"Land Back" & Papal Audiences

By Hymie Rubenstein

NEARLY THREE MONTHS after it signed a "Sacred covenant" on March 31, 2024, Easter Sunday, Tk̓emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation (legally known as the Kamloops Indian Band) posted the contents of the agreement with Canada’s Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Vancouver and the Diocese of Kamloops, British Columbia, on June 21, National Indigenous Peoples Day.

The covenant was said to reflect “our mutual acknowledgment of past wrongs, particularly the Catholic Church's role in the country’s Residential School System, and a shared commitment to truth, reconciliation, and the future,” according to a press release the next day.

A message from Pope Francis conveyed by Cardinal Pietro Parolin, the Vatican’s Secretary of State, was shared during the ceremony accompanying the covenant’s ceremonial signing on the Kamloops reserve in which “The Pope extended his greetings and support for the Covenant, viewing it as a step towards fulfilling the call for the Church and Indigenous Peoples of Canada to walk together, pray together, and work together" towards reconciliation.

Land Implications

WHAT THE ONLY detailed discussions of the contents of the sacred covenant found here, here, here, and here failed to address was its most important feature, namely its “land back” implications. In particular, the covenant may be viewed as a land surrender initiative masquerading as a spiritual agreement, an attempt to either repudiate the idea of the conquest of Canada or the signing of the land treaties.

Although it masquerades its objectives under the language of “reconciliation,” the covenant is an overtly political document promoting land back and nation-to-nation sovereignty under the guise of a purported centuries-long political and nation-to-nation alliance between Indian Bands in Canada and the Papacy.

Several sections in the covenant clearly reveal its land back and nation-to-nation sovereignty objectives.  Under the heading “Historical Precedent for a Sacred Accord,” there are fleeting references to the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery,” a 19th century term for early European colonization projects, which Pope Francis recently repudiated – even though it never applied to the Catholic Church as it is usually expressed – one of many such repudiations by his Church going back centuries, after decades-long pressure from Indian activists, and to the imaginary Concordat of June 24, 1610 between the Mi'kmaq and Pope Paul V for which no evidence exists. The repudiation of the Doctrine of Discovery and the alleged existence of the Concordat bolster claims that Indigenous lands should be returned to their “rightful” owners and that Indian Bands in Canada should be treated by sovereign powers on a nation-to-nation basis.

This is certainly not the position of prominent National Post investigative journalist Terry Glavin who claimed on July 2 that:

The idea of the covenant began among leading Tk’emlúps families who had become fed up, early on, with having to go along with stories about nuns waking children in the middle of the night to bury their murdered classmates. The Easter covenant was the result of an intervention by the Catholic clergy, former Tk’emlúps chief Manny Jules and former national chief Phil Fontaine on behalf of Indigenous Catholics who’d had to sit there and shut up while their Catholic faith and their traditions were assaulted and their beloved churches were burned to the ground.

More particularly, Glavin presents no evidence that the covenant was instigated as an Indigenous-led effort to set the record straight about the following May 27, 2021, press release from the Kamloops Indian Band that was heard around the world:

It is with a heavy heart that Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc Kukpi7 (Chief) Rosanne Casimir confirms an unthinkable loss that was spoken about but never documented by the Kamloops Indian Residential School. This past weekend, with the help of a ground penetrating radar specialist, the stark truth of the preliminary findings came to light – the confirmation of the remains of 215 children who were students of the Kamloops Indian Residential School…. We had a knowing in our community that we were able to verify. To our knowledge, these missing children are undocumented deaths. Some were as young as three years old.

Glavin’s position has little credibility given that on May 27, 2024 Chief Casimir continued to claim that “Our investigators’ findings to date are consistent with the presence of unmarked burials” and that the covenant continues to argue that “past wrongs” included chronic “spiritual, cultural, emotional, physical, and sexual abuse of Indigenous children in Catholic-run residential schools.”

In particular, the covenant declares that: children were forcibly removed from their homes to attend these schools; they were deliberately isolated from “the influence of their homes, families, traditions, and cultures”; “Aboriginal cultures and beliefs were [considered] inferior and unequal; “children were inadequately fed, clothed, and housed”; “First Nations languages and cultural practices were prohibited by government policy in these schools”; and children died at the schools in high numbers.

This is why Glavin’s assertion that “… it [the covenant] should go some distance in healing divisions that have opened up among and between lay Catholics and clergy about the way the church hierarchy, including the Vatican, has responded to the clamour [about the harms associated with Indian Residential School attendance]” has no believability: these and related assertions have been shown to be uncorroborated, distorted, decontextualized, or exaggerated here, here, here, here, and here.

