Cruickshank’s Interior Legacy

Kamloops This Week
February 11, 2016

http://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/cruickshanks-interior-legacy/

IN THE PHOTO: James Cruickshank was known as Bishop Jim to those in the church. He paved the way to hearing stories and apologizing to people in the Lytton area after sexual and physical abuse at the former St. George’s residential school. Cruickshank died on Dec. 30, 2015, at age 79. Anglican Journal photo

Kamloops’ Anglican community will come together tomorrow to celebrate the life of the last bishop to lead a diocese that once stretched from Lytton to Valemount.

James Cruickshank — Bishop Jim to those in the church — died on Dec. 30, 2015 at the age of 79.

Elected bishop of Cariboo in 1992, Cruickshank was the last to hold the post before the diocese shut down in 2001 after lawsuits over sexual and physical abuses at the former St. George’s residential school in Lytton left it bankrupt. He’d previously served as Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Kamloops.

Bishop of the Anglican Parishes of the Central Interior Barbara Andrews said while coming to the decision to close the diocese was “a huge thing for us,” Cruickshank chose to focus his work on healing and reconciliation with First Nations, who made up about one-fifth of the Cariboo’s congregants, according to media reports of the day.

One year into his term as bishop, he apologized for abuse at the school, which closed in 1972, on behalf of the diocese.

“Somewhere along the line, the government of Canada established a policy to assimilate native people,” he told a Washington Post reporter not long before the diocese closed. “That was tragic. We bought into it. They were told Christianity was superior to native spirituality. They were told not to speak their language. A huge destruction came from it and we can’t deny that.”

Andrews said that attitude has become Cruickshank’s legacy in the Interior.

“Jim led the beginning of hearing the stories and finding a way to move forward, just in the way that the Truth and Reconciliation commissions are now suggesting we do as a country,” she said. “Bishop Jim was the first to begin to hear those stories and make apology to our own people in the Lytton area.”

Once the Cariboo diocese ceased to exist, Cruickshank returned to Vancouver, where he had served as the Dean and Rector of Christ Church Cathedral, to become a professor at the Vancouver School of Theology.

Tomorrow’s service will begin at 11 a.m. at St. Paul’s Cathedral, 360 Nicola St.