Deb Haaland ordered the Indian Boarding School Initiative last June, shortly after becoming the first Indigenous secretary of the interior in U.S. history, and just days after a B.C. First Nation announced the grim discovery of human remains at a former residential school.
That cathartic moment and the imminent release of Haaland's report have combined to put church leaders on notice in the U.S., where they are preparing for what they hope will be a period of reconciliation of their own. Haaland's investigation sought to identify all of the schools that were part of the program, with a particular emphasis on "any records relating to cemeteries or potential burial sites which may later be used to assist in locating unidentified human remains."
It's a chilling echo of words frequently attributed to Canada's first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald -- "take the Indian out of the child" -- in his 19th century defence of the Canadian residential school system. The report, scheduled for release in April, is expected to serve as a jumping-off point for a host of reconciliation efforts, Department of the Interior spokesman Tyler Cherry said in a statement.
Not only is Indigenous history dramatically different in the two countries, so too has been the scope and scale of the saga of residential schools -- known in the U.S. as boarding schools, Gone said in an interview. And while Indigenous issues have long been a driving force in Canadian racial politics, those same issues have largely been overshadowed in the U.S. by what he called the "Black-white" dynamic.