Pope Brings Healing? Canadian Consul Sows Seeds of Hatred

The following is a Letter to the Editor at VTDigger, written by Randy Kritkausky of Whiting, VT and Lachine, QC, and published July 28, 2022. Original url here.

Across Canada, news of Pope Francis’s visit and apology to Canada’s First Nations is greeted with relief. News story after news story describes the roles of the Catholic Church and Canadian government in residential schools designed as vehicles for erasure of the nation’s Indigenous population. 

We read about the pope’s visit as a milestone in implementing Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation process, a laudable effort to correct historical injustices.

Inexplicably, promoting reconciliation with Indigenous populations seems to end at the U.S. border. On this side of that boundary, Canada has actively sown seeds of hatred and attempted to undermine, indeed to reverse, Vermont’s own attempts at reconciliation with its Indigenous population, the Abenaki. 

The Canadian Consul’s office funded a forum at the University of Vermont platforming individuals, both Indigenous and mainstream, who are extreme outliers in their own communities. They made outrageous, hateful and untruthful claims about Vermont’s Abenaki population, arguing that they are “fake Indians” and that our state Legislature’s recognition of four Abenaki bands should be voided. 

The same spokespeople then claimed that a Canadian Abenaki community should be recognized by Vermont as the only real Abenaki in our state. The voices that the Canadian Consul’s office funded then argued that Vermont’s Abenaki have no right to teach their language and engage in their own traditional ceremonies. 

That is cultural erasure, Canadian-sponsored.

The Canadian Consul personally appeared at the forum, thereby lending his official embrace of the event’s political agenda. Not only is this contrary to Canada’s policy of reconciliation, it is a violation of diplomatic protocol to fund efforts to overturn democratic due process in a neighboring foreign state.

The repercussions of the April event still resonate across our state, impacting the Abenaki, and even Indigenous people like me who are not Abenaki. We all feel threatened by the seeds of animosity which have been sown.

Pope Francis has traveled to Canada in a gesture of healing and is offering an apology for his institution’s role in the cultural erasure of indigenous people. I respectfully request that the Canadian Consul follow in the pope’s footsteps and apologize for his recent involvement in the attempted cultural erasure of Vermont’s indigenous population.