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| Gordon's School. Students being transported to St. Luke's Church -- Oct. 11, 1953. |
TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION AT THE VILLAGE LEVEL
By Jim Harding
No Nukes
July 13, 2012
I once team-taught with an anthropologist from New Zealand who told me that if a community got bigger than 200, people lost track of each other. Face to face contact declined and third-party rumour increased, he suggested. I was telling him how quickly I seemed to be forgotten when I moved from a rural area to a large Ontario city to teach. He responded that “it’s far more than being out of sight, out of mind…it’s more like you’re already dead and gone.”
This old friend is now dead and gone and I think of him regularly and fondly, so I’m not sure that what he said was the whole story; he was a bit of a loner-wanderer with a streak of cynicism. But I am still predisposed to living in a small community where face-to-face relationships are more likely.
I once team-taught with an anthropologist from New Zealand who told me that if a community got bigger than 200, people lost track of each other. Face to face contact declined and third-party rumour increased, he suggested. I was telling him how quickly I seemed to be forgotten when I moved from a rural area to a large Ontario city to teach. He responded that “it’s far more than being out of sight, out of mind…it’s more like you’re already dead and gone.”
This old friend is now dead and gone and I think of him regularly and fondly, so I’m not sure that what he said was the whole story; he was a bit of a loner-wanderer with a streak of cynicism. But I am still predisposed to living in a small community where face-to-face relationships are more likely.
Read more HERE.
RECONCILIATION TAKES TWO
Residential school survivors gathered in Saskatoon critical of federal government's actions
By Sandra Cuffe
The Dominion
July 13, 2012
SASKATOON—The thunderclouds had scattered by morning when the sounds of footsteps, engines and drumbeats converged in Saskatchewan last month. Thousands of Indigenous residential school survivors, their relatives and people from different walks of life gathered in Saskatoon, traveling from all four directions.
From June 21 to 24, laughter, tears, songs and stories were in the air at Prairieland Park, where the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada held its fourth national event. Survivors who gave statements about their experiences and participants who witnessed the event reiterated the importance of documenting and understanding the truth of residential school history. But on the reconciliation of that history, consensus was not even on the horizon.
Read more HERE.
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