Canada Day 2021

 Happy Canada Day,

A day to celebrate the beauty of this land and a day to recognize that the foundations our country is built are not solid. 

Time to reflect on a year past. What a year! The Covid pandemic and the coming to the surface of  irrefutable evidence of the indigenous genocides perpetrated by our ancestors there does not seem much to celebrate. 

And yet there are gifts in this we are given an opportunity to mourn and recognize that we did not earn the gifts of this land we appreciate when we celebrate. Bullies do not 'earn' the rights they gain by overpowering and subjugating their victims. It is very clear that our ancestors who came here to escape bullies and persecution from their home countries became the persecutors and bullies in their new country. We need to take this in, there is no recompense that we can make, the only way forward is to do the work and to try to walk a new path that listens with the heart and acts with humility, respect and love. Forgiveness is the only way past our guilt and we are the only ones who can do that.

Our Indigenous people are continually sharing their stories with us and when we start to really listen we will discover their gifts. The wisdom and stature of these stories make our focus on material wealth and conformity to narrow views on what we should want and be seem not only trivial, but a waste of the potential of being human.

"According to the story, long ago, a messenger sent to see how the Neshnabék were living, discovered that the Neshnabék were living their life in a negative way, which impacted their thoughts, decisions, and actions. Some had hate for others, displayed disrespectful actions, were afraid, told lies, and cheated. Others revealed pride or were full of shame. During his journey, the messenger came across a child. This child was chosen to be taught by the Seven Grandfathers to live a good life. He was taught the lessons of Love, Respect, Bravery, Truth, Honesty, Humility, and Wisdom.

Before departing from the Seven Grandfathers, they told him, “Each of these teachings must be used with the rest. You cannot have Wisdom without Love, Respect, Bravery, Honesty, Humility, and Truth. You cannot be Honest if you are only using one of the other teachings. To leave out one teaching would be embracing the opposite of what the teaching means.” The Seven Grandfathers each instructed the child with a principle. It was then up to the child to forget them, or to put them to use."

Seven Grandfather Teachings | NHBP (nhbp-nsn.gov)
 


“And then there was the sad sign that a young woman working at a Tim Hortons in Lethbridge, Alberta, taped to the drive-through window in 2007. It read, “No Drunk Natives.”

Accusations of racism erupted, Tim Hortons assured everyone that their coffee shops were not centres for bigotry, but what was most interesting was the public response. For as many people who called in to radio shows or wrote letters to the Lethbridge Herald to voice their outrage over the sign, there were almost as many who expressed their support for the sentiment. The young woman who posted the sign said it had just been a joke.

Now, I’ll be the first to say that drunks are a problem. But I lived in Lethbridge for ten years, and I can tell you with as much neutrality as I can muster that there were many more White drunks stumbling out of the bars on Friday and Saturday nights than there were Native drunks. It’s just that in North America, White drunks tend to be invisible, whereas people of colour who drink to excess are not.

Actually, White drunks are not just invisible, they can also be amusing. Remember how much fun it was to watch Dean Martin, Red Skelton, W. C. Fields, John Wayne, John Barrymore, Ernie Kovacs, James Stewart, and Marilyn Monroe play drunks on the screen and sometimes in real life? Or Jodie Marsh, Paris Hilton, Cheryl Tweedy, Britney Spears, and the late Anna Nicole Smith, just to mention a few from my daughter’s generation. And let’s not forget some of our politicians and persons of power who control the fates of nations: Winston Churchill, John A. Macdonald, Boris Yeltsin, George Bush, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Hard drinkers, every one.

The somewhat uncomfortable point I’m making is that we don’t seem to mind our White drunks.

They’re no big deal so long as they’re not driving. But if they are driving drunk, as have Canada’s coffee king Tim Horton, the ex-premier of Alberta Ralph Klein, actors Kiefer Sutherland and Mel Gibson, Super Bowl star Lawyer Milloy, or the Toronto Maple Leafs’ Mark Bell, we just hope that they don’t hurt themselves. Or others.

More to the point, they get to make their mistakes as individuals and not as representatives of an entire race.”
― Thomas King, The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America

Cheers
Jeanne