June 30, 2021
-by Frank Macdonald
Canada Day is among my favourite holidays; although this year, as it approaches, it doesn’t fill me with the cocky, quiet pride of earlier ones.
For decades, Canadians struggled with our national identity: What is a Canadian? It was a question that filled newspapers and books, and television panel discussions. What are we?
That lingering question vanished without a trace when, in the 1960s, we discovered that what the pundits couldn’t tell us, our poets could. It was a time when the poetry reading demographic in Canada, despite the disproportionate population ratio, was 10 times larger than in the United States.
Canadians were looking for something. Suddenly it was there.
Canada excelled internationally and at home when it held a world fair called Expo 67, a great party in a decade of great parties. It came from our poets, whether with words alone, or with accompaniment. And we did this really reckless thing of electing as our prime minister the coolest person on the planet except for the Beatles. Canada just decided to be.
When sporadically attending university during these years, my focus was on Canadian literature and history. Of the former, it was one of the most exciting periods of my life. Of the latter, an interesting history existed there, but was concealed inside Victorian moralism and myth-making.
As we are learning almost daily now, anything different from the Empire’s red serge was pagan and filled with people and cultures the likes of which the civilized world had never seen before. The British simply claimed them as though it was all just a big game hunt. Britain owned…
Canada was part of that Empire Britian owned, a source of resources and labour. Britain would rather form alliances than kill off healthy warriors who look like they could work like horses on the Empire’s behalf. But all Commonwealth nations were subordinate to England. Britain wrote the script, and its subjects believed they was doing their duty by undoing the good fortunes and civilizations of others.
In what was then the vast land of British North America, a land inhabited by savages, the British, and later the Canadian government, set out to civilize these people through their children, convert these pagan and heathen boys and girls into well-behaved white people, or kill them in the process.
This is the story most Canadians will carry in their hearts on this Canada Day, the image of unmarked graves filled with Indigenous children who were under the care of God, King, and Country. They weren’t buried with compassion and sorrow; they were disposed of. Hundreds of children, more likely thousands, who died in the hands of, and under the care of, religious or government agents who probably believed their brown-skinned lives weren’t worth the effort.
Across Canada now, the Earth is speaking.
The nation has been haunted for weeks by the ages and the innocence of those buried children. More children’s remains are being discovered beside many of the nation’s residential schools, the remains of children who never grew up.
If they had, what would they have seen, known?
Not a lot of change for them for the most part. Except, perhaps, for newspapers, television, and social media telling a First Nations story from a First Nations source. We, the inheritors of this tragic history, may be reluctant to accept our culpability in the infanticide, but we can never again not know that something is viciously wrong with Canada’s gospel of itself.
It’s impossible to imagine the depth of pain being experienced by every person carrying First Nations blood in their veins. But we need to listen to the pain. Our ancestors inflicted it. And in the course of this learning, we are learning that that most of our leaders, among them our first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald (residential school advocate) and Pierre Eliot Trudeau (the ‘60s scoop of Indigenous children) were not men made of marble or granite, but were people who, like most of us, were imperfect, their vision of the nation flawed and racist.
Undoubtedly, there will be federal and provincial responses, and all the physical help that First Nations people needed should be provided. But this is not a time for a thoughtful Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) to attempt to lead social services action. Nor is it the time to send into devastated First Nations’ nations an invasion of counsellors and psychologists and university gurus to fix things, a.k.a. Freud and Jung or whoever passes for them today.
This is a time for Britain to stand back, and by Britain I mean every non-aboriginal Canadian. Beyond the humanitarian aide that will be needed, the rest of us Canadians need to stand back.
What was done to these children we did as a nation, but it has nothing to do with us now because this is the grief of all First Nations, and they possess their own cultural pathways of finding their way through this together. And will. But white do-gooders are probably unwanted, nor our politicians doing the picture op thing during this most solemn moment. We best do our mourning from a respectful distance.
As Canada Day approaches, I’ll be no less welcoming as ever. July the Firsts are pretty rare around this part of the globe, so I can’t afford to let one go by. But it doesn’t mean I need to celebrate it. Oh, I will, with some poets I have never met, and Virginia and I will walk along the beach for a bit, then home to meet our broiled or barbecued appetites.
I hope to find a period of time, an hour or two that will belong to me, a time to to reflect, to quote to myself scraps of Al Purdy, recall some of the anecdotes from university history classes, watch the nation’s subdued pride as this day is televised across all of Canada’s timelines. But they are timelines that can’t reach back far enough into the past to undo what we have discovered about ourselves as Canadians.
This year does not mark Canada’s 254th.
It is more appropriate that we mark and remember Kamloops Residential School: 215.