Conversely, two sections in the covenant plainly reveal its “land back” purpose. The first, listed under the heading “Historical Precedent for a Sacred Accord,” once more dismisses the Doctrine of Discovery as applying to the Catholic Church.

In particular, the covenant re-confirmed that on June 2, 1537, Pope Paul III promulgated a bull relating to the rationality, souls, and rights to freedom and personal property of any Indigenous people encountered by Catholics in their universal conversion mission, followed by this quotation from it:

We, who, though unworthy, exercise on earth the power of our Lord and seek with all our might to bring those sheep of His flock who are outside into the fold committed to our charge, consider, however, that the Indians are truly men and that they are not only capable of understanding the Catholic Faith but, according to our information, they desire exceedingly to receive it. Desiring to provide ample remedy for these evils, We define and declare by these Our letters, or by any translation thereof signed by any notary public and sealed with the seal of any ecclesiastical dignitary, to which the same credit shall be given as to the originals, that, notwithstanding whatever may have been or may be said to the contrary, the said Indians and all other people who may later be discovered by Christians, are by no means to be deprived of their liberty or the possession of their property, even though they be outside the faith of Jesus Christ; and that they may and should, freely and legitimately, enjoy their liberty and the possession of their property; nor should they be in any way enslaved; should the contrary happen, it shall be null and have no effect. (emphasis in original)

Speciously reinforcing this papal bull, the covenant also listed under the heading “Confirmation of Truths, “that Father Jean-Marie-Raphael Le Jeune, Chief Louis Clexlixqen (Xlexléxken), and Chief Johnny Chiliheetza (Ts̓ elcíts̓ e7) visited Pope Pius X in 1904 to petition his support for Indigenous jurisdiction and title over Indigenous lands,” property never mentioned in the 1537 agreement.

This claim was also highlighted in expanded form by Archbishop J. Michael Miller, head of the Vancouver Catholic Archdiocese in his March 31 sacred covenant address:

In 1904, Chiefs Louis Clexlixqen of Kamloops and Johnnie Chilleheetsa of Douglas Lake accompanied Father Le Jeune, an Oblate priest, across two continents to meet Pope Pius X in Rome. There they advocated for the rights and title of First Nations people in this region, and they showed how their work together had advanced language and trade. While in Rome, Chief Johnnie and Chief Louis, took part in an exhibition of stenography, at which they received three gold and five silver medals.

Kamloops Bishop Joseph Nguyen, Archbishop Miller, and special assistant Barb Dowding, blanketed Indigenous-style at the covenant signing. (Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc photo)

Challenging the Veracity

AS FOR GLAVIN'S position, he is correct that “The covenant was set in motion by the interventions of former Tk̓emlúps chief Manny Jules and former Assembly of First Nations national chief Phil Fontaine,” both long-time Indigenous political activists, when they developed an early draft of its contents.

Jules is a former Kamloops Band chief who appears to believe tales of six-year-old children secretly burying bodies late at night outside the reserve’s long shuttered boarding school; Fontaine is a former Assembly of First Nations national chief and one of the first people to publicly address residential school sexual abuse at the hands of unnamed assailants, likely other students. 

Manny Jules, who attended the Kamloops Indian Residential School as a day student from grades 1-7 between 1959 and 1967, the period when bodies were allegedly buried in secrecy beside the institution, was briefly chief of staff to Phil Fontaine. When asked in a June 1, 2021, interview on CBC’s The Current whether he had heard stories of secretly buried children, he said, “Everyone did. I heard them, you know, from my parents and I heard them from other residential school survivors. You know, you just know that this is the situation right across the country.”

This is hard to believe because Jules had never publicly identified secret burials or reported them to the RCMP during his own tenure as chief. Nor did he ever search for the burials he claimed he knew about from his parents, despite the fact that the Band participated in an archaeological excavation program on the Kamloops Reserve led by Dr. George Nicholas of Simon Fraser University. Neither did he testify about secret burials to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), the government commissioned body charged with reporting on the history, operation, and legacy of the country’s Indian Residential Schools, when it held two days of hearings in Kamloops in May 2013, or acknowledge that it was his sister, Diena Jules, who instigated the ground penetrating radar (GPR) work at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School but said nothing about secret burials before doing so.

