On the First Day of My Covidcation...

On the first day of my Covidcation I…

I really don’t remember!

Covid was unprecedented in my lifetime. It prefaced many unprecedented events. Events that could/would inspire change.

George Floyd. Black Lives Matter. The US – and Canada – were grappling with racism. People protested the injustices that were being perpetrated against Black people. In Canada, we were finally looking at the systemic racism that permeated our culture.

I had always struggled with my own racism. As a product of Canadian society, it was inevitable that I grow up racist. I believed it was what I did with that awareness that I hoped would set me apart. Always an avid reader, particularly of works by those with experiences other than mine, I started to read a great deal more non-fiction that examined racism and anti-racism. I studied the experiences of Black Americans and Black Canadians to try to better understand what they had and continue to live through.

Kamloops Indian Residential School. 215 unmarked graves. I was stunned. I had heard of Residential Schools. I suppose I event figured that children were not well treated in these schools. Despite being aware of claims of abuse, of torture, of murder being made by Indigenous people, I really did not pay much attention. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe them; it just wasn’t on my radar. But now it was.

I defaulted to my usual – I read. I read everything I could find online about how Canada treated Indigenous people from the beginning. I read about the Indian Act. I read the recommendations that came out of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the recommendations from the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. I read fiction and non-fiction. I took the course from the University of Alberta on Indigenous studies. I joined Indigenous and Black-run Facebook groups. I listened. I wrote letters to the PM and my MP. I relearned the history of my country and learned to question everything. It was not easy. Our national heroes, the RCMP, turned out to be not so heroic. Formed to control the “Indians” in the 1870s, it began to seem to me that they never really changed that aspect of their role. Our leaders instituted systemic racism with the white supremacist believe that “white is right”. I learned that they started the Residential Schools with the literal belief that they were going to “beat the Indian out of the children” and turn them into “model” Canadians. Sadly, while they stole the cultures, languages, beliefs of all these children, they never thought to make society accept them.

I spent and continue to spend my days trying to understand our past and figure out how we might mover forward. I still believe in Canada, am proud to be Canadian. But I am more aware than ever that so much work needs to be done in order to find “the Just Society (that) will be a united Canada, united because all of its citizens will be actively involved in the development of a country where equality of opportunity is ensured and individuals are permitted to fulfill themselves in the fashion they judge best…(P.E. Trudeau.)