Mulroney, in his apology to Japanese Canadians, said the aim was “to put things right with the surviving members — with their children and ours, so that they can walk together in this country, burdened neither by the wrongs nor the grievances of previous generations.” Both the victimizer and the victim are freed from their bonds. Japanese Canadian internment “went against the very nature of our country.” With the apology, so the redemption narrative went, Mulroney was returning Canada to its natural, perfect state. Cue music. Roll credits. The lights come up, and all is right with the world again. I find the storyline hard to resist, especially when the main characters are long gone. But of course not all of these dramas took place once upon a time.
My dad met his second wife, Etheline Victoria Blind, at a south Edmonton bingo. Yes, he found a native bride at a bingo, in front of a glass concession case where deep-fried pieces of bannock known as “kill-me-quicks” glistened under neon light.
I was working for an environmental organization at the time. Like most Alberta non-profits, we depended on bingos and casinos as fundraisers. Dad was one of our A-list volunteers. He was retired, reliable, and always cheerful, if a bit hard of hearing. Etheline, on the other hand, was on the long-shot volunteer list. She was the mother of the high school friend of a colleague. I didn’t know her, but I called her one night in desperation.
I don’t remember seeing any sparks fly between Dad and Etheline. He was sixty-five at the time, and not seeking to kick at the embers of his love life. But Etheline invited him to play Scrabble with her, and so it began.
Dad and Etheline had a cantankerous sort of affair, from my point of view. They lived separately for many years — Dad in a condo on Rainbow Valley Road, Etheline in an aging split-level five minutes away — but moved gradually toward each other, in location and spirit, finally marrying a few days after Valentine’s Day, eight years after they met. I flew down from Whitehorse with my son, just a year old then. He was the only person at the wedding wearing a suit, a one-piece suede tuxedo.
And so Etheline became my Indian stepmother.
Stephen Harper’s apology to residential school survivors was a powerful political moment. You had to be moved by the sight of the oldest and youngest survivors, side by side on the floor of Parliament — one a 104-year-old woman, the other barely in her twenties. The speeches were superb, the optics perfect. Yet personally, I felt tricked. Tricked because the apology distilled the entire complicated history of assimilation into a single policy, collapsing it like a black hole into a two-word “problem”: residential schools. Here was the forgetful apology at its best. By saying sorry for the schools, we could forget about all the other ways the system had deprived — and continued to deprive — aboriginal people of their lives and land. The government had created the problem, sure, but had owned up to it, too, and was on its way to getting it under control, starting with the survivors’ prescription for recovery. If they were abused, they merely had to itemize their pain in a thirty-page document, tally their compensation points, stand before an adjudicator to speak of their rape and loneliness, and receive their official payment. All taken care of.
And yet. And yet.
Etheline, I apologize. I knew you for ten years and never really knew where you came from. I’m educated, post-colonial, postmodern, mixed race, well travelled, curious, vaguely liberal, politically correct. “You’re the most Canadian person I know,” I’ve been told. And yet I never once asked you about your time in residential school. I never really related until that night, after we’d watched Harper’s shining moment, that powerful ceremony — and I’d watched how it moved you, felt the hair on my arms rise and a shiver in my back when we talked late and you told me how your grandfather was taken from his family when he was four, the same age my oldest son is now; told me how he’d never known his parents, but relearned Cree ways from his adopted family and became a strong Cree man even after his own children were taken away; how he’d raised you when your mother couldn’t; how you were in the mission school, too, for four years, and your grandfather wouldn’t let them cut your braids, and you’d feel the cold brick walls with your hands, and the laundry ladies would only call you by your number, and you would stare out the window toward the dirt road that led away from the school and cry for your Kokum and Meshom. I never knew. Or if you told me, I only listened with half an ear. And I apologize again, for bringing it all up, for writing down your private pain. But I know we need to tell it again and again. It has to be there; it has to get into people’s hearts.
And here I make an apology for the government apology. For whatever I feel about them, about how they can bury wrongs in the past instead of making sure the past is never forgotten, about how they can use emotion to evade responsibility, they have indeed changed my life. They’ve made me rethink what it means to be a citizen of this country. They’ve brought me closer to my family.
Near the end of the conference, the woman with short grey hair stood up and told a story. After World War II, when she was a schoolgirl, she’d one day refused to read out loud from a textbook with the word “Jap” in it. She was sent home, where she proudly told her father what she’d done. He slapped her across the face. The apology, she told everyone at the hall, had restored her dignity. The conference ended the next day, and I returned home with something to think about.
It’s summer as I write, almost a year since the conference, and the apologies have kept coming. The state of California apologized for the persecution of Chinese immigrants last week. Thousands of former students of Indian day schools, feeling left out of the residential school apology, filed a statement of claim at the Manitoba legislature yesterday.
I’m sitting on the beach of Long Lake, just outside Whitehorse. Though it’s hot outside, the water here always stays cold, because the summer’s not long enough to heat it. Still, my two boys are hardy Yukoners, and they’re running in and out of the water, up to their necks. I watch their little bodies twist and turn, then look at my own thirty-eight-year-old paunch and search the sky. What will we be apologizing for when my children are adults? Temporary foreign workers? The child welfare system?
Tomio bumps into Sam, knocking him to the ground. Sam cries. “Tomio,” I tell my oldest, “say sorry to your brother.” “Why?” he asks. “I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Say sorry anyway,” I reply.
We say sorry when we are responsible and when we are not. We say sorry when we were present or when we were far away. We are ambiguous about what apologies mean in the smallest personal interactions. How can we expect our political apologies to be any less complicated?
A long time ago — or not so long ago, really, but within our nation’s lifetime — another train hustled along these tracks: the Colonial Experiment. She was a beaut, shiny and tall. Ran all the way from Upper Canada; ended here in this lush Pacific rainforest. The Colonial Experiment was strictly one way, so it’s up to the Apology Express to make the return trip.
Watch as we go by: a Doukhobor girl peeks out from under her house, her head scarf muddy. The police officers who took her sister and her friends away to the school in New Denver are gone and won’t be back for another week. A Cree boy, hair freshly shorn into a brush cut, stares out the window of a residential school in the middle of the Saskatchewan grasslands, watching his parents’ backs as they walk away. A Japanese fisherman hands over the keys to his new boat. A Ukrainian woman swats the mosquitoes away, bends to pick potatoes at Spirit Lake, and feels her baby dying inside her. A Chinese man living under a bridge thinks about his wife at home and wonders if he’ll see her again.
But take heart: at every stop on the way back, someone important will say sorry for their lot. Just like the man in the top hat on my son’s train engine TV show, he’ll make it all better, no matter how much of a mess there’s been.
All aboard. If you feel a little sick, it’s just the motion of the cars. Close your eyes. Try not to forget.
