Our Home ON Native Land
In a lot of ways, and for a lot of reasons, I’m grateful to live in Canada.
I have freedoms that I wouldn’t in other parts of the world.
That said, I am often ashamed of the actions of our government and of (some) Canadians.
We (settlers) live on stolen land.
We don’t teach children in our schools accurate Canadian history. (This is improving, but very slowly).
We have thousands of murdered and missing Indigenous women and girls, yet the powers that be do little or nothing to help their families, work to find their killers, or work to find the missing women and girls.
We have uncovered the unmarked graves of over two thousand Indigenous children who were stolen from their families, forced to go to residential school, and never made it home.
Poverty, racism, generational trauma. Some uninformed people say they can’t use “the past” as an “excuse”. The sixties scoop wasn’t all that long ago — only 63 years ago. There are many residential school survivors still alive today, and their children and close relatives still live with the significant harms caused by Canada’s government.
The last residential school in Canada just closed in 1996 (in Saskatchewan), just 27 years ago. This is not the long, forgotten past. This is a recent history which we are attempting to ignore and forget, to dismiss and hide.
We can’t repair harms which we refuse to acknowledge. Truth and reconciliation happens in exactly that order: First, truth. Only then can we begin the process of reconciliation and reparation.
Oh Canada, I have very mixed feelings about you. We live in a beautiful country and I am grateful for many things. I acknowledge the many sacrifices which have given me the privileges I have.
If we want a nation of which we can be proud, we must take collective responsibility for the harms we have done so we can learn from the past. We must do better.
Those aren’t my stories to tell. They aren’t my history, and those aren’t my relatives. So tomorrow, on July 1st, I will seek to lift up the voices of Indigenous Canadians, to centre their experiences and their stories.
Oh Canada, our home ON Native Land.
© Jillian Enright, Neurodiversity MB
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