Native people, churches come together to heal

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When Kathleen Greene was eight years old, they told her she had to go to residential school or her father would go to jail. So she went, kicking and screaming.

The kicking and screaming didn't last. Once inside the school, Greene soon learned how to endure the insults, the sexual abuse and beatings without tears.

"One day, I decided not to cry," she said, " and when the principal started beating me up, I just glared at him. He slapped me. He threw me against the wall. He dragged me around by the hair. I never cried. And after that, he had nothing to do with me."

After leaving school at 16, she suffered more sexual abuse and assault at the hands of her father and first husband, lost three children in a fire, and became an alcoholic. She now calls herself a survivor.

Greene told that story on the first day of the Sacred Assembly in Hull, Que. Dec. 6 to 9. For four days, nearly 2,000 Native and non-Native people from across Canada, the United States and even South Africa released decades worth of guilt, shame and anger in an attempt to reconcile mainstream religions with Native spirituality.

Top Aboriginal leaders including Assembly of First Nations Chief Ovide Mercredi, Jim Sinclair of the Congress of Aboriginal Peoples, Gerald Morin, leader of the Metis Nation, and Inuit Tapirisat of Canada vice-resident Mary Sillett, met with the heads of the United, Roman Catholic, and Anglican churches and others to find some common ground.

Spirit Alive Television Ministries, which produces the American weekly prayer show 100 Huntley Street, even broadcast a live interview with assembly organizer Liberal MP Elijah Harper from the lobby of the Hull congress centre where the assembly was held.

The meeting was a time for truth, and religious leaders got an ample dose. It was a time for forgiveness and Native people offered plenty. But Native leaders stressed that it was also a time for reconciliation and retribution.

"A great many lives have been ruined because of what our parents and children have experienced," Harper said. "We're not her to sweep these things under the rug."

Leaders from six organized religions apologized to Native people on the second day of the assembly. They recounted the ways they have tried to help Natives deal with the abuse they suffered.

United Church Moderator Marion Best said her church supported self-determination, land claims and sharing natural resources saying, "we have tried to walk beside you."

The United and the Presbyterian churches said they were committed to helping Native Canadians heal. The United Church is hoping to raise $1 million through donations to help pay for that healing.

But forgiveness is a painful exercise. In one of the smaller afternoon sessions, an Elder from the audience said his pain has not yet subsided.

"I'm the product of residential schools," he said. "I'm looking for answers. I'm looking for someone to talk to. I want to meet with these church people. I want to see what kind of answers they can give me."

Mercredi expressed bitterness about losing his culture as a child and having to learn the songs and ceremonies as an adult.

"I am almost 50," he said, "and I would have been 49 when I would have seen my first sundance. Why is that? Because assimilation has been almost complete. Because our culture has been almost destroyed."

Mercredi ended his speech with a Cree song of leadership taught to him by an Elder. His voice, shaking and barely hovering above a whisper at times, floated above the silent crowd as tears dropped from his chin to the podium.

Dene MP and Secretary of State for Training and Youth, Ethel Blondin-Andrew, started her speech by saying she threw her official speech away and was planning to speak from the heart.

Swallowing tears, she talked of suicide in her family and described how one wounded generation gives the pain to the nest. "It's a wounding of the soul of a people, the spirit of the people," Blondin-Andrew said. "It's the woudig of the psyche of a nation."

And while the theme of the assembly was spiritual healing reconciliation, it was not without some political posturing.

Prime Minister Jean Chretien made a speech at the opening of the assembly saying he hoped the gathering would awaken a greater spirituality across the country.

"Mr. Harper, you have found a new way," he said.

Indian Affairs and Northern Development Minster Ron Irwin made many promises in his speech on the final day of the assembly.

He said Native people have an inherent right to self-government and that they also have a right to economic stability and self-sufficiency.

"I need partners, I need allies. I need people walking side by side," Irwin said. Harper said he planned to hold the minister to his commitments.

Morin, Sinclair, Mercredi and others spoke openly about how the treaty process in Canada has been undermined and why Aboriginal people need to be included in the up-coming constitutional process.

But for the most part, speakers at the assembly stuck to the topic of spiritualism, in all its forms.

One man interrupted Harper's opening comments one morning. He began by moaning and then started shouting to Harper that he was God and "Om." Harper asked the audience to rise and pray for him and the man's shouts subsided.

Despite the odd distraction, Harper said in an interview that he felt the assembly had really conjured a healing spirit among Native people, so much so that he's called for another sacred assembly in 1997 to keep the spirit alive.

"Hopefully people will go back home with a new sense of purpose and direction. I think where the real work needs to be done is in the communities where the pain is amongst our families."