What did the Pope’s apology mean? And what comes next?

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan Last week, the Pope came to Canada primarily to say sorry.

Clip Pope Francis on First Nations territory, has delivered a historic apology meant to right or wrong of the past. Pope Francis has delivered a historic apology to the indigenous community in Canada. An emotional apology from Pope Francis for devastating abuse at residential schools in Canada.

Jordan The apology had been a long time coming. The impact it will have on Indigenous Canadians, on reconciliation in this country, and on the Catholic Church itself remains to be seen. For now, perhaps the most generous description of reaction to the Pope’s visit is mixed.

Clip He didn’t address the doctrine of discovery. We’ve been asking for the revoking of the doctrine of discovery since the beginning of this journey, and he didn’t address it at all. We can’t bring them back, right? It really hurts. An apology today won’t erase anything. The experience already happened. We want to see some action behind this trip and not just lip service. It cannot be that way. It cannot be just a photo op. It has to be real work.

Jordan Will this apology, this admission of genocide, and this attempt to make things right, provide any real comfort for the survivors of residential schools or for the families who are mourning those who didn’t make it out? Or will it offer a neat little storybook ending for those who might wish to sweep the horrors of history under the rug? Will this apology matter in a practical sense? What happens after the man who supposedly talks to God says sorry? What comes next? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Patty Krawec is an Anishnaabe writer from Lac Seul First Nation. She is the co-host of the podcast Medicine for the Resistance. She wrote about the papal apology for a handful of publications last week, including the Yellowhead Institute. Hi, Patty.

Patty Krawec Hello.

Jordan I want to ask you first, I guess, what you were expecting when you heard that the Pope was coming to Canada. He was apparently going to apologize for genocide for residential schools. I know a lot of people felt ambivalent, I guess, about this decision. What did you expect to happen?

Patty Krawec Well, I think I expected what we got. It’s a large institution, although he did apologize for, at times protecting the institution at the expense of the people. At the expense of the people within it, at the expense of the indigenous people. That’s still what he’s doing. He’s still making this pilgrimage, making this apology. It’s very late in coming. I mean, the Anglican Presbyterian United Churches apologized quite a few years ago. People have been asking the Catholic Church to apologize for a long time. Even up to last year, people didn’t think it was going to happen. They’re still holding onto records. There still, I kind of expected this spectacle, what we got of the pilgrimage, the sad faces. I think it was important for you know survivors and for a lot of people to hear the things that he said that acknowledging the harms and the wrongdoings, they felt validated, they felt heard. I mean like I said, the other churches had apologized, made better apologies, in my opinion. But this church ran the vast majority of schools. And you know for him to acknowledge that, yes, these wrongs were committed on our watch. I think for survivors that was really important. The spectacle validated the things that they have been talking about. And I think even like over the last year since you know the graves have come to light again, there’s a whole section of it in the Truth and Reconciliation report that came out a number of years ago. But again, Canadians just keep being surprised by this stuff. And we’ve seen denialism in the media. We’ve seen reporters saying, well, where are the bodies and where’s this and where’s that? And it wasn’t that bad. So for the Pope to do this, to come in his wheelchair and to say these things, I’m not going to say that that isn’t important. I mean, I think the apology left a lot to be desired. But I think the spectacle and the presence, I think it was very important.

Jordan What did it leave to be desired? How do you make a proper apology for something of this magnitude?

Patty Krawec And it’s way beyond this magnitude, right? But he talked about the role of the church. He talked repeatedly about individual acts of harm. Like I said, he talked about the institution protecting itself. He talked about individuals and the church participating in the harms of colonization. But you know he talked about it as if the church didn’t have 1000 years of history, of doing this stuff, of doing it in Europe, of doing it in the you know Spanish missions throughout Central America and Mexico and what became the US. That was one of the pieces that I wrote for religion news services, where I said, okay, but what about Junipero Sarah? This is the Pope who hurried the canonization of Sarah, who ran nine missions in California that were terrible places. There were places of violence. When they studied, the more natives died there than were being born. These missions were not good, happy places as you read about them. They sound a lot like residential schools and yet they predate Canada in the US. So it’s not like Canada and the US put the church in this awkward situation where now the people who wanted to prey on kids had a place to go. The church has already been doing this. And so the apology doesn’t acknowledge that. They’ve apologized for abuses in Ireland and in Boston and in Pennsylvania and all kinds of places. They keep apologizing for these things that are a big part of who the church has been global because it’s happened in Africa, it’s happened in Australia, it’s happened in South America. Where hasn’t it happened that the church has been? That would be a you know really good question for somebody to answer because I don’t think you would find any place that the Church has set foot where this has not happened and been hidden.

