The 17-member commission held its second meeting at St. Peter’s Church on the Six Nations Reserve in southwestern Ontario from Nov. 6 to 8, welcoming Janaki Bandara from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Canada to the commission.
Finlay and Wesley reported that the commission began to develop a theological reflection on the Doctrine of Discovery, its continuing impact and ways that it might be dismantled. Secondly, members discussed “what reconciliation looks like in parishes and communities, particularly around the understanding of healing and wholeness and the Circle of Life,” which Wesley explained is a part of the teachings of the medicine wheel. Thirdly, they explored how the quality of life in indigenous communities could be improved by understanding the nature of treaties and the Indian Act, an act that he said “crippled the aboriginal people” after it was passed in 1951 and became law.
Read it all from the Anglican Journal.
I thought that the Indian Act was from 1876. The Canadian discourse on the Doctrine of Discovery has always had a conceptual handicap that it never had a place in Canadian law, which has tended to support a doctrine of cessation of sovereignty by treaty (with major exceptions of the land covered by the 1763 Royal Proclamation and British Columbia’s century-long attempt to ignore the legal presence of the First Nations). I always found it puzzling that the Primate and his roadies were trying to place it in the Canadian discussion, which is far more complex and subtle.