Coffee, Rejoicing, and Weeping

As I Was Saying is a forum for a variety of perspectives to foster faith-related conversations among our readers with the goal of mutual learning, even in disagreement. Apart from articles written by editorial staff, these perspectives do not necessarily reflect the views of The Banner.

As an Indigenous person, I’m familiar with the history of what Indigenous people have gone through since the early 1800s. I’ve developed and facilitated workshops titled, “Indigenous Awareness.” In part of this workshop, I briefly cover the history of Canada, using 1492 as a starting point. This is when the “Doctrine of Discovery” was approved by a papal bull in the Catholic church. This legal document laid the groundwork for the eventual residential school system that was opened in 1883 across Canada.

The Doctrine of Discovery was based on the idea that anyone who wasn’t a Christian was less than fully human. The Doctrine was used to justify European claims that since Indigenous North Americans weren’t Christians, the land they were living on for thousands of years was “open season,” or in their words terra nullius (nobody’s land).

After the Europeans “discovered” the Americas, they took over and started to move Indigenous people on “reservations.” This led to the Indian Act and the residential school system, where the children were taken from their parents and were forced to be raised by the priests and the nuns. This system took the language, culture, ceremonies, the traditional family system, and much more from these families as a whole. It also covered seven generations of my ancestors.

I’m not a historian on worldwide sufferings, but for the sake of this column I’ll briefly paraphrase a snapshot of a few. Germany had Adolf Hitler, the United States had their wars of North and South, Mexico has extreme poverty as a result of corruption and nepotism. The Philippines were colonized by Spain, Great Britain, the U.S., and Japan. Many countries had World War II. The Soviet Union had Joseph Stalin, and Italy had Benito Mussolini, then China had Mao Zedong. Iraq had Saddam Hussein. Cambodia had Pol Pot.

As an Indigenous person I never want to give the impression that I’m saying that the sufferings of my people were worse than the sufferings that took place in other places. Every one of us here in Canada and the U.S. have our own unique forms of sufferings and oppression. That’s why so many people have immigrated to Canada and the U.S. I would never say our sufferings are far worse than anyone else’s. But I would say our sufferings are unique. Our sufferings caused intergenerational trauma over seven generations.

I have heard many comments from fellow Christians such as, “I’m tired of hearing about all these apologies; it will never be enough or solve anything.” Other people have said, in anger, that “if Indigenous people just got a job and got off the streets, things would get better,” or “My people came to this country and became farmers and worked the land, and look at us. We did OK.”

My response? Perhaps there have been enough apologies. Now it’s time to learn about the unique forms of suffering we went through.

I would also love to sit at a coffee shop to hear about what took place in other places or anyone else’s suffering from their country. Then I would ask all the people at the coffee shop to have a Sharing Circle, where everyone can tell the story of what their ancestors went through. It should never be about us as Indigenous people saying that our sufferings were worse than that of others. Each of us have a unique set of sufferings in our stories.

I would then tell everyone sitting at that table that our sufferings were unique and so were yours. The Bible says in Romans 12:15, “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep” (ESV). We can see in each of our stories where we can rejoice and where we can weep. Then, after the weeping, we would be less likely to get mad and say, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore.”