Elegy
Prince Albert Indian Residential School, Lac La Ronge, Canada, 1948. From the Library and Archives of Canada. Each summer has been a requiem to the dead. Shoulder to shoulder, as in congregational prayer, we fill streets and intone the names of the departed — each line a saf, each police-hemmed formation a prayer row. Our voices are hoarse; they break when there are no loudspeakers. Each protest is a kind of janazah, a funeral without a body.
May they rest in peace, may they rest in power, may they rest — ya rabb, forgive our living and our dead, may their graves be spacious and full of light, may we see their freedom in our lifetimes.
Years ago, I taught a course called Access to Justice to first-year law students. In Canadian legal practice, “access to justice” is a catchphrase with widely varying definitions, and in this school the course’s instructors had significant leeway to decide their class’s core focus. In broad terms, some elected to focus on the first part of the formulation: Access, often expressed as access to the law. How many people have lawyers? How can court systems adapt to accommodate the increasing numbers of litigants who cannot afford counsel? How might technology bridge the gap left by underfunded and overwhelmed free legal clinics?
Others, like myself, were no less curious about the second of the idiom’s parts: Justice. What constitutes justice? Revenge, relief, rehabilitation? What are we giving people access to?
Midway through the term, having set out many of these tensions, I turned to my students — two dozen odd, varying in age and race — and asked them how many knew what residential schools were.
In undergrad, I was made to read Duncan Campbell Scott’s poem “The Onondaga Madonna.”
Now more famous for his political career than his
