staff. Later on, Catholic Church joined in as well. This is a societal issue. It's not just one church or the other church or one province or the other province. There are just far too many who are actually involved.

When you look at the assessment of the damage, you actually see the dioceses of Anglican Church issuing apologies. Real life examples of how widespread this issue was, let me mention that in British Columbia which actually has borders with obviously certain First Nations communities, indigenous communities, you've got Ahousaht, Alberni, Cariboo, Christie, about 10 other residential schools. Some of the recent findings of mass graves are in on the sights of only a handful of these 140 residential schools. There hasn't been forensic investigation as to what kind of literal bones are lying in the courtyards or underneath the foundations of these schools. And then, these bodies actually belong to young children. We're talking hundreds of bodies. Nobody knows why they were buried there. Nobody knows why there wasn’t a proper cemetery. Nobody knows under what conditions they died.

IE: There has to be some records somewhere in these schools?

NC: There isn't. None, and then there is no epidemic. And this is so widespread in so many different provinces, so far away from each other. Remember, Canada is a continental country, to have the same phenomenon occurring on the east side and then the west side…

IE: It has to be a policy..?

NC: It has to be something that was normalized in some fashion. So in Alberta, which is the other province, you have 25. Alberta was scarcely populated. Alberta and Saskatchewan, these are actually natural resource provinces, so it's not like Ontario or Quebec where you have very large populations. So it's almost like we call them residential school industries. For some reason the churches established a fecundary financial relationship with the federal government to go and fetch the children of Indigenous communities up north and bring them down to these provinces where even agriculture was just flourishing. There wasn't much going on. This is such a widespread operation. In Saskatchewan, scarcely populated, you have another 20. In Manitoba, you have another 18. In Ontario, you have very large ones. In Quebec, you have about six. And even in Atlantic provinces you still have residential schools. Then you have residential schools in Nunavut itself, in Northwest Territories itself these are inside and in Yukon.

It's a horrendous list and nobody can deny that this is actually systemic. It wasn't just a province, it wasn't just one population which engaged with these kinds of practices. So the standard practice is that you basically arrive to a community and declare that all the children under the age of seven or eight will be taken into the custody of the state and you often go, I believe, with the Mounties at the time or some sort of a law enforcement, and the families give their children and they don't know when they're going to see them. I don't know what they were told when the children were taken, whether the children were taken like a boarding school arrangement to be given better education, but whatever they were told, they never saw their children again until they were adults, if the children survived.

And then the children went through a name change, they were given Christianized names and then they were basically baptized in some fashion, if they weren't already, and then they were under very strict instructions never to speak their indigenous language and they were trained, but they were never trained highly enough to join the society at a certain age. If they survived the circumstances, they were released to the society and then they mostly worked in menial jobs. Siblings were separated. That was very common practice, even for child adoption. Separation of siblings is not a suggested practice, so there was no reason for the siblings to be separated and sent to different schools but that was a very common practice. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission responds to some of the court cases that were actually opened against the churches in terms of the sexual harassment of those indigenous individuals who survived and who were harassed and abused by members of a certain church.

IE: From what you're saying, I understand this is a governmental practice that involves the assistance of the Church. Are there any autopsies that can tell us the reason for their death?

NC: Not yet but they know that these are children because of the size of the bodies and then there is no actual killing, like there is no gun wounds.

IE: Death but not execution or shooting kind of?

NC: No, it's premature death and there are no records of these children. So, the record keeping practices of these 140 residential schools are also, I wouldn't say, under scrutiny, because most of the records were then destroyed. I mean, this is why it's called cultural genocide. Not only you take the children, but then you don't register them in terms of where you took them from, what their initial original names were. Even their birthdays are basically a blur, and there's no record of where they were released to either. Many argue that the populations which ended up in the cities primarily originate from those who have been taken into indigenous oriented residential schools and they didn't know where to go back to.

