his public execution (Phil was removed as AFN Chief a month or so after his papal audience), Phil Fontaine was engaging in a “re-conciliation”. Unfortunately, every residential school survivor is forced to endure the same public humiliation, by accepting re-traumatizing and an insulting monetary pittance, and then absolving their torturers of any wrongdoing – for which they can earn re-acceptance as a “reconciled” slave, aka, one who is “healed”. When Canada, its mass media, and its churches speak so ecstatically about “reconciliation” with their aboriginal victims, their happiness is not misplaced. For they are all too aware that to be “reconciled” with residential school survivors means, morally and practically, that these inconvenient Indians have re-subordinated themselves on the terms of white society: by foregoing legal action, freeing whites of responsibility, and publicly “forgiving” Christian Canada for its bloody crimes, as happened so pathetically in the spring of 2010 at the presentation of a formal “Forgiveness Charter” to Canada and its churches by state-funded aboriginal officials in Ottawa. For the survivors of Christian genocide, “re-conciliation” means surrender, humiliation and defeat. Their Christian conquerors have just never had the honesty to explain the actual meaning of the term to them.
Hidden No Longer: Genocide in Canada, Past and Present
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