As for Phil Fontaine, Canada’s Indian Residential Schools took centre stage after he was interviewed in 1990 on CBC television by the late Barbara Frum. Fontaine, then Manitoba Regional Chief of the Assembly of First Nations, unexpectedly made allegations of widespread sexual abuse at the residential school he had attended as a child: “In my grade three class ... if there were 20 boys, every single one of them ... would have experienced what I experienced. They would have experienced some aspect of sexual abuse.” Although Fontaine did not elaborate, the scale of what he described suggested widespread student-on-student abuse, an allegation supported by evidence in the TRC Report which said “student abuse of fellow students was a serious and widespread problem,” a position also supported by TRC Chief Commissioner Murray Sinclair.

When Fontaine filed a class action lawsuit prior to the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement which ended these claims, he stated that the “sexual abuse” consisted of having to bathe in the presence of a priest, something all the Grade 3 boys were required to do when they had their weekly shower and got a change of clothing for the upcoming week.

Although these readily available facts should have raised obvious red flags about possible exaggeration, deception, or fabrication by both of these high-ranking Aboriginal leaders in their work developing the sacred covenant, Archbishop Miller’s Delegate for Operations in the Archdiocese of Vancouver, James Borkowski, blithely claimed “What kept us progressing was a commitment to truth, wherever it takes us, and a desire to avoid divisiveness in this work.” Translation: avoiding divisiveness means accepting Indigenous assertions as unassailable.

Unassailable as they may be to the Catholic Church, the “confirmation of truths” about  a 1904 meeting with Pope Pius X, has no historical verification. The words expressed in both the covenant and by Archbishop Miller have originated from stories told by either Jules or Fontaine or “knowings” passed down orally from generation to generation by Indigenous “knowledge keepers.” But there is no written historical evidence that these three men petitioned Pope Pius X “for Indigenous jurisdiction and title over Indigenous lands” during their attendance at a general Papal audience in Rome in 1904.

Whether a discussion of land tenure took place and how the Pope responded to it is important because such petitions for territory and property, including demands to repatriate land and artifacts owned by the Catholic Church, are today at the heart of Indigenous grievances in British Columbia where few treaties land treaties were ever signed and the rest of Canada where there were many formal land transfers.

Demonstrating that the Roman Catholic Church fully supports a “land back” movement reinforces the position of many Aboriginal organizations like the Anishinabek Union of Ontario Indians that:

• “Land was never ceded or surrendered
• Promises were made to share the land with the newcomers and allow them to live on Anishinaabeg territories in turn for financial compensation (e.g., rent)
• In many places these were to be conditional agreements
• Lands and waters were stolen through many different ways
• Doctrine of Discovery was used to justify theft of land and to create Canada
• Maps were redrawn to erase Indigenous peoples and nations even though they still exist today
• Moving forward requires everyone working together and re-envisioning new maps, land sharing based on financial compensation and the return of lands”

Critics of the many land treaties signed with Indigenous people have argued that oral tradition says their Aboriginal signatories “never surrendered their traditional territories. Instead, they agreed to share the land, to the depth of a plow, in exchange for gifts, annual payments and assistance when in need” because “the surrender of lands was never discussed during the treaty negotiations.” They also claim that “The text of treaty was read publicly at each negotiation, but the commissioners carefully selected interpreters who were in favour of treaty, and held the readings only after the close of negotiations.”

Such assertions allowed former Assembly of First Nations head Matthew Coon Come to proclaim, “I am not a Canadian” and to declare “All of it” when asked how much of Canada belongs to its indigenous inhabitants.

The covenant clearly recognized this “land back” preoccupation when it stated, “That the dioceses will renew their commitments to support a fair and just recognition and implementation of First Nation jurisdiction and title” under its Commitments to Action section.

But did a discussion of Indigenous land grievances take place when Father Jean-Marie-Raphael Le Jeune, Chief Louis Clexlixqen, and Chief Johnny Chiliheetza visited Pope Pius X in 1904, as the covenant proclaims, justifying this promised “commitment to action”?

There is no better to answer this question than by comparing it to an audience in front of the same Pope in the same year by a different land petitioner.

Herzl’s Petition for Zionism

THEODOR HERZL (1860-1904) was a Jewish journalist, lawyer, writer, playwright, and political activist who was the father of modern political Zionism. He formed the Zionist Organization and tirelessly promoted Jewish immigration to Palestine in an effort to form a Jewish state. Specifically mentioned in the Israeli Declaration of Independence, he is officially referred to as "the spiritual father of the Jewish State."

On January 26, 1904, Herzl was received in audience by Pope Pius X at the Holy See in Rome where he tried to convince the Vatican to support the Zionist “land back” movement. Pius X was respectful towards Herzl, but resolutely refused to support Zionism in any way.

Herzl kept detailed notes about his audience with Pope. These are well worth quoting to contrast them with the diary entries of Father Le Jeune.

