Most of what we read about the Indian Residential Schools are reports about their operation by the Roman Catholic Church. Little is told about the role played in their administration by the other denominations that ran them on behalf of the government of Canada, the body responsible for their creation, regulation, and financial support.
The following undated pamphlet was written and distributed during the 1940s or early 1950s by what was then called the Church of England, now known as the Anglican Church of Canada.
It paints of far different picture of life in Canada’s Indian Residential Schools during a era when up to 35, or 25 percent, of them were actively managed by a church whose former supreme head, their archbishop and primate, Fred Hiltz, decades later on March 20, 2017 shamefully claimed had “nothing good” about them.
Alas, the Anglican Church is quickly becoming a second-hand version of the United Church of Canada — often rightly called the NDP at prayer — an organization that is neither united nor much interested in Christian doctrine.
Earlier generations of Anglican priests who spent their lives bringing the word of God to “heathens” all around the world (as Christ demanded) should come back to haunt this pseudo-Christian until he confesses that all religions are equal: in value, morality, truth, and salvation. None is superior or inferior to any other and each is equal in the sight of the Almighty even when they are based on logically and operationally incompatible almighties (a word that is actually a nonsensical spelling error because there can only be one Almighty, by definition).
Wait … he already did that in his July 12, 2019 “An Apology for Spiritual Harm” when speaking on behalf of his church he made the following confessions:
I confess our sin in failing to acknowledge that as First Peoples living here for thousands of years, you had a spiritual relationship with the [non-Christian]
Creator and with the Land. We did not care enough to learn how your spirituality has always infused your governance, social structures and family life.
I confess our sin in demonizing Indigenous spiritualities, and in belittling the traditional teachings of your Grandmothers and Grandfathers preserved and passed on through the elders.
I confess the sin of our arrogance in dismissing Indigenous Spiritualities and disciplines as incompatible with the Gospel of Jesus, and insisting that there is no place for them in Christian Worship.
I confess our sin in acts such as smothering the smudges, forbidding the pipes, stopping the drums, hiding the masks, destroying the totem poles, silencing the songs, stilling the dances, and banning the potlatches. With deep remorse, I acknowledge the intergenerational spiritual harm caused by our actions.
I confess our sin in declaring the teachings of the medicine wheel to be pagan and primitive.
I confess our sin in robbing your children and youth of the opportunity to know their spiritual ancestry and the great wealth of its wisdom and guidance for living in a good way with the Creator, the land and all peoples.
Fred Hiltz’s apology is nothing short of apostasy: the testimony of an anti-Christian morally-relativistic polytheist.
Indeed, if Hiltz is truly sorry, he will call on all Anglicans in Canada to convert to the remnants of some indigenous spiritual belief system or the other as a way to repent for the sin of accepting the hegemony of Christian belief and practice. He should also issue a declaration that those who refuse to do so deserve to burn in Hell for an eternity (which is a very long time!), at least if there is a Hell according to Indigenous spirituality.
In the meantime, I urge the clownish prophet Hiltz to reflect again on the following passages of Scripture he promised to uphold when he became a priest:
And he [Jesus] said to them, “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned" (Mark 16:15-16).
"And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age'” (Matthew 28:18-20).
In this same address, Hiltz issued of his Church’s endorsement of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Article 12 that:
“Indigenous peoples have the right to manifest, practise, develop and teach their spiritual and religious traditions, customs and ceremonies; the right to maintain, protect, and have access in privacy to their religious and cultural sites; the right to the use and control of their ceremonial objects; and the right to the repatriation of their human remains.”
If the Moslems had colonized Canada instead of the Christians, an imam like Father Hiltz would have been swiftly beheaded for pagan impiety by daring to utter these blasphemous words. No wonder that Islam is the fastest growing major religion in the world: it tolerates no dissent and takes no doubting victims like this denier of the Gospels.
A sect that not only tolerates but actually celebrates an infinite reinterpretation of its core beliefs to satisfy passing ideological fads does not deserve to have any disciples which is why the Anglican Church is in as much free fall as the United Church of Canada with more and more if its confused and disheartening members flocking to Protestant denominations preaching the old time religion of hell-fire and brimstone.
Any religion worth the name is supposed to preach the straight and narrow, not the crooked and wide.
As for the following pamphlet written long before Anglicanism repudiated its core mission, though it is ethnocentric in tone, as a cultural anthropologist with over 50 years of teaching and research experience, I contend that its contents ring far truer than the preposterous exaggerations, distortions, and outright fabrications we are now being fed about the nature of indigenous cultures and the role of the Indian Residential Schools in helping aboriginals cope with the worst effects of European conquest and colonization.
There is a mountain of archival evidence, never properly consulted or reported on by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission charged with investigating the history, operation, and consequences of the Indian Residential Schools that paints a far different and more benign picture of the schools than the outrageously biased one we continue to hear 25 years after the last school closed — and decades after most of them closed — from the thousands of “survivors” who were generously remunerated for their “stories.”
This highly informative and critically important brochure can be read as follows only by paid subscribers in its attached PDF version.
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