Jordan One of the reasons we wanted to talk to you this week as opposed to in the middle of the apology tour. First of all, probably because you were very busy last week. But also mostly because the thing I had on my mind was if there would be certain outlets in the media or just certain Canadians who are kind of committed to the idea of Canada as an exceptional nation who would kind of use this apology to tie a bow on the whole past year and a half and our confrontation of residential schools and the graves that have been found and all of that stuff and sort of close the book on it. What have you seen in the wake of this visit to indicate if real change is going to continue to come from this or if we sort of are hitting the like, oh, okay, well, they apologize. Let’s go.

Patty Krawec Glad that’s over.

Jordan You know what I mean?

Patty Krawec Yeah, that’s really it. Trudeau is like, all right, we can check off number 58 on the Truth and Reconciliation and you know in the Calls to Action. And Murray Sinclair is like, actually, no, we can’t because he didn’t apologize for what the church did. It was a bad apple’s apology.

Jordan Maybe can I stop you just there and you can explain what Action 58 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission says and why Murray Sinclair and others think it wasn’t met?

Patty Krawec Call to Action 58 was the request for the Catholic Church to apologize to survivors on Canadian land for the residential schools and the harm. And he came very close, which is why Trudeau thinks it’s fine because, yes, he did come here. He did say he was sorry for the bad things that a lot of priests did. But Sinclair is saying that he didn’t because he didn’t apologize because he stopped short of the Church taking full responsibility for it. And at one point, and I forget, I think it was when he was in Lac Ste. Anne where he stopped just short of it. And he’s saying that the church acted in kind of followed colonial patterns as if the Church was following in Canadian footsteps and otherwise wouldn’t have done this. And so what Sinclair is saying is no, that the Catholic Church was very much an actor in this and that’s what he wants the Church to apologize for being kind of a partner in this. Not an unfortunate side effect.

Jordan I want to be mindful about asking you to relive your own family’s trauma, but I do know that you mentioned in your article that through artifacts and photographs you were able to piece together your own family’s story. Can you tell me what you learned about your family and the history with residential schools and speak to them maybe what this apology meant or didn’t mean to you personally, because I’m always wary of asking someone to speak for the whole indigenous community. So how did it feel to you?

Patty Krawec The apologies are very much about the survivors. Right. That’s who they’re talking about. So talking about my dad’s brothers who went to the schools, talking about you know my grandparents, I mean, my paternal grandparents, talking about their experiences and the things that they went through. But the apologies don’t really address the secondary impact of those schools, right? The things that happened to my father, because I mentioned in that article, he didn’t actually go to the schools. Band manager was angry at my grandmother, and she wouldn’t return to her husband. So he says, okay, your little boy, who I think he was two at the time because he’s not registered in a school already, let’s just erase him off the band list. And we’ll say that he’s the child of this man that you’re living with now who didn’t have status. And so just like that, my father no longer had status. And it’s a really weird thing about racism in Canada, is they don’t care whether or not you have status, right? He got all of the racist abuse that you get when everybody knows who your family is and where you live, and they can see it on your face that you’re not like them. But then, of course, the traumas of residential school come home through family, come home through you know the adults in the community and through the siblings. Because one of the things that the schools did that was particularly ugly and has these ripple effects in our communities is it set the children against each other. It set the children so that the older children were put in control of the younger children and mirrored the behaviour that they had received from the priests and the nuns. And one thing that really struck me when I was listening to Connie Walker’s podcast was there were years at St. Michael’s, and you know that this isn’t an isolated case where every priest and nun would later be mentioned in complaints. Every one of them. There was nobody who was safe in that school. And then the kids get pitted against each other, and then they bring that home because they’ve got all this anger that they don’t know how to deal with. What do we do as the children and grandchildren who are experiencing our own traumas, who have experienced our own harm? And I’ve listened to friends talk about this and don’t feel that they can speak in public about it because their parent, grandparent, uncle abuser is a survivor and somehow set apart. We talk about wanting to hold the predators accountable. We talk about that all the time. I tweeted out one time that instead of having a list of survivors, I wanted to read out a list of the perpetrators. And somebody I know on Twitter said, well, you’re going to be mentioning family members. And that’s really hard because you know when we call for justice, we have to think about that. We have to think about who this net is going to draw in. And this carceral stuff always lands hardest on black and Indigenous people. It always lands hard. There’s a reason why we’re winning in terms of prison population.

