Japanese Canadian group backs school survivors

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Keiko Miki, president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC), attended a ceremony in Winnipeg on April 14 to call on the government of Canada to compensate former residential school students for loss of language and culture.

It was 16 years to the day after some 500 Japanese-Canadians and their supporters had rallied on Parliament Hill in 1988 to call for redress for people of Japanese heritage who had been denied basic human and citizenship rights by Canada during and after the Second World War.

Japanese Canadians were placed in detention camps, in some cases deported and stripped of their Canadian citizenship and their possessions, and treated like criminals under the War Measures Act because their ancestors were from a nation that was allied with Nazi Germany.

On Sept. 22, 1988, then-prime minister Brian Mulroney announced in the House of Commons that a redress settlement had been negotiated by NAJC and the federal government to acknowledge the injustices.

It included a payment of $21,000 to each Japanese Canadian affected by the provisions of the War Measures Act. A $12 million community fund was established to help rebuild community infrastructure and an additional $24 million was allocated to establish the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.

Residential school survivors, their lawyers and Native leaders have complained that the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) process set up by the Office of Residential Schools Resolution Canada limits compensation and excludes compensation for loss of language and culture. Government documents show that the residential school system was designed to strip Indigenous peoples of their traditional cultures and languages to force them to assimilate into Canadian society.

At the April 14 ceremony, Miki read a letter she had written to Denis Coderre, the minister responsible for the Office of Indian Residential Schools Resolution Canada (RSRC).

"The current ADR minimizes and demeans the experience of child victims and assumes that a conventional personal claims settlement process related to sexual and physical assault, injury and confinement is sufficient to deal with the residential school issue," she said. "The process ignores the historical irresponsibility of the church and state, including the fiduciary relationship issue between Canada and First Nations peoples and the pervasive losses for victims of mental, physical, emotional, health, cultural teachings and Aboriginal languages, etc. The fallout will continue on from generation to generation unless victims and their families are satisfied that a fair and just settlement has been reached."

She added that the NAJC is "strongly condemning the government's ADR process," saying it denies "a timely, compassionate and just resolution."

She urged the government to work with survivors "to correct the flaws in the ADR process immediately so that all survivors can finally begin to heal with the dignity and respect that they deserve and to bring some measure of closure to this sad episode in their lives."