The Anglican Church of Canada is facing what may be its most difficult time "in living memory," Anglican Primate Michael Peers said in a September sermon at St. James Cathedral in Toronto. Memory, in fact, is at the heart of the church's current struggles. In living memory of thousands of indigenous Canadians now embroiled in lawsuits against the government and mainstream churches of Canada, native children were taken from their families to be schooled in European culture, religion and lifestyle. Some 130 Indian residential schools were administered by the Anglican, Roman Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist (now United) churches to carry out the government policy of assimilation of native peoples. The Anglican Church ran 26 residential schools between 1820 and 1969. In addition to the incalculable loss of family and community, language and values, large numbers of children were subjected to physical and sexual abuse. The schools' legacy includes broken families, alcoholism and suicide.

Three hundred fifty-nine lawsuits, involving 1,600 survivors of this abuse, are now facing the national Anglican Church or its dioceses. The Canadian government is named in more than1,500 lawsuits involving 7,000 survivors. In many cases, claimants brought lawsuits against the government, which then brought third-party claims against the churches.

According to a Residential Schools website set up by the Anglican Church, the total assets of the General Synod (the church's national body) amount to less than $10 million. The damages claimed in the lawsuits naming the General Synod exceed $2 billion, and legal costs continue to escalate. The church may be facing bankruptcy. Although church leaders have assured dioceses that their contributions are not disappearing down legal sinkholes, the drain on the church's assets has already impacted its ministries. In August 2000 eight national church staff positions were cut, and grants to assisted dioceses in the north of Canada (one-third of the church's budget) were reduced by 5 percent. The national church's newspaper, The Anglican Journal, suffered a significant cutback, and a national resource center supporting parish ministries was closed.

"There have been shortfalls in donations from dioceses for other reasons," said Jim Boyles, the church's general secretary. "In normal times we might well have been able to handle that through normal budgetary processes. But since we are using our reserves for legal expenses, interest income has fallen, and there is uncertainty because of the continuing drain from the church's assets."

In October, the synod of the Diocese of Cariboo in British Columbia -- financially depleted by legal fees stemming from lawsuits filed after the conviction, for sexual abuse, of a former dormitory supervisor at St. George's School in Lytton, B.C. -- voted to authorize its bishop, James Cruickshank, and its executive council to formally wind up the affairs of the diocese in the next 12 months. Only one of 15 cases involving the diocese has been decided. Now under appeal, it is also the only case of all those involving the Anglican Church to have proceeded to judgment.

The Diocese of Cariboo -- comprised of 17 small parishes that have struggled to become self-supporting and have gradually increased their self-reliance -- is engaged in a dispute with the government over ownership of parish buildings, with the government claiming they are diocesan assets, and the diocese asserting that it holds them in trust for the parishes. Delegates to the Cariboo synod laughed when the diocesan chancellor reported that federal lawyers had asked for a list of "jewels and paintings" owned by the churches, many of which are small and poorly equipped. Echoing the national church's stated priority of "healing and reconciliation," Cruickshank urged his diocese to focus on indigenous ministry.

"We need more healing circles and we need to participate in the healing gatherings. And we must always ask what are the needs of the survivors of abuse at St. George's, and we must ask them how we can best respond. We must also ask what role this diocese can play in confronting the racist backlash which we know is present."

The church is facing "pruning," Cruickshank said, which will enable it to "grow back more compassionately than we ever could have imagined possible, because we will know what it's like to be powerless."

While affirming the church's willingness to accept moral and financial responsibility, Anglican leaders have called on the government to find an alternative to the expensive, drawn-out, adversarial court process.

"We'd like to see a comprehensive plan to resolve these claims in the most humane and expeditious way possible," Boyles said. "Our church supports the concept of Alternative Dispute Resolution and has been working with the government on 12 pilot projects, but it is very, very slow. We believe the government needs to look at alternative ways of handling claims. The church and federal government must find a way through these cases so they're not fighting each other, but rather focusing on the victims of abuse in the schools."

Boyles says such a process should be based on principles outlined in a report by the Law Commission of Canada, which include "compensation, apology, memorialization, and commitment to ensure such abuse doesn't happen in the future."

