By Bill Chu

SINCE 1995, when South Africa initiated its Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the world has been abuzz with this new word ‘reconciliation.’

According to Wikipedia, 17 other countries, including Canada, have since initiated their own Truth and Reconciliation Commissions.

That list does not include efforts between Israelis and Palestinians, the British and the Irish in Northern Ireland, Tutsis and Hutus, Serbs and the Muslims in Bosnia, blacks and whites in the United States, the rich and the poor, and others.

So what has reconciliation to do with us living in the ‘the best place on earth?’

Is Canada not already known for its human rights, peacekeeping and multiculturalism?

Indeed, against our postcard-like cityscape, it is tempting even for Christians to agree with the political mantra that we are close to being in heaven.

Let us reason together

Let us start from where we all can agree: that despite our covenant to manage the creation as recorded in Genesis 9, all of us have sinned and come short of the glory of God.

Our mismanagement has been both personal and communal.

Despite the 1974 Lausanne Covenant, most evangelicals still focus on personal sins but miss out on the broader communal sins.

By missing our general calling, we unconsciously participate in and support environmental destruction, economic exploitation, racism, militarism, gentrification, etc.

Yet Romans 6:1-4 reminds us that we cannot continue to live in sin and mismanage the creation.

While God will finally deliver the creation from being held in bondage to man's depravity, sin has been the cause of all the sufferings and groanings of the creation.

As the above may be too general a statement to prove the need for reconciliation in B.C, we will highlight two people groups who have suffered much injustice here – both disenfranchised until the late 1940s, both excluded from being given free tracts of land for homesteading in 1875 and both subjected to at least a century of racism.

The truth regarding aboriginals

The heart-wrenching truth about aboriginals is so well hidden that most Christians accept the politicians’ answer: the government is spending billions on the aboriginals annually, but they choose to live their own lifestyle (in abject poverty).

To make this more believable, our government has even had a ministry renamed the Ministry of Aboriginal Relations and Reconciliation (MARR).

This is in addition to the creation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada (TRC) in 2008 to publicize the crimes committed in native residential schools.

However such liberal use of the word gives two false impressions about reconciliation.

One is that reconciliation is a top-down effort and that we in the grassroots are just bystanders to a reconciliation show.

The second is that forgiveness is expected from victims while repentance is not demanded from perpetrators.

That is reflected by the TRC not requiring the perpetrators of crimes to meet their victims and admit their guilt, and by the unrepentant MARR, which continues to ignore aboriginal titles and rights.

From two decades of sojourning with aboriginals, I see that we are still far from closure and the ending of enmity implied by the word ‘reconciliation.’

Recently I ran into a distraught native mom whose three day old baby had been taken away by the Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD).

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This was the sixth child taken from her to foster homes, with the six costing MCFD at least $10,000 per month!

More shocking is that four generations of her family were apprehended as children – her grandmother and mother into residential schools, and she and all her children into foster homes. The excuse for removing her baby was her lack of “intellectual and psychological capacity!”

So instead of healing and empowering their traumatized victims, our government has chosen to revictimize them, resulting in natives making up 60 percent of British Columbia’s foster children!

Historic attitudes to Chinese

It should surprise no one that the rise of the British Empire came at the expense of the many countries they tried to colonize.

When China lost the Opium War to stop the opium trade being imposed by Britain, it ceded to Britain the colony of Hong Kong and $21 million in reparations.

Towards the end of the 19th century, China’s coastline was cut up into spheres of influence for eight foreign nations, including Britain and the United States.

The pillage of ancient cultural artifacts and the looting of Beijing and the Forbidden City by the eight-nation alliance just added to the misery, distrust and tension.

The powerful Church of England failed to fulfill the church’s prophetic role and chose to bless what England did, including its colonial expansion. Had it been faithful to the kingdom of God rather than to that of men, the church could have prevented massive colonial injustice.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution in 1858 also nurtured the illusion that western culture was more highly evolved and so should survive. This fueled the superiority complex among British Columbia’s white settlers, who needed but did not want the Chinese to build the white colony.

Racism was also buoyed by eugenics. Although made notorious by Nazi Germany, eugenics was enforced by law in British Columbia and Alberta.

In February 1935, 65 Chinese ‘lunatics’ were shipped back to China using their mental state as an excuse. In B.C., the Act authorizing this was not repealed until 1972.

This, together with the late withdrawal of all discriminatory legislation against the Chinese in 1967, may explain why Trudeau’s new policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s, with no accompanying apology, was a hollow response to a century of racism towards Chinese Canadians.

Why must we engage?

As Christians charged with the care of the creation, we need to realize that we live in the shadow of an empire which colonized this province we now call home.

Just like Paul the apostle, who was a Roman citizen living in a Roman colony, we can either claim all the privileges of the empire’s citizenship or we can declare its irrelevance by submitting ourselves to the higher demands of God’s kingdom.

Our challenge is to consider whether the sad history and condition of others should be acknowledged in this colony, whether the brokenness that marred our relationships with each other should be healed and whether the perpetrators should be restored to wholeness again.

When false prophets are saying “Peace, peace” when there is no peace, Christians need to recall we have been given the ministry of reconciliation (2 Corinthians 5:18-19), with redemption being the fulfillment of God’s purposes in all of creation and not just in the individual man.

Bill Chu chairs Canadians For Reconciliation.

Dozens of Chinese Canadians stood and applauded September 20, when the City of New Westminster offered a formal apology for the racism and discrimination that Chinese Canadians have suffered for more than a century.

New Westminster is the first city to apologize for injustices against Chinese Canadians. The apology came as a result of a request from Canadians For Reconciliation, led by Bill Chu.

October 2010