Only the uninformed, the stubborn, or the mischievously contrarian would kick against accepting that Canadians missed the boat when we abandoned our historic compacts with Indigenous peoples in the northern half of the continent.

Centuries of injury, at times inflicted with abject cruelty, to Indigenous physical, spiritual, cultural, political and economic lives makes the case open and shut for all but those who gainsay for its own sake. 

On the non-Indigenous side, we traded away practical wisdom about Creation in exchange for neurotic guilt over paternalistic policies so hallucinogenically bizarre and profligately expensive that, to repeat the immortal words of Mr. Bob Dylan, it’s a wonder we can even feed ourselves.

Advertisement

Sadly, it seems that in failing to right-balance Indigenous-non-Indigenous relations for so long, we are poised to tip the canoe yet again. Of particular concern to Canadian Catholics and Christians is our inexplicable refusal to learn from Indigenous leaders across the country who have made assertion of religious belief and practice inseparable from their participation in political life.

As we report elsewhere in the Register, the Dec. 6 event at Montreal’s Trudeau Airport marking repatriation of 62 artifacts from the Vatican was an immersion in a 90-minute fusion of Indigenous politics, prayer and the spiritualization of the public square. 

The visual evidence was omnipresent in the symbols, iconography, decorative motifs, bodily postures and rituals for the initiated. The language, meanwhile, was unmistakably, unapologetically theological and worshipful.

Critics, of course, will dispute the theology and reject aspects of the worship as pagan beyond the pale. It’s true, too, that while many Indigenous faith traditions are historically and anthropologically authentic, a minority seem afflicted by the syndrome Buddhism suffered when taken up in the West by “Zen-lite” syncretists of the 1960s: water it down, drain it off, make the rest up. 

Advertisement

To which its true believers would doubtless respond: “It’s our belief, and we’re sticking to it.”

Which, thinking about it, is a great deal more than millions of non-Indigenous Christians – Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox and Other – do in the face of the incessant tide of secularism that has washed away not only belief, but the fundamental freedom to publicly espouse that belief. Of course, there are thousands of Christians who work diligently daily precisely to protect such freedom. Yet even they, valiant as their efforts are, can’t hold a candle to Indigenous insistence on living faith not just publicly but organically, that is as a native form of being.

Proof is in the December 6 “welcome home artifacts” event being held in Montreal, once part of the “beacon of light in French Catholic North America,” now a beachhead in the provincial government’s maneuvers to eradicate public displays of spiritual belief to pursue the jumped-up ideology of State-imposed laicité.

On that very battleground, Indigenous leaders began their event with a heartfelt prayer of gratitude to the Creator for the safe return of “the ancestors” who have taken on the form of the artifacts returned by the Vatican. There was, to be clear, not a note of “defiance” in the prayer or, for that matter, in any of the myriad references in later speeches to faith, belief, spirit, Creation etc. What emerged instead was a straightforward, unwavering, demonstrative, assertion: “What we believe is who we are.”

Granted, the affirmation came in a rented airport hotel conference room where not even Premier François Legault’s anti-creedal clean-up crew would dare to intrude. But it’s a safe bet that if the event had taken place outside City Hall in the heart of Old Montreal, Quebec’s political class would have been there with benevolent frozen smiles or mouthing words of Indigenous solidarity.

Advertisement

There is a lesson in the model here for all Christians, and especially for Catholics given that about a third of Indigenous people in Canada profess the Faith as devoutly and devotedly as any Canadian demographic group. There is a moment for getting on board to move, as one speaker at the Montreal event phrased it, from mere reconciliation to active reclamation.

For 35 years, Indigenous people in this country have been reclaiming their place in a social order they vigorously insist on reshaping and renewing. Some of the claim is, as these things historically are, made up on the fly. But far more importantly, it is rooted in a profound belief in the reality of a transcendent order created by God in compact – covenant – with humanity. We must not let these ships pass in the night again.