Jordan How do you reframe that narrative? And I’m not asking you to fix the burden that lands disproportionately on Indigenous and black people in this country, but the narrative that we try to honour the survivors while not naming the perpetrators and not holding them accountable.

Patty Krawec Well, I think we build our communities, right? Like, we know who’s safe and who’s not safe, and we give each other space to create our own communities and deal with things in our own way. You know, there are some really good models of transformative justice rather than restorative justice. Transformative justice is a little bit different. So you know there’s some really good models of that coming out in terms of how we build our communities and where we look to for authority. Like, if we’re always looking to the Canadian state or the church to fix what’s wrong in our communities, to fix what’s wrong in our lives as Indigenous people, we’re always going to get colonial answers. We’re always going to get colonial solutions. And so what I really liked and I ended two of the pieces that I wrote in this way was thinking, you know the one of them where I had been thinking through the missions. Because we had travelled to the missions. We’d gone to the gathering of nations powwow in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And the massive spectacle that that was I mean. You want to talk spectacle, you know, the Pope spectacle, this spectacle, thousands of Indigenous people dancing in one space and just the colours and the sounds and streaming down the stairs beside me and just the enormity of our presence and the missions are empty. Like I walked through those missions, and they’re empty. I’ve been to The Mush Hole in Branford, it’s empty. There is nobody there. And Si Pih Ko, the Cree woman who spoke her language to the Pope and sang that song that for a while people were saying was the national anthem, but it wasn’t. I loved what she said at the end. She says, then I turned my back on him and said hi hi, and then I shook it off. I’m not going to look for solutions to the issues that our communities face. I’m not going to look to the Canadian state for them, the apology was important. It was necessary to validate the survivors. But that is not where the solution for our communities lies. The solution for our communities lies within ourselves because the colonial state failed, right? We see it at Land Back Lane, we see it at Wet’suwet’en, that they can draw the boundaries around Canada and say that that’s what it is. But we are still holding on to lands. We still have language. We still have traditional beliefs. We still have our feet on the places where we emerged as people. It failed. Those schools are empty, and we’re still here.

Jordan Tell me a little bit more about some of the ways that Indigenous people and communities made their feelings known to the Pope last weekend and what it means.

Patty Krawec Well, there were protests, people holding banners asking him to denounce or rescind the Doctrine of Discovery. There were groups in Nunavut who very clearly said, we’re not going. We’re not going to go and see the pope. You can go if you want to, but we’re not going. Like, there were public statements in that regard. There was a lot of action on Twitter in terms of talking about the things that could have been said and should have been said. And I think those things were also important for the survivors to hear, for the people who were looking for some kind of closure or resolution from the church to remind them, too, that we’re bigger than this. He’s gone back to Rome and he mentioned genocide just as he’s like, flying off into the sunset and leaving our jurisdiction. So he did mention it, which is good, also validating. It would have been nice to have heard that in a different context. And one of the Mohawk reporters did ask him about that, and he gave him about the Doctrine of Discovery and he did kind of give this really long, rambling answer that didn’t answer her question, but I thought that was really important. A lot of the other reporters were asking very general questions about him, so having her on the plane to be able to ask that really pointed question was really important.

Jordan For those unaware of Christian doctrine, what was the doctrine of discovery and how does rescinding it play into the decolonization movement?

Patty Krawec Well, the Doctrine of Discovery is a collection of papal bulls and legal orders and theologies. It actually spans about 400 years, from the 11th century up to the 15th century. So it’s not like a single thing that could be repealed. It’s this whole big collection of documents and theology. And it basically laid out the rules of engagement. What do Christians do when they come to a place where there are non-Christians? When they arrive in Africa or later on as they came to the new world when they arrive in a place where there are new people? How do you navigate those relationships and what do you do with the land? And so it laid out all of those rules. So it’s 400 years of legal documents, so rescinding the Doctrine of Discovery, I’m really a mixed feeling about whether it’s useful or not. I have been told by some legal experts, like Bruce McIvor and others, who said that it would actually have rescinding this, saying, okay, it’s no longer in play, would actually impact future land claim agreements. I mean, they’re legal documents, right? So they set a legal precedent. Ruth Bader Ginsburg cited it when she denied an Oneida land claim back in 2005. So it’s very much part of the law of Canada and the US. So it could affect future land claims because they would no longer be able to rely on that legal precedent. But it would also shift the relationship with the Indigenous peoples because it says that we were empty, that we’re not Christian, we’re not human. And so it would shift those rules, too, around citizenship and who belongs in place and who doesn’t. But I think that’s a much bigger ask because now you’re asking people to change how they think. I mean, that way of thinking is directly linked to the not guilty verdict and the murder of Colton Boushie and other acts of violence that have happened. It’s these ideas of who belongs here and who doesn’t. And according to the Doctrine of Discovery, we don’t belong here, even though we were already here.

