I want to thank you for the invitation to speak to you all this evening, and for the opportunity that it provides me to share in this development of the Knights of Columbus as it spreads further into the Archdiocese of Grouard-McLennan.  Despite what some of you may have heard in the past, while I was pastor at St. Joseph’s in Grande Prairie, I was very supportive of the Knights of Columbus.  My resistance to entering the ranks of Knighthood during those years had more to do with a brotherly concern for one of my associate priests than it did about any difference of outlook between me and the Knights of Columbus.  In fact, I am most grateful for the allegiance that the Knights express toward the leadership of the Catholic Church, both at a diocesan and a parochial level.  I have known of only one situation where conflict existed between a council of the Knights and a pastor.  Grant Mann assures me that this would be a rare exception, and that the resolution to it should have been very clear: the K of C exists for the parish and the diocese, not the other way around.

            At last year’s exemplification, roughly one year ago, some of you will recall that I reflected on my previous months as archbishop.  At that time, having been seated in the cathedra only a few months, I spoke of the challenges that I had discovered in our diocese: the shortage of priests, our sense of being a diocesan church, the distances that separate our many communities, and the effects of declining rural populations.  At this point in time, other experiences have filled out my first full year as archbishop:  I have celebrated a full season of confirmations across the archdiocese, I traveled to Rome to receive my Pallium from the Holy Father, I attended the plenary assembly of Canadian bishops in Cornwall ON, I moved a few priests around the archdiocese, and attended to the funerals of Fathers Joe MacGillivray and Claude Lemieux.  I ministered to the Little Red River Cree Nation at their annual pilgrimage, I celebrated Christmas eve Masses in two of our Native communities, and I have initiated some archdiocesan committees: a council of priests, a finance committee and a planning committee.  It has been a busy year.

            By far, however, the single greatest demand on my time and energy has been the Indian Residential School settlement agreement.  Before becoming your bishop, I misunderstood this issue to be only about either going bankrupt with lawsuits, or avoiding that eventuality.  Over the weeks and months, I have come to appreciate what this matter is all about.  I have also come to realize that most Canadians are ignorant about the issue, and so I gladly take every possible opportunity to speak of it to others.  This is what I would like to do now; and I want to finish with a challenge to you, the Knights of this archdiocese.

            Let me begin with a bit of history, which may sound like my stating the obvious.  Some of you here today are older than I, and may have a better sense of lived history than I have of narrated history.  A fundamental question might be asked: How did the Catholic Church develop in this area? 

            What initially motivated the western expansion of Europeans into the Canadian northwest was the fur trade.  These adventurers were not permanent residents in these areas, but seasonal laborers who did not hunt and trap themselves, but dealt in furs that the Native hunters supplied.  Oblate missionary priests, seeing these Aboriginal peoples as fertile ground for evangelization, followed these fur traders and established mission stations.  While the Natives tended to be nomadic, missions such as at Fort Vermilion, Dunvegan and Grouard provided stable services of church, school, farm and hospital.  While the missionaries brought the best of current European civilization to the Natives, they also sought to learn from the Natives how to survive in this harsh environment.  They also contributed what they could to the Natives’ personal and cultural survival.  Not only did Oblates learn the languages of these peoples, but they also put into written form what had previously been only an oral language.  It may come as a surprise to learn that Canadian Oblate Missionaries wrote 141 dictionaries in 27 different Aboriginal languages, and 79 grammars in 19 Aboriginal languages. 

            With the advent of European settlers, however, problems arose over land, hunting & fishing.  Patches of territory that had for generations been the domain of Native tribes were being encroached on by white people, and the government of Canada, anxious to have the territory settled and farmed, was in need of a way of acquiring large tracts.  Even more devastating to the Natives was the large-scale hunting and fishing of resources that they themselves had used carefully, especially the buffalo.  Tensions were rising in all parts of the country where Native and white communities encountered each other.  Our American neighbors to the south engaged in Indian Wars that led to the massacre of whole bands of Indians.  While this was never part of our history, the Riel Rebellion of 1885 did signal for the rest of Canada the need to come to peaceable terms with aboriginal peoples if there was to be a successful settling of the western regions.  The only foreseeable way to make such an arrangement seemed to be by treaty.  Over the years, there have been very divergent views of the numbered treaties and their significance.  For most of the white population in Canada, treaties were seen as the way to acquire huge tracts of land for farming by homesteaders; for the Natives, however, the treaty was viewed as a covenant of friendship between them and their more recently-arrived neighbors.  As one former chief recently posed the rhetorical question, “How come Indians celebrate Treaty Days, but white people don’t?” 

