When Noah MacDonald gets a call to visit a Catholic church and talk about truth and reconciliation, his reaction “is always an overwhelming sense of hope.”
MacDonald is a young Anishinaabe knowledge keeper from the Michipicoten First Nation in Northern Ontario. He is also Canada’s first Indigenous canon lawyer and a doctoral candidate at The Regis-St. Michael’s Faculty of Theology at the University of Toronto.
On Sunday, Sept. 28, for the third year running, MacDonald helped the downtown Toronto parish of Our Lady of Lourdes commemorate the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
At two morning masses in the large immigrant parish — including one streamed over YouTube and Facebook — MacDonald smudged the church and congregation and spoke about his hopes for healing and reconciliation between the Catholic Church and Indigenous peoples.
In most Catholic dioceses in Canada, the First Nations and Métis practice of smudging — burning a combination of sweetgrass, tobacco, cedar and sage as a sign of spiritual cleansing — is an approved form of the penitential rite that begins all Catholic masses.
“I get so much hope from communities like this,” MacDonald told Canadian Affairs. “That’s where reconciliation happens. It happens on the ground if it happens at all. It happens in church basements and in small meeting groups.”
Our Lady of Lourdes is not a small meeting group. The 800-seat church is home to seven masses every Sunday, including one in Tamil. The diverse, immigrant congregation sits between Toronto’s gay village and St. Jamestown, a dense neighbourhood that is home to thousands of immigrants. The Jesuit-run church is the spiritual home of people from the Philippines, Africa, India, Latin America and more.
MacDonald believes there is a natural alliance between new Canadians and Indigenous people.
“In my eyes, there’s no greater way of being Canadian than to engage in reconciliation,” he said. “It’s one that is so enriched by different cultures as well. They bring their own experiences and that makes it so much more enriching.”
Orange t-shirts
Maria Leo, an immigrant from India and a volunteer lector in the parish, wore her orange shirt to mass on Sunday.
“We are so proud to wear this orange shirt. We will always wear it on the 30th,” said the 50-something teacher at St. Joseph’s Catholic School in Mississauga, Ont.
Leo believes immigrants understand better than most the importance of truth and reconciliation.
“Being part of this beautiful country called Canada, even we [immigrants] are in regret,” she said. “We want to be part of the people who first owned this beautiful land. We want to be part of them, as well. To support them, help them.”
Libby Blaskova, who came from Slovakia in 2000, sees the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation as part of being Canadian and Catholic.
“We live on the land that is actually not ours. It belongs to somebody else,” she said. “Any nations that ever come over here, we took over all the land.”
Growing up in Slovakia, most of what Blaskova knew about Indigenous peoples came from Western movies and books. Now she compares it to “going back to the Holocaust.”
“At least wearing the T-shirt I can — I don’t know whether ‘acknowledge’ is the right word — but at least say that it has happened,” said Blaskova, who works at a health spa.
Multicultural vision
A 2022 research paper showed Canadian immigrants were more likely to support Indigenous peoples than the Canadian born, despite being less familiar with residential schools and governments’ efforts to advance reconciliation.
“Even if immigrants aren’t socialized in Canada at a young age, that’s not an obstacle to building understanding and support for reconciliation,” wrote researchers Andrew Parkin, Anna Triandafyllidou and Seyda Ece Aytac, who drew on Environics Institute survey data for their work.
Immigrants are naturally drawn to a vision of Canada as an alliance of many nations, rather than the traditional French-English bi-national view of Canadian history, they said.
Indigenous Canadians have long been concerned with how Canada’s history is taught to immigrants. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s 94 Calls to Action included a call for Indigenous input on what newcomers are taught about Canada when they apply for citizenship.
The commission demanded Ottawa consult the Assembly of First Nations, the Metis National Council and the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami representative bodies on a revised information kit for a new citizenship test “to reflect a more inclusive history of the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Canada, including information about the Treaties and the history of residential schools.”
So far, Ottawa has completed an extensive consultation process, but has not yet issued a new citizenship test or study guide.
In his own experience, MacDonald finds conversations about truth and reconciliation easier among downtown immigrants than in whiter, suburban or rural parishes.
“There’s pre-conceived notions or problems that are held, that can sometimes be harder to break down with someone coming from the suburbs or from a small town outside of Toronto,” he said.
“There’s a lot that rural parishes or the rest of Canada can learn from a parish such as this — of openness, engagement and ultimately friendship.”
Michael Swan is a parishioner at Our Lady of Lourdes and co-ordinator of the parish organization that presents the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation at the parish.