Jordan The last thing I want to get at, and again, this is why we waited till the whole visit was over just to make sure. What do you think comes next from the Catholic Church? What have they committed to? What are you hoping to see? If anything.

Patty Krawec if anything. I would like to see them release records. That’s something that came out very clearly in Duncan McCue and Connie Scott’s podcasts about how they’re holding onto records. They know who these people are. They know who they are, and they know where they are. Canada, too. Canada has all of that information from the class action lawsuit. So we know who these people are and however, they’re going to be held accountable. I mean, I’m an abolitionist, so I’m not asking for police intervention, but we know who they are, and their accountability is still really important. So I would like to see them release records. I would like to see them return land. I would like to see Catholic Church owns an awful lot of land in Canada. I would like to see them I mean, the Doctrine of Discovery is much bigger than that. The Doctrine of Discovery also talks about who belongs on the land and who doesn’t. We also were empty and needed saving, and that’s a big part of the doctrine of discovery as well. But they could return land. That would be huge. They could turn over church buildings to Indigenous leadership. How would that change the relation of the church? If they were now motivated to not be evicted from their buildings if their landlords were now Indigenous people, how is that going to change their relationship with that indigenous community if they are now motivated not to hold on to their lease? So the church could do that. That’s something very simple that the church could do. Turn over its land with lease agreements, and then now we’re your landlords, and now you’re going to treat us differently.

Jordan What about the rest of Canadians? And here I’m speaking specifically to what we chatted about a few minutes ago, which is like, check off the call to action number 58, and it’s been an uncomfortable last year and a half. And who might be tempted to sort of tune this out or view it as the ending of this part of the story? What do Canadians need to do to make sure that we continue to hold space for Indigenous people and their struggles and care?

Patty Krawec Well, I think there’s a lot they can do. I mean, that alone is just a good thought exercise of what if you did return your land to Indigenous people and we were your landlords? How does that change the relationship of the way you do business, the way your business operates, the way you use your land? Even if you can’t physically do it because you don’t actually own the land, you can think about it and you can think, well, okay, so if I acted like this was Indigenous land, how would that change the policies of my organization? Do you have seats on your board for Indigenous people if you have a land acknowledgment? Are you paying rent to anybody? I have a foundation, the Nii’kinaaganaa Foundation, that collects rent and disperses it to indigenous people. I have a book coming out called Becoming Kin. And that’s basically what it’s about, is how we can move forward, how we can understand how we got here and how we can then move forward in a good relationship. Because land back doesn’t mean everybody going back to Europe. I mean, am I going to get split in half? My mom is European, my dad is Ojibwe. That’s a ridiculous idea. So nobody’s going anywhere, although maybe some rich people will leave cottage country. That would be great, but how do we live together? That’s why I wrote this book. It’s called Becoming Kin, and it comes out in September, and every chapter ends with a thing that people can do. Look at your bookcase. That’s where it starts. Look around you. Where are the Indigenous people in your life? Where are they on your bookshelf? Where are they on your TV set? Where are they in your day-to-day existence? Are they anywhere? Are they service people? Are they people you give money to as you walk down the street? Like, who are they and where are they? And then each chapter kind of ends with another task, a thing you can do. Okay, so what do I do with this apology? All this stuff that everybody is talking about? What do I do? And there are things you can do, and it starts by noticing us and how do you see us. How do we fit into that?

Jordan Patty, thank you so much for that. That’s a great practical note to end on and looking forward to your book.

Patty Krawec Well, thank you very much for having me.

Jordan Patty Krawec, co-host of the podcast Medicine for the Resistance, and, as mentioned in this interview, the author of Becoming Kin: an Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future. You can go pre-order it wherever you get your books. That was The Big Story. For more from us, head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. You can talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can, of course, email us [click here!] and call us an old-fashioned phone. We’ll give you a voicemail. You can leave whatever you wish, 416-935-5935. The Big Story is in every single podcast player on earth, I think. I hope. And it’s also available on your smart speaker if you ask it to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page