What Would Stan Rogers Sing of the 215 in Kamloops?
UBC Reconciliation Pole Detail—One Nail for Each Residential School Attendee
I did not find out about Stan Rogers’s tragic death in a plane crash in 1983 until some while after the event. I have often since then wondered how he would sing about the Canadian tragedies he missed. For me, nobody else in my life so far could capture the anguish of Canada’s failings more truthfully than Stan. His deep voice, his true to Canadian experience lyrics, his simple but rich arrangements balanced our charm and our anguish in equal parts. True, he sang about much that is Canadian and beautiful. But I remember most when he sang about lost fisheries, lost livelihoods, lost life ways.
His untimely death cheated us of a melody about the Oka crisis—what would he have made of the military and the militant staring each other down on a road through a disputed forest where each tall, precisely Trappist-planted tree could be seen as sentinel or soldier, depending on your viewpoint?
More recently, what would Stan have sung about while loggers and tree protectors in British Columbia faced off first on Haida Gwaii? What would he have made of a battleground creek named Fairy?
But these and many other challenging moments in our post-Stan history pale against the 215 small bodies found near a B.C. town with a First Nations sounding name that will forever now be tinged with the uniquely Canadian tragedy of residential schools and their countless casualties. Many alive and damaged, many forgotten, most never identified in their suffering. And now we find too many of these in an unmarked, mass grave—too many to continue to ignore, too young to have heard the words Stan or their own family story tellers would have chanted.
What would Stan have made of this? Would he have referred to their First Nations cultures? But he could not, because they came from all across the province, were apparently buried with nothing to signify the richness and variety of their origins. I think he might have paid reverence to the thousands of copper nails in the residential school replica carved by Haida master carver 7idansuu (James Hart) into the Reconciliation Pole at the University of British Columbia—one nail for each of those who attended, suffered and in many cases, died.
Stan reached a third of a century before he was taken from us. These 215 reached only small fractions of Stan’s short time. What songs would they have sung, what words would they have written? We will never know, and are the poorer for it. They may never rest in peace, but maybe we can begin to make the peace that they deserved.