Faith groups called to implement UN declaration
Donald Bolen grew up in southwest Saskatchewan, not far from a site where indigenous people left evidence of their lives and culture at least 8,500 years ago.
Yet, like many non-Aboriginal people in Saskatchewan, he scarcely knew that the history of the place went back any further than that of his farming parents and grandparents.
This week, alongside other Canadian bishops, Bolen, the Roman Catholic Bishop for Saskatoon, will sign a public statement renouncing the ideas in the Doctrine of Discovery and Terra Nullius, which were used by Europeans to justify claiming land that was already inhabited by indigenous peoples.
European monarchies relied on a declaration by the pope in 1493 that lands without Christians were empty; it granted ownership of “discovered” land to Catholic monarchs.
“We’re repudiating those underlying concepts and attitudes, which allowed colonizing nations to come into the country and find various justifications for taking the land — and leaving indigenous people in a great plight, and doing so in a way that was arrogant and unjust,” Bolen said in a recent interview.
The full statement will be released Wednesday, along with a statement by the church formally adopting the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP).
The statements come in response to the Calls to Action issued by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).
It gave March 31 as a deadline for churches, all faith groups and interfaith social justice groups in Canada to release statements saying how they will implement the declaration.
In the national documents, the Catholic Church will distance itself from attitudes of superiority and reject any assertion that Europeans could determine whether land was occupied without consulting indigenous people. It will affirm that indigenous people have fundamental human rights that must be recognized and will acknowledge that the cultures and spirituality of indigenous people were not respected in the residential schools.
It will include a commitment to a list of new ways to “walk together,” including educating people about underlying causes of the social and economic inequities between indigenous people and the rest of Canadian society. That includes asking why the incarceration of aboriginal people is disproportionately high, why schools are failing youth and to acknowledge “there are reasons and we are complicit in the structures and the policies that have created this context,” Bolen said.
The Canadian Unitarian Council (CUC) has also been working for years to act on the calls of the TRC, said Rev. Karen Fraser Gitlitz.
The CUC issued an “expression of reconciliation” at the TRC’s national event in Edmonton in 2014, promising to uphold the rights of indigenous Canadians and to have congregations educate themselves and reach out to aboriginal communities.
The national body created curricula for adults and children to guide their work. The Saskatoon congregation invites aboriginal speakers to talk about the history that differs from what was taught in schools and in many Canadians’ families, Fraser Gitlitz said.