It is fitting that a royal commission operating in the name of the people of Canada is looking into the issue because in a fundamental sense the party that bears most responsibility for the residential school story is the people of Canada.

      If people get the government they deserve, then the people are responsible in a moral sense for what government does in its name. At a minimum, Canadians, their politicians, and their mainline Christian churches ought to do two things. First, the process of denial and evasion should be replaced with candour and willingness to help Native communities repair the damage done to them.

      The other duty that the history of residential schooling places in the laps of Canadians is the obligation to ensure that it never happens again. The root of the problem with residential schools was not religious instruction, inadequate teaching, insufficient vocational training, or any other specific feature of the schools' operation. The essence of the problem was the assumption of Euro-Canadians - churches, governments, people - that they, because of their racial superiority to Aboriginal people, knew better than the Native communities and their leaders what was in the best interests of those dependent groups.

       Recent events show that the we-know-best-what's-good-for-you attitude is still alive and kicking. At the height of the Oka crisis in the summer and autumn of 1990, the minister of Indian affairs lectured an assembly of chiefs in Ottawa on how they ought to have behaved during the resistance. Early in 1993, when journalists exposed the horrors of solvent abuse among Innu children at Davis Inlet, Ottawa agreed to a long-standing request by the band to relocate them to a better place on the Labrador coast. The television lights had barely cooled down when the premier of the province began telling chief Katie Rich that he knew better than she to what spot they should relocate.