On October 20^th, the Craddock Lecture series will be making a triumphant return to Bloor Street United Church by asking the question: What does it mean to right historical wrongs? Hosted this year in-person by St. Matthew’s United Church and broadcast over Zoom, the lecture will begin with a talk by Douglas Sanderson, a Professor in the Faculty of Law at University of Toronto and co-author of Valley of the Birdtail.

The Craddock Lecture series began when Richard Humphrey Craddock, a mathematics teacher with the Etobicoke Board of Education, left in his will, a sizable donation of $10,000 to Bloor Street United Church in 1962. Mr. Humphrey intended the sum to be used to bring an “outstanding Preacher” to the church at least once a year. $10,000 may not seem like a huge amount today, but in 1962, that amount was equivalent to three years of Mr. Craddock’s salary. 

This year’s “outstanding Preacher” is none other than Douglas Sanderson. Douglas’ Cree name is Amo Binashii, and he is Swampy Cree, part of the Beaver clan and a member of the Opaskwayak Cree Nation, located in Northern Manitoba. 

He holds the Prichard Wilson Chair in Law and Public Policy and has served as a senior policy advisor to Ontario’s attorney general and minister of Indigenous affairs. Douglas has also co-authored a book with Andrew Stobo Sniderman, titled Valley of the Birdtail: An Indian Reserve, a White Town, and the Road to Reconciliation. 

In anticipation for his talk on the 20^th, I sat down with Douglas to discuss his book.

He told me about the beginnings of the book and how his co-author Andrew Stobo Sniderman, who was his student at time, “was really struck by how there was a real disparity between schools on-reserve and off-reserve”.

Stobo Sniderman would discover the town of Rossburn and Waywayseecappo First Nation, two small communities divided by a valley in Western Manitoba. At the time, the Waywayseecappo Community School was in the midst of joining the Rossburn School Board. A change that would add an extra $1.2 million for the school’s annual budget. 

Stobo Sniderman would continue his project until he determined he could not tell the story alone and brought his former professor on board. Over time, the goal of the book would evolve, Sanderson revealed. 

“What we kind of ended up wanting to do was something so much more ambitious than explaining the disparity of funding on-reserve schools versus provincial schools,” he explained. ”In some sort of real sense, we wanted to explain how it is that Canada got into this condition of just unimaginable inequality. You know, none of us needs to go far to see staggering inequalities between [Indigenous] and [non-Indigenous] Canadians…how did that happen?”

How did that happen? That is the driving question behind the book and the question I returned to many times when reading it. How did Canada come to be the way it is today? This question cannot be answered with one quick Google search, the history of communities like Waywayseecappo and Rossburn run too deep.

Douglas explained that the story of Waywayseecappo and Rossburn is really the story of Canada. “Two side-by-side communities, one of them gets one kind of treatment, access to cheap land and credit and markets and good schools and another community sort of right next door, [they] steal their children, deny them access to land, access to credits, access to markets.” 

“Just play that through all over the country, an Indian reserve next to a town,” said Sanderson. “If you run that experiment again, like 400 times over 150 years, what you get is Canada.”

In 2019, the Trudeau government would propose new interim regional funding models that provided comparable funding and considered variable cost factors of on-reserve schools, such as remoteness, school size and socio-economic conditions. This decision came just about two years prior to Valley of the Birdtail’s release, which only further stressed the importance of equitable funding.

I asked Douglas his opinion on the current state of on-reserve education. 

“It hasn’t been in place very long, but of course you know results happen very quickly when kids are given an honest chance,” he replied. “[Stobo Sniderman] will say that it’s not trying to make up for many many lost decades of underfunding, and that delivery is often more expensive on reserves for similar services, so similar funding might not even be equal funding in an important way. but to be fair, that particular situation is better than it was.”

Douglas describes the underfunding of on-reserve schools as “a symptom of the problem”. He explains that equal funding is not set in stone and that “governments just decide to do it and one day they’ll decide not to do it.”

For this reason, Douglas wants his readers to be concerned with “bigger structural questions about how we could actually bring about something that is a more equal vision of the country.” 

He often describes the book as hopeful, but finds himself questioning what exactly makes it hopeful? Saying, “we don’t make any promises about a brighter tomorrow or prove that everything is possible, I think we show that change is possible for people.”

That idea about living together side by side in a condition of equality is not a conversation we have had, or our parents had, or our grandparents had. Douglas explains “it’s a generational change that’s about rethinking what it means for us to live together in this space.”

A thought I have long found myself reflecting on, the hope of a better Canada does not come from the promises of the government, it comes from people willing to have this conversation, people wanting to see a future of equality for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples in all areas of life, not just education. 

The Craddock Lecture will focus on “What does it mean to right historical wrongs?”. Douglas will be going in-depth on why this is more complicated than we think. “What is it to right a wrong that happened now and what is it to right a wrong that happened a long time ago?” And the most daunting question, “How do we work towards reconciliation?”

The event will be held Sunday, October 20^th, 2024, at 10:30 AM at St. Matthew’s United Church in Toronto and on Zoom for anyone across Canada. There will be a lunch at 12:00 PM for in-person attendees and discussion groups for both in-person and online attendees from 1:00-2:00 PM.

For more on location and joining via Zoom, click here: https://bloorstreetunited.org/churchsocial-calendar/?event_id=65157&event_date=2024-10-20