IE: Maybe that's why you have this very high rate of young people's suicides because trauma gets carried away intergenerationally. Maybe they are the descendants of these people, even I mean, we don't know that

NC: But some are…

IE: These are very traumatic events for a little child. All these practices leaving you in a vacuum, not having any security, etc. And then kind of like leads to probably abuse, self-hate, whatever.

NC: The whole lot. I mean the whole experience is heavily traumatic and there is a sense of a loss of identity, loss of community. They do not remember their original language, many of them, because they were taken away so early. Many of them witnessed the deaths and sexual abuse of others and they were essentially helpless. There was no scrutiny about the practices of the church, and I mean your question about whether the federal government initiated it or the churches initiated it. The federal government and the churches for the longest time determined many of the policies hand in hand. Up until 1982, for instance, there's an educational board specifically for Catholic students and then this is governmentally funded. It's a public school but the funding allows for these schools only to give education on Catholic doctrine and principles. Most of the post 1960s populations coming into Canada from Latin America are Catholics, so the population kept growing and then therefore the need kept growing and then the school board always worked in very close connection with the Catholic churches in Canada. There's also a historical pedigree about education system and federal funding running very close to each other and in various ways very interconnected.

IE: Can you tell us a little bit more about this Truth and Reconciliation Commission then? How did this come about?

NC: First of all, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started as a public inquiry commission and in their administrative law, the highest degree of inquiry is a public inquiry and these inquiries are binding for all units of the federal government if they're undertaken at the federal level and you have a special commission funded by the federal budget to investigate an issue. So, the beginnings of the Truth and Reconciliation Process is actually the establishment of a federally funded commission, which ran a long time, between 2008 and 2015 to establish its findings. When you are invited to an inquiry as a member of the public service, you have to release information. This information cannot be used against you in a house of court.

When the inquiry started, many aspects of the residential school system and the policy came to light that even the commissioners were not aware of. The commission released its final report detailing 94 specific courses of action and policy change. They also initiated federal statutory day of commemoration concerning the residential school policy and deaths and disappearances. How does it affect us? Because the idea of a public inquiry and a commission is that this has to translate into policy change, but it's not so easy. Reading a land acknowledgement is one thing, changing the curriculum is another. Changing certain provisions of the specific acts against discrimination is another. Dealing with problems in the territories is another. So, one of the most widespread criticisms of truth and reconciliation work, including the commission and the final report is that it was heavily circumscribed and was very limited in its scope. It didn't look at the problem of indigenous nations in Canada. It just focused on the residential school system and the government's response is that, well, this is a first step towards something much larger, but we've acknowledged the deaths and we've acknowledged the damage and the government also paid the compensation package for the survivors of residential schools as well as their communities and families.

IE: It was almost like a cherry-picking exercise not like a wholesale thing because probably victims are dead but also the perpetrators are dead, so there won't be anybody to be held accountable, almost like

NC: Precisely!

IE: …a discrimination issue or something that is more tangible today. Does this type of commission contribute to healing between the communities?

NC: I think it does. It does for the aims of both reconciliation and future resolution of the relations between indigenous First Nations communities and the Canadian public at large which includes primarily immigrant communities. So the commission itself was created through a legal settlement, which is very important between residential school survivors themselves and gave very detailed testimonies of places, times, names, and then the Assembly of First Nations and Inuit representatives and the parties who were responsible for the creation and operation of the schools, the surviving parties, which included both the federal government and the church bodies. So that's a very unique combination. Most of the TRC processes, including the South African one, tends to protect state authorities and it tends to concentrate on individual societal crimes. This one is unique in the sense that it actually brought together legally recognized bodies under a common mandate and the mandate of TRC was to inform the Canadian public. That means there was federal funding allocated not just for the documentation and the testimonies of the survivors which are widely available but also in general, communities affected by the residential school experience and their current day status. It basically began as a major public policy initiative.

IE: I mean shift?

NC: Yes, definitely. So I think in that sense it's very unique. Governments do not fund such operations normally and any package that comes out of the federal government tends to be a very large package because with all its complaints, Canada is actually a very rich country and it's a social welfare state. So, federal government funding the scale, even the smallest size, tends to be quite large. Also, what's unique in terms of transitional justice, international criminal law and that kind of debate is residential school survivors were part of the commission. So, they weren't just witnesses, they were actually part of the commission.

