(Ubyssey)
Today the Indian Residential School History and Dialogue Centre at UBC was opened to the public in a ceremony that included a statement of apology, which was delivered by President Santa Ono, to Indian residential school survivors and, more generally, to Indigenous people, for the university’s involvement in the system that supported the operation of the schools.
“In June 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized in Parliament to the Aboriginal people of Canada for the Indian residential schools and the damage they created. Even so, few Canadians are aware of this history or its lasting harmful effects.
Their ignorance is no accident. Expressions of Aboriginal culture were banned by Canadian law from 1885 to 1951, and only recently has significant attention been given to Aboriginal history, experience, and perspectives in school curricula at any educational level.
Universities bear part of the responsibility for this history, not only for having trained many of the policy makers and administrators who operated the residential school system, and doing so little to address the exclusion from higher education that the schools so effectively created, but also for tacitly accepting the silence surrounding it. In years past, even after the signing of human rights declarations and ethics agreements that followed World War II, university professors conducted research on the residential schools that exploited their deplorable conditions without attempting to change them.
In modern times, the continuing failure to address this history has meant that the previous ways of thinking – or of not thinking – about the residential school system have remained largely intact. Failing to confront a heinous history, even if it is one that we did not cause, is to become complicit in its perpetuation. This is not a result that we, as a university, can accept.
That is why, today, on behalf of the UBC community, I apologize to you who were so affected by that system — for our participation in a system that has oppressed you, excluded you, and that, through intention or inaction, continues to cause offense.”
To read the full apology, visit the President’s Office website.
For a printable version of the apology, download the PDF.