Herzl, by then well known in European political circles, travelled to Rome in Jan. 1904 after the sixth Zionist Congress and six months before his death, looking for support for the recreation of the State of Israel.

On January 22, Herzl first met the Secretary of State, Cardinal Rafael Merry del Val.

According to Herzl’s private diary notes, the Cardinal agreed on the history of Israel being the same as the one of the Catholic Church, but asked beforehand for a conversion of Jews to Catholicism.

Herzl recorded his account of the January 25 meeting in his diary abbreviated as follows:

Father Le Jeune et al.’s Papal Audience 

CONTRAST THE PAPAL audience on October 4, 1904, and the events that preceded it to the on described in the diary in which Father Le Jeune made daily entries from the day he and the chiefs left Kamloops to the day of their audience with the Pope.

The backstory of this audience is as follows. Born in France, Jean-Marie-Raphaël Le Jeune (1855-1930) was ordained as an Oblate of Mary Immaculate Roman Catholic priest on June 7, 1879. He volunteered for service in British Columbia and arrived in New Westminster – the Oblate headquarters in the province – in October 1879.

“Charged primarily with the proselytization of native people in the region,” over the following decades, he held several positions in different of the province but never rose in rank in the Church hierarchy.

Le Jeune was very active among the native people of the region. He successfully encouraged the construction of chapels and was deeply involved in retreats which could be attended by 2,000 to 3,000 natives.

The 1904 tour of Canada and Western Europe (England, France, Belgium, and Italy), a critical part of this pilgrimage with the two Chiefs to the Vatican, lasting nearly four months, its highlight a Papal audience.

Left to right, Chief Johnny Chillihetza, Chief Louis Clexlixqen, and Father Jean-Marie-Raphael Le Jeune.

According to Father LeJeune’s diary entries:

 To the right side of this [St. Peter’s] church stands the pope’s house [Vatican Palace]; it’s a very big house;… we went to that house, and we arrived at a room where there was a bishop who makes arrangements for those who want to see the pope. We spoke with him, and he told us, “When I find which day is good for you folks to see the pope, then I’ll send a note to you.”

Oct. 4, 1904. In the morning, we again went to the pope’s house; now we received tickets for us to see the pope. Then we went to see the big church, St Peter’s church. And we stayed at that church until midday…. Now it was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon; we went to the pope’s house, and we were taken close to where the pope was. Many other people were there, about fifty. We knelt all in a line; then the pope came; he gave his hand to each of these people, and each of us kissed his hand. He placed his hand on Louis’ and Celestin’s [Chillihitzia’s] head, [and] he also gave a large medal to them; he looked a little tired, and seemed a bit sad. When he was done giving medals to all, he stood and he blessed everyone…. [H]e was really glad about everyone coming to see him. He also blessed the 2,000 medals we had gotten from “St Anthony Louise” and then brought to Rome. We wanted the pope to bless all of our [Indian] people, and he said, “Indeed, I bless [them] all.” Then we went back to our house in Rome, and we got ready to leave Rome and return to our home [British Columbia].

The entire meeting with the Pope probably lasted less than a minute or two. There is no mention in any of the diary entries of a discussion of land claims or that “While in Rome, Chief Johnnie and Chief Louis, took part in an exhibition of stenography, at which they received three gold and five silver medals.”

Le Jeune was seen as kind man with a great affection for Indigenous people. He was seen as very popular with the native people of his district. Interviews with Aboriginals on the Kamloops Reserve in 1947 elicited the same response: “Invariably their faces lighted up with pleasure as they replied, ‘Yes, we remember him well, He was a great and good man.’” Surely, such a spiritual leader would have waxed eloquent about Chief Johnnie and Chief Louis’s medal winning in his diary.

The same can be said about raising land issue concerns with the Pope, had this happened, and ensuring this was reported in media reports about the Vatican audience. Such reporting never occurred, as shown in the following news report.

Daily News Advertiser (Vancouver), Nov. 17, 1904, p. 7

Conclusion: Explaining the Church’s Denial of the Truth

COMPARING THE TWO Papal audiences highlights the fundamental differences between them based on a distinction between private and general audiences.

Private audiences like the one granted to Theodor Herzl have always been reserved for heads of state, government leaders, new Vatican ambassadors to the Holy See, or bishops, in short mainly to the world’s elites.

General audiences like the one attended by Father Le Jeune are held to give pilgrims and visitors the chance to "see the Pope" and receive the Papal Blessing or Apostolic Blessing from the successor of the Apostle Peter during their visit.

Such audiences with the Pope consists of small teachings and readings. At the end of the Audience the Pope will pray together with those attending the audience. At the end of the prayer, the Pope will impart his Apostolic Blessing upon those gathered to see him.