IE: That's empowering.

NC: Yeah, they were there to give guidance about the next stage in the initiative, for the kind of commemoration and the kind of paying tribute that should be permanent and lasting Canadian public policy measures. The final report included 10 principles for reconciliation then, 94 calls to action. That includes all sectors of Canadian society, including public service. That's quite unique. So, it's not “let's say sorry, let's give them compensation, let's close the issue”. It's more like this is just the beginning. We'll basically make sure that the curriculum will change. We'll make sure that the Indigenous histories will be included. We'll make sure that in so many ways the Canadian public service will have an expansion to the territories and immigrants should be educated about Canada's particular history.

Here is the catch: you are running away from Ukraine or Iran or Chile and you arrived in Canada. You already suffered so much and you worked very hard to establish a life in Canada. You knew nothing about the Indigenous population. You weren't involved in the residential school system, you didn't even know they existed for the most part. Although for citizenship you have to take a constitutional law test and then there you actually have to acknowledge the special status of Indigenous communities, but practically you had no dealings with them per se. All of a sudden, at school, your children are told that they are not only responsible for the future of the Indigenous communities but them and their parents are usurpers of this very skewed and explosive relationship. Some of the immigrant communities did not take that well because they don't believe that as migrants they're also settlers, because the language itself, the truth and reconciliation, identifies Canada as a settler society not as an immigrant society. So, even the latest arrival has to somehow be accountable for making use of land and resources that doesn't belong to them, which is actually a very problematic statement if you think of it from the immigrant point of view. So, there is a lot to be done at the school system for the incoming immigrants and their children to be acclimatized to Indigenous politics of Canada which obviously goes back to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada recommendations.

IE: This is very important because I think it's also an issue that is being dealt with in Germany. They are also settler societies, somehow not to the extent of Canada, but because they are teaching Holocaust and all other things, the new communities are also at loss. Well, we were never part of this kind of, as you have said, but I guess Canada is in that regard leading the way, that this is, you know, if you're going to be part of this society, this is this society, for better or for worse.

NC: Yes, so there's often what we call a generational clash between older immigrants and then younger immigrants. I could speak for my own children. They were trained in the Canadian educational system and my older son, I think, was perhaps the only white child in his class, and when I mispronounced the name of a city in Pakistan, he would correct me because his classmates came from all these geographies that I've never been to or I didn't have a first-hand experience whereas in his generation, that's the Canadian public.

IE: That's wonderful. I wish it was happening everywhere.

NC: Right. So younger generation is much more keen on embracing this idea that indeed we are settlers and then there are things to be done. The story is just starting whereas the older generation tends to be very reactive, saying you know what this is “white guilt”. You're basically moving white guilt onto our shoulders. We don't see the histories of the brown people in this business of reconciliation. It was something that the French and the British and their European counterparts engaged in. We had nothing to do with it. It's their colonial past. So, for instance, the older Indian community tends to say “well, we were also colonized, so we're not going to take responsibility for what the colonizer did to the indigenous community because we were in the same situation”.

So, you've got these very interesting political debates, but the younger generation actually can rise above it, saying there's a lot to be done still, because you still have these communities and first of all, they're not just Eskimos. There are different communities with different languages. They have different traditions, different histories. Constitutional politics have a lot of gaps in terms of dealing with indigenous land claims and culture claims. There's also appropriation of indigenous cultures using certain cultural symbols that are actually of spiritual nature to somehow showcase Canada as this land of mystically beautiful peoples whereas the actual story is very dark. So, there's a lot changing at the moment.