In his September sermon at St. James, Peers acknowledged that he does not know if the national church will survive in its present form. "I do not know if those dioceses that are in financial difficulty will survive either," he said. "I do not know if church buildings in those dioceses will have to be sold. ... But there are things I do know. I know that the way of the cross is the way to life. I know that it makes possible -- in fact, even inevitable -- the setting free of the kingdom of God."

As Bishop Duncan Wallace, quoted in The Anglican Journal, put it, "All we need is a book, a bottle of wine and some bread and we're in business."

An interview with Donna Bomberry
by Marianne Arbogast
[Ed. note: Donna Bomberry is Indigenous Ministries Coordinator for the Anglican Church of Canada.]

Marianne Arbogast: Why is the issue of residential schools so significant for native people in Canada today?

Donna Bomberry: It's very complex and steeped in the history of our relationships in Canada. The Anglican Church, with the other church denominations who administered the residential schools for the government, operated residential schools until 1969. So it's still a live experience for my generation, the next generation older than myself and our children and grandchildren coming after us.

There are many issues that native people have with that experience, but the major focus here in Canada is the litigation that has come about because of physical and sexual abuse that happened to former students. But there are other issues that come out of it as people recall their experience. It is often termed cultural genocide, where people lose their language and identity as part of a people and within a family and a community. And other losses have been identified. Being raised in an institution, you don't learn relationship skills, parenting and how to be family. So the legacy affects three to four generations who are living today.

M.A.: What kind of outcome do you think indigenous Canadians are hoping for from the lawsuits?

D.B.: I guess they're seeking redress. But they haven't seen or heard anything. Our Council [the Anglican Council of Indigenous Peoples] has noted the actions of some lawyers in Canada who were seeking First Nations people to sign up to litigation. People didn't know what they were signing up for. They heard promises of dollars or whatever promises the lawyers were making, and people would sign on to the lawsuits, not fully understanding what it was about. So we identified that these lawyers were preying upon people who have a poverty, a spiritual poverty and an economic poverty, as a result of many experiences -- residential school being a major part of that -- in their life. And that, really, the only winners in all this are going to be the lawyers.

M.A.: So those who suffered abuse or the consequences of abuse will not in fact benefit from the lawsuits?

D.B.: I don't know. Out of the legal court situation, there's no provision of long-term work for an individual to seek healing -- and perhaps some of them aren't seeking that. So perhaps it's a short-term solution. It's what's available to all in Canadian society. Human rights and due process is court litigation. And lawyers are convincing enough, I guess, that that is the route you go, if there's no other action in town.

M.A.: Would it have been better for the government to have taken a different approach?

D.B.: What is now being looked at is Alternative Dispute Resolution. The church and government together are exploring the ADR process as an alternative way that is hopefully going to be more humane than the court system and is able to help provide mechanisms for healing. But that is moving very slowly.

There's some discussion happening now about another alternative to litigation and ADR, and that is tribunal, which is a little more than the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa. A tribunal would allow all parties to speak, all those who've been affected. That includes the former students, their families, former staff, and even government, to explain the policy. Many people don't know what the policy was all about and why the residential schools were established. You know, that's the biggest question that many of the former students have: Why did that happen? Why did I go through all that? What was all that about? And we're still trying to understand as a church what we were doing involved in that.

M.A.: How would you evaluate the response of the church to this challenge so far?

D.B.: I look at our history. Our national church got out of residential schools in 1969. And our church commissioned a report to General Synod called the Hendry report, Beyond Traplines. The Hendry report identified self-determination and treaty and land rights and industrial and environmental development, and so our church set out to find ways of being advocates and seeking justice in those areas.

And then in the early 1990s the legacy of residential schools really began to emerge, when a political leader in the First Nations community spoke out about his experience. The Anglican Church also began to pay attention to that. The church needed to hear those stories and bring to light the experience of those who attended Anglican schools. That began in 1991 and our Healing Fund was established in 1991. The apology of the primate of the national church came in 1993, and a covenant regarding self-determination within the church came about in 1994. So indigenous Anglicans, working with the rest of the church, began to tell the story. But the story wasn't known generally. Canadians in general have been in denial about the history, so it's been a steep learning curve and a quick one in the past few years.

