A few years ago, I wrote a Canada Day post that reflected a little on our nation’s shortcomings and hoped we could move past them. In light of the revelations over the past year, I’ve come to realize that post was written from a perspective of privileged naivete.
As I write this, the nation is reeling from the discovery of three sites of unmarked and/or mass graves, each site corresponding to a site where a Residential School once stood. Each site filled with the bodies of Indigenous children who died at those “schools” as part of the genocide the governments of the day waged against the First Nations people within our borders. Right now, the tally stands at over 1,000 children buried at these sites. Now that there’s an active push to examine the Residential School sites across the country, that number can only be expected to rise.
In between the discoveries, other examples of the deeply rooted and systemic racism within Canada have revealed themselves. In early June, a man in London, Ontario, took a vehicle and ran over a Muslim family, killing all but one nine year old child. A former intelligence officer has recently spoken out on systemic racism and harassment within CSIS, Canada’s intelligence agency. Another report records several racist incidents at one of Canada’s busiest border crossings. The first black leader of a federal political party – Annamie Paul of the Greens – is under fire from her own party, and faces a no-confidence vote.
My post in 2018 operated under the assumption that Canada was not, at heart, a racist country; we had our flaws, true, but we just needed to work at them. But now, faced with the mounting evidence, it is time to come to terms with who we are. Who we really are.
Continue reading “Coming to Terms With Who We Are”