Love and Christianity: A Critique of Žižek

Mathew Coon Come is Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada. He is also a Cree from Northern Quebec who, as a child, was sent by the Canadian federal government to a residential school run by the Catholic Church. The residential schools in Canada, run by both Catholic and Protestant churches, took native children from their local communities and attempted to strip them of their culture, language, and spirituality, in order to eventually assimilate them into the mainstream of Canadian society. At the residential schools the practice of the cut was initiated: to cut Aboriginal children off from their cultural heritage: their language, dress, and “pagan” beliefs. Coon Come himself experienced this as traumatic.

In response to the claims for redress concerning these historical practices (the residential schools are no longer operative; the last ones closed down in the early 1970s), the federal government, and the mainline churches who ran the schools, have agreed to a monetary liability and also have issued a formal apology to the victims of the residential schools and their families.

Mathew Coon Come, speaking for the Assembly of First Nations, has rejected this apology, and has called for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, similar to the one initiated in South Africa, maintaining that much more work of mourning and love needs to take place between non-Aboriginal Canadians and Aboriginal Canadians in order to bring about reconciliation (Dueck 2000).

It is interesting to note that Mathew Coon Come is a devout Catholic Christian, and an overwhelming majority of First Nations people identify themselves as Christian, both Protestant and Catholic (Dueck 2000). This is important to note because the conflict over the residential schools is not a conflict between non-Aboriginal Christians and Aboriginal non-Christians, but involves a call for love and reconciliation that is in keeping with a long history in the land called Canada, going back to the