That experience is in the history of my family, as close to me as an uncle, but I never knew the stories. I knew of dysfunction and substance abuse. We internalize our anger and abuse ourselves and so we see that in our families, but we don't know why. I think that's part of the denial. We believed things about ourselves that were being taught in residential schools. Assimilation was a policy to do away with Indian people, and we internalized those views of us, and self-hatred and low self-esteem went to work at us. Those are the areas we try to respond to now through our work of healing and reconciliation.

One positive thing is a proposed increase in the Aboriginal Healing Fund that is administered here at the national church. The Aboriginal Healing Fund was established in 1991, and it has established an annual budget of $100,000. That will be doubled come 2001.

The Canadian government needs to address the litigation situation so that we, the church, might be able to participate in the healing in the long run, rather than being put out of business in the short run. We want to continue to be around to work in bringing about justice, whether it's advocacy for land rights or treaty rights with the government, or education with the rest of Canadian society.

M.A.: Do you think that part of the reason the lawsuits have mushroomed the way they have at this time might have to do with anger or frustration over other issues, like treaty rights, that are harder to get a handle on or find a way to take to court?

D.B.: I think it is more basic than that. Because First Nations communities haven't been able to have those issues resolved, they have the highest unemployment, and so it gets down to an individual's basic situation and needs that, politically, the First Nations community is trying to find a resolution to. And they can't move in those areas until our treaties are upheld and government recognizes land rights and treaty rights, so that First Nations communities can be further self-determining and be involved in their communities' development. It comes down to the treaty, the land basis of a First Nations community, and how that affects an individual. Residential schools also identifies for an individual that they lost a culture and its values and its relationship to land. It's the land that gives a people their identity, who they are, what their economy is, what their society is. Residential schools displaced people in that relationship, so they could not return, and if they did return there was nothing there to sustain them. Many former students are out in the cities, and have discovered that they don't have the skills to sustain themselves.When I first started doing this work I ran into many people who would say, I've been in and out of recovery programs for substance abuse and these conventional programs aren't working for me because I haven't felt validated. I think that's part of the frustration and the stereotyping that we face as Indian people. No one knows what our history is. Those individuals who are seeking healing and recovery don't have their experience validated because no one knows what they're talking about.We see racism and anger surfacing around fishing rights, logging, mining. When indigenous peoples are seeking their fair share of a particular industry, we run into conflict with other people who have a stake in that industry.

It's a vicious circle and out of that anger and frustration, it comes out this way. The tip of the iceberg is being focused on the residential schools. But the cultural genocide and loss of language and psychological abuse, all that is part of the other lawsuits that are there, and courts have not determined yet how to deal with that.

M.A.: Those issues are actually named in the lawsuits, but don't fit into a legal category?

D.B.: Right, or one that is what they call "compensable."

M.A.: Do you think there's a way in which the lawsuits might be helpful in bringing those issues to light and raising questions about attitudes and practices that persist in the dominant culture?

D.B.: One thing that the lawsuits have done is gotten everyone's attention. I guess this is a wakeup call for Canadians.

M.A.: What has this process been like for indigenous Canadians who are Anglicans?

D.B.: My own sense of this is through our national Council when we gather. Many of them are former students of residential schools. It's very complex to try and tell you what it's like for them, because they're very much part of the church, faithful people, but their families are hurting. They experience the legacy within their own families and their own communities, and they need to walk with those hurting people. We as a church need to respond and we need tools, we need skills, we need resources to help respond locally.

Marianne Arbogast is associate editor of The Witness.

'English and English only'
The Orthodox Church in Alaska has been in the hands of native Alaskans essentially since the Russians sold the Great Land, as they call it, to the U.S. [in 1867]. It was the only institution in native hands because of the assimilationist policies of the U.S. government. [Then] the U.S. government, in a remarkable violation of the separation of church and state, assigned various Indian reservations to specific Protestant Christian bodies and paid the salaries of missionaries to carry out the civilizing task. Two of the key players in the social and educational assimilationist policy were Presbyterian ministers, S. Hall Young and Sheldon Jackson. Young wrote in his autobiography about the need to counter Orthodoxy's habit of using indigenous languages and customs.