My university is quite a large university with nine faculties and 60,000 plus students and the last five years we had several calls in terms of establishing indigenous studies chairs but we also came to an understanding that it's not the responsibility of the indigenous studies scholar who should teach indigenous politics or indigenous history. We should all have foundational courses that each one of us can teach on Indigenous histories and Indigenous politics, which is quite quite different. If you compare it, let's say, with Black Studies or race and racism education. Interestingly, institutionally, there is a very widespread push to make Indigenous studies, Indigenous histories, part of the regular curriculum. For instance, when I was teaching Canada an immigrant society, something like that, it's now pro forma that you start with who has been excluded, who has been treated as a second class, and that starts with the Catholics and then the Eastern Europeans, then the Indians, of course, the Chinese. Everybody knows about this. So, members of these communities and their children and grandchildren are already honoured today in terms of what happened to their communities. So the next push is now to variegate that story even further, not start with immigration, French-British colonisers suppressing others, but start with colonisers, pretty much causing the extinction of Indigenous communities and the land grabbing and the unceded territories. Then move on to Canadian history. So, it's creating almost like a prehistoric Canadian state.

And you might say, how could one commission or one inquiry lead to that? And I think that's the promising part of it. I don't think people actually thought it would go beyond apologies by the government, some compensation agreement, some recommendations, calls for action by the final report. But it is actually moving beyond it. And what's also interesting is the federal government, instead of closing the commission which naturally came to an end, they started a federally funded National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation which is actually a permanent archive for fitness statements, documents, all relevant materials the commission has gathered. Not only they have library and collections, but they also have a National Student Memorial Register as well as ongoing learning and research centres and they continue to collect documentation. So the story didn't end with the commission. They actually institutionalised the findings of the commission which is again unusual, because often these are sores and wounds that societies do not feel so comfortable about continuing to dwell on. Right, you get the job done, you close the issue, you erect a memorial or two, maybe you have a museum or archive of some sort, and that's it. You move on. So the Canadian government is moving on, but in a different way, and they also established a statutory holiday which I think you would appreciate is very unique.

IE: It is almost holistic approach like a much wider scope, with the society, with the immigrants, with the government. So we're really talking about like a healing process. Well, at the same time, we're still kind of like far away from total healing, I guess. So what does it take for healing to actually happen? Can that kind of healing ever take place in a non-democratic setting if not through the government, can it be through the society in some other way?

NC: This is true because the statutory holiday, for instance for Truth and Reconciliation, was actually created through legislative action by the federal parliament, which is very unusual. Public commemoration takes place throughout public education system in all federally regulated workplaces. It's a mandated holiday. You cannot not participate. There's a shift from a simple cultural apology and compensation to a federally mandated which is very difficult, by the way, because the federal government has to negotiate with each of the provinces in terms of making these kinds of legislative amendments. Politically, it's a very hard process. And then they switch to every child matters discussion.

There are ongoing issues about young Indigenous girls basically being sold into prostitution and in an unprecedented way, many of them get killed and their bodies are dumped on the highways and what not. In the border provinces, sometimes.

IE: Even today?

NC: Even today. Sometimes 7% of the inmates are actually Indigenous whereas in the population of the province there are maybe 3%. So, these are ongoing problems. I'm trying to build a bridge to what you asked in terms of democratic versus autocratic societies, right? So, even though there is legislative decision-making involved, commemoration involved, institution-making involved, at the societal level, many of the problems are multiplying today. They're not taken care of because the kind of racism and discriminatory nature of these acts are deeply ingrained in the society. Majority of the homeless populations in Canadian cities are Indigenous which says something about the rate of integration. The retention rate of Indigenous students is so minuscule. So even you get them into the school system to get higher education at an university until very recently maybe 10% of them actually completed the degrees. Because there isn't the community and the culture. They're kind of picked up and then brought into an environment that they're not accustomed to. Those continue to be problems despite the fact that there are very significant federal level interventions. So coming back to your question, whether democratic or autocratic, unless there is societal understanding of the extent of the problem, law itself is not going to lead to full-scale transformation, I wouldn't even say healing.

I don't think you can heal a problem that goes back to 300 years. I don't think that's possible.

