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	Residential School Commission Hears Stories of Healing from Rwanda, South Africa Winnipeg Free Press March 3, 2011 http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/canada/breakingnews/residential-school-commission-hears-stories-of-healing-from-rwanda-south-africa-117361078.html VANCOUVER - After his four sisters were butchered in the Rwandan genocide, Freddy Mutanguha's only desire was to kill his enemies. Nearly two decades after surviving the 100-day slaughter, the 34-year-old is now willing to hire his former foes into his workplace and even welcome them to move in next door. It was a long, visceral and delicate healing process propelled by pointed government action, attendance at annual memorials and a resolute president who refused to allow revenge, Mutanguha said in an interview after speaking to a commission looking into Canada's aboriginal residential schools. "My case is the case of many thousands and thousands of people," Mutanguha said. "This is how I can measure the progress." Mutanguha acknowledged many scars still blotch his homeland, but he shared insights into repairing a wounded nation with the Canadian commissioners during a three-day forum this week in Vancouver. "Reconciliation is possible," said Mutanguha, who is now working as director for the African country's largest memorial to the approximately 800,000 Rwandans slain in 1994. "When people achieve to be in the shoes of others, you can come from the pain to dialogue." Hundreds of participants joined Mutanguha to hear or describe their own knowledge and experiences of living through some of the gravest recent tragedies of humankind for officials with the federal Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In Canada, about 150,000 First Nations, Inuit and Metis children were taken from their families and put into state and church-run schools before the last school closed in 1996. Many suffered emotional, physical and sexual abuse, inflicting profound harm that has been passed down the generations. As part of its five-year mandate, the commission plans to establish a National Research Centre as a permanent resource for learning and teaching about what happened. It's better for authorities to take steps towards righting egregious wrongs than doing nothing, said Catherine Kennedy, director of the history archive working to tell the impact of South African apartheid. But she warned the commission to not get tangled in the same traps of South Africa's truth and reconciliation commission, which has been widely touted as a great success. "It ended up being about individual stories and a few rotten-apple perpetrators, rather than the complicity of white South Africa, and the complicity of big business who profiteered relentlessly and scrupulously off apartheid policies," she said, arguing institutionalized racism wasn't addressed. "Everybody holds it up as the example, and it's made — I think — South Africans quite complacent and quite self-congratulatory about the work that they still need to do." Since the commission's reports and recommendations were issued in 1998 and 2003, more than C$140 million in reparations still haven't been distributed, about 300 prosecutions have come to a standstill and the mammoth collection of documents, video and audio records gathered during the public hearings have been under government lock and key. Kennedy said she feels the commission rushed into trying to mend fences without a solid blueprint, and that's something Canadians should keep top of mind. "You need to woo political champions, you actually need to build partnerships now so that it isn't this isolated commission," she said, urging numerous levels of government, universities, organizations and society as a whole to keep pushing the issues forward. "While this is going on, you've got to capitalize on getting as many people as possible to recognize the importance of this, and to recognize that this is only a starting point." Australia's "stolen generation" of Aborigines — children who were forcibly removed from their families until about the 1970s — waited a decade after a report said they'd been wronged before the country's prime minister issued a formal apology. A few months later in 2008, Prime Minister Stephen Harper used strikingly similar words to express regrets to aboriginals across Canada. Aboriginals in both countries share a common set of damaging experiences, said Joanna Sassoon, project manager with the National Library of Australia. She's worked towards collecting the oral histories of hundreds of similar people who lost their identities because they were forced into institutionalized care, and said such an endeavour requires building tremendous trust. "People have found the experience to be very empowering and very validating," she said. "(But) the survivors need to know who is going to watch over their life." Note to readers: This is a corrected story. An earlier version said in paragraph 8 that the last residential school closed in the 1980s.
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