"One strong stand," Young wrote, "-- so far as I know I was the first to take it -- was the determination to do no translating into any of the native dialects. I realized that the task of making an English-speaking race of these natives was much easier than the task of making a civilized and Christian language out of the native languages. We should let the old tongues with their superstitions and sins die, the sooner the better, and replace these languages with that of Christian civilization, and compel the natives in our schools to speak English and English only."

And in 1912, the U.S. government closed the Orthodox Church school, St. Paul's in the Aleutian Islands, for the crime of teaching Aleut. Let me give it to you straighter. In the words of one of the commissioners of education: "We have no higher calling in the world than to be missionaries to these people who have not yet achieved the Anglo-Saxon frame of mind."

Or, straighter yet, in a citation that I think is really raw in its exposure of the connections of commerce, racism, Protestant Christianity and assimilationist policies. This is from the official school philosophy promulgated in 1900 (Jackson headed the U.S. government's education policy in Alaska): "If the native population of Alaska can be brought under the influence of Christianity and be given a rudimentary English-language education, it follows that the white population [these are immigrants from the lower 48 states] could employ them in mining, transportation and the production of food."

Now this phrase, "brought under the influence of Christianity," is especially telling in that many of the native population were Orthodox Christians. But just this is another trait of the controlling narrative: That is to say, it consistently filters out, or declares as illegitimate or heretical, dissenting Christianities.

Larry Rasmussen (quoted with permission from his 1999 Kellog Lectures at the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass.).

Bridges in Spirituality
First Nations Christian Women Tell Their Stories, Joyce Carlson and Alf Dumont, editors (Anglican Book Center/United Church Publishing House, 1997).

From Our Mothers' Arms
The Intergenerational Impact of Residential Schools in Saskatchewan by Constance Deiter (United Church Publishing, 1999).

In 1986, on behalf of the United Church of Canada, its Moderator made a formal apology to native people for the role of the church in the missional destruction of their cultures. In 1993, Canada's Anglican Archbishop offered a similar apology, naming, in particular, the church's role in the administration of residential schools.

These two books are intended as part of the work which repentance demands. They are efforts to listen to the voices and stories of native people and to grant those voices a wider hearing.

The first, Bridges in Spirituality, comprises the oral histories of five church women, some with liturgical authority (one the first to offer communion in the Ojibwe language), others clergy spouses, all active church leaders in their own right. The "bridge" concerns their gift and capacity to combine the Gospel and given ecclesiastical structures with the traditional ways, creatively giving form to the one with the other.

There is included, for example, the invocation of the elders of the four directions in connection with a native baptismal. These women tend to have as graceful a facility with Scripture as with the old traditions and the two move in and out of one another in their hearts and words.

The second volume is more narrowly focused on the residential schools of Saskatchewan. It, too, works from oral histories, in this case of the author's own family members.

The consequential effects of the residential system which it documents are devastating. Perhaps emblematic is a schoolwall mural which is described, whereupon white priests pause on a staircase leading to heaven while native people in traditional dress are represented going off to hell.

The consequences were indeed hellish for native children. Citing the work of Alice Miller, the internationally noted child psychologist, Deiter is able, with a substantial theoretical foundation, to read the evidence of this poisonous pedagogy, this assault on family, this loss of parenting as issuing in the whole range of obsessive-compulsive disorders: alcoholism, drug addiction, gambling, overeating -- just to name a few.

Teasing stories out from behind denial, it also narrates humor and, above all, resistance. The latter includes, on the one hand, the direct burning down of certain residential schools or, on the other, the development of Indian sign language as a subversive method of student communication, "silenced" and behind the back (or under the very noses) of teachers.

An appendix outlines the United Church's formation and administration of a Healing Fund. Given the scale and consequences of this well-intentioned horror, at $1 million it seems underfunded.

-- Bill Wylie-Kellermann is The Witness' book review editor.