It's a bit like I know this is a horrible analogy, but if you lose a child as a parent, you might have other two, three, four children, but you never heal from it. You just learn to live with it and you learn to mourn it and then your life basically is a different life compared to a parent who never lost a child and most likely they would never understand you. So this is the analogy that's often used. You cannot close that wound. It's a multi-generational trauma. What you can do is create a different future. So you can't do past reconciliation, but you can actually do future reconciliation, which is very very unusual. We're talking about 150,000 Indigenous children, removed, separated and many dead, and then the last federally run school closed in late 1990s. That is so recent.

IE: Canadian society until 1990s wasn't even aware of all these things and now they are just having an awakening.

NC: I mean, I wish I could be so optimistic because I don't think they were necessarily unaware. The political elite, the establishment definitely knew this was the case and the reason being in the Canadian context they had an arrangement concerning Indigenous child welfare. And indigenous child welfare regulations are federal regulations and it basically authorised indigenous children to be removed from their families for issues related to poverty, substance abuse and, instead of providing support for these children within their own community, it authorised for them to be moved to residential schools, and this was basically known by the public. That's what I was trying to say, although there is now a bill C92 legislation which acknowledges that Indigenous communities have the right to create their own child and family policies and laws and the residential school-like experiences will never be repeated on account of the children taken into federal state custody and then moved to white settler communities, it was actually social workers who were paid by the government, by the public budget, going to these communities, determining which families were dysfunctional which mothers are not suitable for parenting and making lists of these children. So, up until the late 1990s, this was normalised practice. In that sense, whether it's a democratic or an autocratic society, until and unless the societal norms about what these communities are, what they stand for, whether they have similar rights, basically the old Christian doctrine and I'm sure it's also true for other Abrahamic religions, “do unto others what you do to yourself” did not apply to Indigenous communities. They were created as a special class of people, historically for 300 years. For some reason, they didn't ever mature to become full citizens in the eyes of not just the public authorities but also in the eyes of the public. They were continually infantilised as legal subjects. Even as parents, they didn't have the right to determine the future of their children. Until and unless that changes, not only legally, but also in terms of the general understanding of the culture and the heritage and the history of these people… I think one of the ways that the Canadian federal government is pushing for that is the land acknowledgement, basically hammering on everybody's head saying this land actually originally belonged to them. It's a treaty arrangement that we are here. They were here before and you have to acknowledge that originally, it belonged to them. Now, how symbolic that is, is open to discussion. In the opening ceremony of the summer term, we had to invite the caretaker of the land where the university campus is, and then she sat next to the president of the university. That's perhaps nice but at the same time, I didn't have a single Indigenous student over the years. None of them made it to the very university that they're assigned as a caretaker. This is the kind of transformation that really falls on the shoulders of the society.

IE: Canada will be an example for other countries that are willing to take that political step. But politics is not enough, as you have underlined. So, thank you because you're kind of like giving hope, even for autocratic societies, in the sense that the society may be ready for something that the government isn't ready.

NC: I think from each country we have lessons to learn in terms of transitional justice debates or long-term historical injustice debates. What I've argued a few years ago when I brought together scholars from the Global South, was that one of the biggest dangers in this field is that we try to impose a mould and inscribe steps ABC. And I think the Canadian example is a very good one in terms of illustrating that you have to do your own job. You can learn from how they did it, but then you really, really have to internalize and see what works for you and what new, innovative things you have to do for yourself.

IE: This was a long and emotionally intense episode of We Can Find the Way. Prof. Canefe and I have discussed many issues involving the Indigenous communities in Canada and the wrongs that have been done to them but also how to rectify them and what the Canadian government was doing, but, at the same time, whether this can be only done by the government. While there seem to be exemplary work done by the government actually, given the death and longevity of the problem, a lot seems to fall on the society as well. So, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, please follow the podcast, its website, like it, share it. You can also write a review in Apple or Spotify. Also, please like the excerpts I share in my YouTube channel or in the Instagram account of we Can Find the Way. I would like to close by thanking my sponsor, Koc Attorneys at Law, my marketing manager Julia Nelson and musician, Imre Hadi and artist Zeren Goktan who allowed me to use their music and photograph in the podcast. Thank you and hope to meet you in the next episode.