A few days ago I published a version of this letter on my personal facebook page and received a lot of positive feedback from friends, both Native and non-Native. I share it with you here in the spirit of making positive change, sooner.
Dear Canadian tax payers (and anyone clinging to the fantasy of Canada as a vast wilderness and solid democracy built on human rights),
The sadness you feel in your heart when the media serves up a couple days’ worth of news about the tragic loss of life of 215 First Nations children in a residential school is part of something much bigger that is still active today.
This is not “history” and it is not “other people” who did these things. It is us. We are the barely sighted benefactors of the sadness you feel. I say this not to make you feel guilty but to help you recognize what is happening because without recognition there can be no change.
We have these little peaks and valleys of sorrow. Gord Downie releases The Secret Path and we clap at the recognition of our breaking hearts. Wet’suwet’en protests emerge and we feel sympathy, although the disruption in transit routes seems worrying. Yet days later the disruption of everything (ironically *except* oil and gas production...) is acceptable and we forget all about the incursions on people’s land and the threats to their basic rights and safety.
[Pause to imagine for just one moment an armed tax payer-funded force barging into your living room, taking your stuff and threatening you and your family’s lives. Repeatedly.]
Please do not rely on news channels to be aware of the world you live in. The truth is all around us, in the hearts and stories of humans, the lands and the waters. If you need to get it from books and documentaries and reams of government recommendations and reports, there is no shortage of those things*, too.
The effects of ignorance, colonialism and a worldview that believes in domination and separateness – these are not news items. It's a way we've been trained to live, believing what we have is actually somehow rightfully ours, and feeling a little sad for some of the sideshows in between episodes of getting back to our busy lives.
Feel that sadness and know it comes from a place that is still active, needs attention and deserves deep care, open mindedness and willingness to be different on the other side of those feelings. Don’t wait for the next news item and budget allocation to lean into this feeling and bridge the gap. That just spans the space between horrific news items and does nothing to bring real change.
I don’t have a lock on the way forward, but I believe connecting with people whose lived experience is very different from my own – reaching out in friendship and community, not charity or pity – can go a long way. In tandem, I believe we need to break the back of that “domination and separateness” worldview that has wrought such harm. As luck would have it, one begets the other.
That goes for everywhere in the world, in small and large contexts, and it certainly applies in the relationships between Canadians and our First Nation friends and neighbours.
This is not a news item. It is a reality. The question is how do we change it?
Yours in connectedness,
L:
* Those links are a non-comprehensive hint at what’s out there.
