Redeeming Truth and Reconciliation: A Christian Perspective

Premiered Oct 8, 2023
Hope arose at SWC's Truth and Reconciliation lecture delivered by Tyndale University literature professor and Upper Mohawk band member Dr. Scott Masson, author of Romanticism, Hermeneutics, and the Crisis of the Human Sciences.
Dr. Scott Masson writes:
This lecture was delivered on Oct. 3, 2023 at Our Lady Seat of Wisdom on the topic of Truth & Reconciliation. These deeply Christian terms have been used in public discourse in Canada in relation to the 2015 Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But are the terms truth and reconciliation used in the sense of the inherited meaning of those terms?
I begin with a look at a famous poem by Duncan Campbell Scott, one of Canada's Confederation poets, the Oyondaga Madonna. It represents the prevailing view of the indigenous peoples of the country as a variation on the 'noble savage.' This is the Romantic view that gave a sentimental version of the Enlightenment view of humanity, perpetuated in the culture at large in its ideal of human nature as a 'self-interpreting orphan.'
This Enlightenment view of human nature is NOT a Christian view. It is anti-personal.
It was not only applied to the indigenous. The Enlightenment ideal of human nature as 'autonomy', of being like gods, determining good and evil, became the dominant ideal for 'civilized' peoples as well. It fit in well with the frontier mentality of being 'self-made men.'
And yet the indigenous were clearly not sympathetic to this ideal of autonomy. From the Enlightenment vantage, they were like children still in need of tutelage.
The government of Canada, influenced by European Enlightenment ideas, embraced this as a duty. In the Indian Act, it made the indigenous peoples of Canada into 'wards of the state'.
This sense of responsibility, however, came at a high price. To be an Indian, legally speaking, was to be someone without the legal status of being a person.
And thus the residential schools established by Christians of various denominations, which were initially entirely voluntary and benevolent in their intent and effects, were co-opted to an ideology that made persons the church wanted to bless with the truth, reconciled to God, into a system whereby personhood became a reward for becoming self-interpreting orphans.
This perversion, which became acute when the residential schools were made compulsory by the government of Canada, meant forcibly removing children from their parents. As 'wards of the state', the parents (themselves being non-persons under the law) had no recourse to justice.
Ironically and perversely, the state saw its own actions in terms of an act of liberation. The diabolical process of denying the indigenous personhood in order to make them fit into a perverse Enlightenment model of human nature was called enfranchisement.
I conclude with a call to truth and reconciliation on the basis of the true meaning of such terms, which are Christian.
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00:00:00 Introduction
00:04:30 Truth and Reconciliation: The Topic Engaged
00:04:42 How are Truth and Reconciliation Undertood?
00:05:20 The Onondaga Madonna: Duncan Campbell Scott
00:06:35 The 'noble savage'
00:09:18 Truth: opposing concepts defined
00:11:18 The tenets of postmodernism
00:16:08 Reconciliation: opposing concepts defined
00:18:10 The term 'Indian'
00:21:16 The Indian Act (1876)
00:22:04 Tutelage and the Enlightenment Idol of Autonomy
00:23:13 Wards of the state are legally regarded as orphans
00:24:05 Self-interpreting Orphans as heroes in culture
00:26:05 Duncan Campbell Scott and 'The Indian Problem'
00:26:43 Is the Enlightenment model of autonomy compatible with Christian personhood?
00:27:15 Enfranchisement as the solution to the Indian Problem
00:30:36 An Indian is, legally speaking, not a person