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Enduring shame

History and Commentary From a Prairie Perspective
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Two days ago, on land which had never been touched by the white man’s plough, I talked with a Cree man who had spent two years in a residential school. What he told me was a journey in horror. What I felt, although silently contained, was a raging hostility against the politicians in Ottawa who are not yet willing to validate an apology with a clear understanding of the way in which children were tortured in the name of the Christian God. Nor are they willing to make full reparations to people whose ancestors were in this land long before European interlopers discovered it.

Yesterday, I read an article in the Saskatoon Star-Phoenixabout Saskatchewan’s oldest cemetery, known to archaeologists as the Gray site. It was written by Bill Waiser. I have no large window into the life and times of Bill Waiser, but we know each other and there is mutual respect. He wrote of a 7,000-year-old burial ground that is protected from pot-hunters only because its location is not public knowledge.

The huge site that I care about is also protected by a blessed ignorance. Tourists are not encouraged to go there. Early in the past century homesteaders were encouraged by Ottawa and the railways to settle on land that should not have been cultivated. The land was cleared of stones. In the immense stone piles were stories of the past. Destroying the stone configurations left by the Blackfoot and their predecessors was like burning pages from the only copy of a history book.

I once journeyed with a party of amateur archaeologists into my beloved country to take night-time photographs of a boulder covered with incisions made by human hands. There was no certain way of knowing the sense of the message or the time it was carved. I was able to turn away from the lights of distant communities to see only the immense star-studded sky. As I wrote later, the barrier between present and past seemed thin as paper.

There are still stones in the grassland that are undisturbed. People who understand and care know that removing one stone is tantamount to erasing a word in a language we cannot read. I was once with a party that excavated at a site that may have been occupied intermittently for about 7,000 years. We found stacked buffalo skulls that revealed ancient mysticisms. Projectile points found in the area were shaped before the building of the first Egyptian pyramid.

I have seen graves of the people who were here before us desecrated by crude oil storage tanks. I knew the site as a child when the ravine was filled with a mass of bleached bison bones. The graves of the hunters were on the hill. The storage tanks are there now. There was no archaeological survey made before the tanks were put in place.

My family came to Canada after the Indian treaties were signed. Innocently, they subscribed to the belief that the people we called Indians must be made into carbon copies of whites or else must be made to disappear. So did I, a long time ago. Now I am ashamed of my country. And I am angry with politicians in Ottawa who make me feel ashamed.