Recently, Canada had its annual commemoration to honour the lost children and survivors of Canadian residential schools, their families and communities.
I wonder how many people did?
In the film “Healing The Hurts”, Hereditary Chief Phil Lane explains that healing is a process not an event. I strongly recommend watching this film of him starting this process with adults who had survived the residential schools in which our indigenous children were forced to live, in order to systematically break them and extinguish their culture and identity. It’s easy to try to point fingers at the churches (Catholic and Protestant) but they were just accomplices who implemented the government’s agenda of “dealing with the Indian problem”.
Horrendous things happened in that school to these children who were silenced by fear and shame. And the poignant question arises: How can people who set out to “do good” do or be complicit in such shocking and atrocious behavior that became systematic? The healing process goes through necessary acknowledgement and reconciliation of the events. It is not an easy “watch” but I feel it may be part of our responsibility as Canadians to understand how the First Nations communities have arrived at their present states, and realize our accountability in that process. How could it be otherwise, an unrelenting intention fuelling a brutal infrastructure developed to dismantle their identities, while most of us naively went about our lives oblivious to what was happening around us?
In the film, a process of deep forgiveness eventually brings the First Nations participants to see the power they each hold to reinterpret their experiences so that rather than continuing to be destructive agents, these events can serve them as powerful medicine to prepare them to be the world healers that this time needs so badly – world peace makers.
Extrapolations within the Context of Peace on Earth:
This is not the first or last atrocity humanity has conjured up to keep a power hierarchy in place. It has happened throughout millennia through war, colonization and power-grabs. And actually it goes even deeper than that, into households and families who have been assaulted by the patriarchic notion that pain and disrespect toughens an individual so they can cope better with life. This devious norm is supposed to make boys into men, and girls into accepting wives. I guess it worked to encourage boys and young men into numbly entering the war machine. There were also other institutions, often set up by religious bodies to punish girls, for instance, who dared to become pregnant out of wedlock (yet the potential father?), or even where children could be taken from a loving mother if their father died or was incapacitated, to be raised in one of these institutions, deeming her incapable. In both cases the victims were used as dispensable cheap labour. Society turned a blind eye. Fear is a persuasive tool to encourage conformity, even to distorted values.
Many of the settlers who came to Canada were from the UK and Ireland, where boarding schools were a norm for education. There, it was not unusual for young children in both primary and secondary boarding schools to be abused and bullied physically, emotionally and even sexually by both staff and the older children. This breeds an atmosphere where the oppressed become the oppressors.
This is not the case for all boarding schools by any means, but probably for at least half of them, certainly until the 1960’s. Some children, of course, managed to come out relatively unscathed by learning how to work the system or by having enough self-esteem and confidence that they were not easy prey.
Yet sending your child off to one of these institutions to be educated was an accepted norm in the UK and Ireland, in those days. The abusive side was a big secret to be mentioned only by the unfit who, could easily be rejected by the system.
More broadly, our Western education system, that we’ve exported around the world, tends to cultivate knowledge and relationships based on what one can “get” from another, in order to succeed or win, whether that be human or nature – often interpreted as unlimited resources to extract with no responsibility for care. Cultivating curiosity to understand and inherently respect all life is not its goal.
A product of this indoctrination is the growth of, what Eckhart Tolle refers to as, the Pain Body – a sort of Mr. Hyde potential within, ready to be ignited into explosive reactions when triggered. The triggering may be so subtle that it can be from just a disturbing thought that feels threatening. He goes into explicit detail about this in his book “A New Earth: Awakening to your life’s purpose” (Namaste publishing co.). Usually the person is unaware of this storehouse of accumulated, unresolved emotions, which they have unconsciously stuffed away. So they do not take responsibility for their actions, when the pain body takes them over because often they are not even fully cognizant of what they are doing. “I was triggered, I reacted, not my fault,…” The pain body feeds on anger, resentment, fear and any negative emotions that ultimately cause division and pain. According to the book, it is a very common phenomenon and disrupts many relationships as well as lives.
I wonder how many of our world leaders today have been affected by these systems.
The world will not find peace until we heal these wounds that many of us are unconsciously carrying inside of us. The rise in chronic physical and mental disorders abounds and like human health and well-being, Nature has become another commodity.
Toxic symptoms are increasingly surfacing around the outer world to be acknowledged and healed. They are like the earth’s symptoms of cancerous or autoimmune disorders and other illnesses that can set in when a system is imbalanced and becomes unhealthy. Our world is our mirror.
Of course, as with all illness, the symptoms need to be treated yet only by simultaneously discovering and treating the source of the symptoms will true healing occur. This process needs to start inside each of us. This is our individual responsibility towards co-creating a healthy, peaceful world. As Buckminster Fuller described it, Spaceship Earth needs another, more elevated and evolved operating system. We need to start co-creating it now.
Check out organizations dedicated to doing this: Unity Earth, One World, The Connection Field, Unify, Ubiquity University, Humanity Rising, Peace2030.earth, to name a few.