            The treaty which governed the entire territory that makes up the Archdiocese of Grouard-McLennan was treaty 8.  It was signed on June 21, 1899, when Indian agents and treaty commissioners met with bands of Natives, signed the treaty, and fulfilled the initial terms of the treaty.  Bands were assigned tracts of land, so much for every member of the band.  Along with the land, Native families were provided what they would need to till the soil and take on the business of farming: rakes, hoes, plows and seed.  Needless to say, these people were hunters and fishermen, not farmers, and to this day we can see that such a goal of making the Indian into a farmer has failed.  Another commitment of the federal government in the treaty was to pay each Indian $5. on signing the treaty, and on the anniversary every year thereafter.  So, even up to the present, on June 21st every year, each Native person receives -- $5.  Maybe it was a lot of money in 1899, but it won’t put booties on the baby these days! 

            All matters concerned with Natives in Canada were governed by the Indian Act, first promulgated in 1876 but amended 17 times since then, to handle such matters as who qualifies as a status Indian, some of the activities that an Indian may or may not engage in, and the laws of enfranchisement by which an Indian would lose his status and all of the rights of a status Indian.  I was surprised to read in the Act that an Indian lost his status and status-rights if he became a university graduate, a medical doctor, a lawyer or a priest.  Not much incentive here to get a higher education; this may be one of the reasons why vocations from the Native peoples has been especially difficult.

            Much of the Government of Canada’s interest relative to Native peoples throughout history since Confederation has been assimilation.  The stated goal of much government policy has been to integrate the native into western society, to make him “more European”, so to speak.  From our present viewpoint, we may judge this effort as more or less failed, but given current understanding and sensitivity around culture and way of life, many in our present society would consider it a dubious moral goal at all.  Without a doubt the most regrettable policy in the strategy of assimilation has been the Indian Residential School.

            Let me begin these thoughts by pointing out that schooling, whether in residential or day schools, has long been a missionary activity of the Churches.  Believing that education was a powerful tool for both evangelization and the overall betterment of persons, Church bodies in every age and in every corner of the globe have established schools.  Looking at the history of education in most of Canada, even a cursory survey will make the point that most post-secondary schools, colleges and universities extant today began as religious institutions.  It was thus by instinct that the missionaries who came to the Native tribes of western Canada set up schools.  By the provisions of the Indian Act, the federal government was responsible for the education of Native children, and the government was grateful to have such dedicated instructors in the religious personnel who ran mission schools.  The federal program of IRS began in 1874, and the last such school closed its doors in 1996.  Over the span of its history, there were some 130 such schools in every province except Newfoundland, New Brunswick and PEI.  On April 1, 1969 the federal government assumed full control of these schools, but starting in the mid-70’s, they were gradually closed.  In 1996, the Royal Commission on Aboriginal People submitted its report, which brought to the attention of the Canadian public the great injustice and harm that was suffered by Natives by means of this school system.  In an attempt to redress this harm, the Aboriginal Healing Foundation was set up to subsidize healing programs for former students and their families.  But another phenomenon was gathering momentum: lawsuits from former students and their lawyers were being served to the federal government, and by the federal government to the Churches.

            In an attempt to deal with the legal quagmire that was resulting, in May of 2005, the government commissioned Mr. Justice Frank Iacobucci to try to find a way to a just settlement that would move away from litigation in the courtrooms of the nation.  The end result is what we now call the Indian Residential School Settlement Agreement.  This agreement, which took full affect on September 19th, 2007 has several provisions:

            I said earlier in this talk that Native issues have made the greatest demand on my time, and they have brought about the greatest change in my thinking.  I have come to a deeper realization of the aboriginal culture and Native ways.  When physicists first split the atom, Albert Einstein made the comment that with that monumental accomplishment, everything in the world had changed -- except the way that people think.  Well, let me tell you that this past year has changed the way that I think about our Native Peoples.  And Divine Providence has put me in a diocese that puts the reality of Native people front and centre in my life.

            The CCCB recently circulated statistics on native Catholic populations across the country, as drawn from the 2001 census by StatsCanada.  In looking over these figures, of course, I was especially interested in what they told me about the Archdiocese of Grouard-McLennan.  What I learned is that:

This is a sizeable minority; too great to be ignored.

            I intimated at the beginning of this talk that I have a challenge for the Knights relative to our Native population.  I would like to word this challenge in the following manner: it is not necessarily to set up councils of the Knights of Columbus on reservations.  I’m not at all certain how such an attempt would succeed.  My challenge is this: to always have our Native people in your mind when you think about the archdiocese.  This now is what I must do – have them in mind.  When I consider a statement of some sort, or a policy, I ask myself, “How will this be understood on the reservations, or among our aboriginals?”  I would ask that in this regard, you try to think the way that I think, and that you also ask yourselves the same questions that I ask myself.  On a large scale, globally, there is only hope for a new relationship between our Native Peoples and the rest of Canadian society if our consciousness is broadened to include them, in all things.  For today, Saturday, February 23rd, I think that is a sizeable enough challenge.

Once again, I thank you all for this opportunity to address you.  I rejoice that we have formed a new Council in our archdiocese, one named after our archdiocesan patron, St. Martin of Tours.  I congratulate those of you who have recently become Knights.  And I ask God to bless one and all in our archdiocese.  May we all grow to be saints in the Kingdom of God.  And that includes our Natives.  Amen.