Church officials well know this distinction. They also know that a lowly priest from a remote outpost in British Columbia would never be granted a private audience with the Pope, all the more reason to question the entire contents of a one-sided agreement that reads like it was dictated word for word to the Church by the Kamloops Band leadership.

A Vatican audience with Pope Pius X or his representatives to discuss land titles never occurred. Instead, the Father Le Jeune and the two Chiefs met the Pope only at a typical Papal audience at which they knelt to receive His blessing along with 50 others as part of an ordinary Catholic pilgrimage, not a land negotiation.

What was a fleeting meeting with the Pope was lifted nearly verbatim from the words of Manny Jules to justify what he called “only the beginning of the process” of a long term strategy:

That process has to be followed up with 50 different dioceses here in Canada. The Catholic Church isn’t one monolith. It’s made up of many, many cells, and I found through my discussions with the Church that there are 50 different dioceses.  Some of them support what we’re doing and some of them don’t because they don’t want the liability, you know. It all comes back to liability.

What accounts for the Catholic Church’s capitulation to this process? And why are Archbishop Miller and his Church fighting so hard to bury truth about the Indian Residential Schools, deliberately, perhaps cynically, engaging in gratuitous virtue signalling instead, by attributing noble actions to a lowly priest he clearly did not engage in?

Rooted in recrimination from Indigenous people, repentance, including the verbal self-flagellation seen in the covenant and its accompanying statements, now marks the Church’s involvement with Indigenous people, especially its 113-year association, 1883-1996, with Canada’s government-funded Indian Residential Schools.

There is a deep historical basis for such repentance. Founded on the Jewish notion of showing remorse for and turning away from sinful behaviour, repentance is a key stage in Catholic salvation. In the New Testament, John the Baptist called for repentance during his sermons, as did Jesus when he proclaimed the Gospel for Salvation. 

A corollary of this assertion is that the Church cannot fight back partly fearing that this would label it as made up of callous Indian Residential School denialists.

Though ostensibly linked to the interaction of its clergy with Indigenous schoolchildren, the Church’s near psychotic current obsession with repentance may also be tied to the disproportionate number of Aboriginal people suffering from all manner of adversities and pathologies, many of them seen by secular activists as the legacy of Indian Residential School attendance. This has made these adversities and pathologies easy to attribute Church malfeasance, a good example of undeserved scapegoating if there ever was one, but a sure trigger for a constant stream of repentance statements over the decades, one more extreme than the other.

There is also the issue of liberation theology, a neo-Marxist spiritual notion connected with the Church power hierarchy. Pope Francis is a Latin American liberation theologian who believes the world is divided between oppressors and oppressed, a simplistic woke binary distinction between evil Europeans and sacred Indigenous people, in this case between murderous white priests and nuns and hapless but noble red-skinned Indigenous children.

This reductionist outlook may be exacerbated by the soft bigotry of low Indigenous expectations: around the world, Indigenous people are often seen as “noble savages,” a trope activists whether Indigenous or not habitually embrace as well, indifferent to the way this can infantilize them as intellectually and emotionally incapable of understanding that their current downtrodden status is not a product of the experience of their ancestors in the boarding schools but rather reflects the overarching experience of colonial subjugation and loss of traditional livelihood strategies the residential schools were meant to overcome.

It also needs to be asked whether a less honourable reason for Church contrition lies in elementary moral cowardice, a fear that if Indigenous protesters, noble savages or not, can burn down and vandalize Catholic churches, they could easily do ignoble damage to the clerics who make up the Catholic Church.

As useful as some of these observations may be, they should not be used to obscure that the Church is not just in repentance mode; as suggested, it is also fully in obstruction of the truth mode.

Why would the Church discredit the generations of good works by so many of its very own devoted priests and nuns, along with the current efforts of skilled researchers who are using historical documents, including provincial death certificates and other archival records, to ascertain the truth about alleged unmarked graves containing missing students at Kamloops and elsewhere?

What this obstruction and vilification mean is that the Catholic Church is standing squarely against the communication of truth about the residential schools. It also means Archbishop Miller has betrayed his motto – Veritati Servire (To Serve the Truth) – by signing this so-called sacred covenant.

Hymie Rubenstein is editor of the online REAL Indigenous Report and a senior fellow, Frontier Centre for Public Policy. A retired professor of anthropology, he was a member of and taught for many years at St. Paul’s College at the University of Manitoba, the only Catholic higher education institution in Manitoba and one endorsed by the Canadian Province of the Society of Jesus.