It’s Truth and Reconciliation Week in Canada. On September 30th, we’ll be recognizing our first Truth and Reconciliation Day which was one of 94 calls-to-action in the report tabled by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. We were pleased to see that the provincial government has chosen to recognize this.
As Canadians, we love to hold ourselves to a high standard. We say things like “that would never happen here” or “we would never do something like that.” We’ve somehow managed to convince ourselves that we’re totally free of guilt and shame.
Did you know that there are a least 45 long-term drinking water advisories still in place across 32 Indigenous communities?
Did you know that Indigenous people are 10 times more likely to be fatally wounded by the police?
Did you know that Indigenous children currently make up 52% of all children in foster care, even though Indigenous people only represent 4.9% of our total population? Many of these children have been removed from their communities.
It doesn’t stop there.
It is incredibly important that every single one of us uses Truth and Reconciliation Day to educate ourselves on the atrocities committed towards the Indigenous people of this land by the Canadian state that now occupies it. Atrocities that don’t just start and stop with the residential school system that we’ve all become much more familiar with over the last number of months.
We can never pay for the crimes of our past, but as settlers we can all do our part to make sure that we understand the real history of this country. We can all use our voices to speak up about injustice. We can all do our part to make sure that these things never happen again, but also that they never be forgotten.
