As a Black Woman, I am Horrified by Canada’s Residential Schools

I didn’t understand the land acknowledgments.

At a live show. At a school event. At Fan Expo.

When I first heard speakers take a moment to acknowledge the Indigenous groups who occupied Toronto, I thought it was an act of vanity.

It was usually White speakers that gave the land acknowledgment; I dismissed it as a performative exercise to absolve all White attendees of the latent guilt felt in driving Indigenous people from their homes.

Basically, I thought the land acknowledgment was pointless.

Recently, news emerged about the hundreds of unmarked graves found at residential schools throughout Canada.

In the span of 2 weeks, 215 unmarked graves were found at a residential school in British Columbia and 751(!) were located at another residential school in Saskatchewan. It is likely the horror story will repeat across the nation, that hundreds more are expected to be unearthed.

I read this news and I felt…stunned. Saddened. Enraged.

And to find this out on National Indigenous Peoples Month.

All the platitudes and the congratulatory gestures to the Indigenous community ring sickeningly hollow in the face of such blatant, egregious genocide.

And these were kids. Children ripped from their homes, their parents, and their heritage, thrust into cruel environments where they were to be subjected to the worst types of trauma.

Then they were discarded unceremoniously, like so many little mistakes or failures of the Catholic residential school system.

I was born in the United States, a hotbed of racial tension and inequality. Part of my decision to become a Canadian citizen was the assumption that Canada, while not perfect, was more accepting and less prone to racial biases and injustices.

But not since slavery times could I conceive it possible for a nation in the Western developed world to snuff out so many lives and brush them aside like they never existed.

If something like the residential schools were to happen to the Black community in the United States, there would be an uproar the likes of which had never been seen before.

But Canada’s response feels…tepid. Not quite apologetic.

It’s like…quiet embarrassment. I appreciate that the nation isn’t trying to deny the atrocities, but something about the response feels like a tacit acknowledgment. Like a collective shrug of “whoops…we did that.”

A Fly Going Into a Fridge

I’m going to attempt a clumsy analogy: Canada’s response feels a lot like a fly that flew into a fridge.

No one wanted or expected the event to occur, and yet it did. The event has to be acknowledged.

So the real question is not when you will open the fridge, by why do you open the fridge?

So why do you open the fridge? Is it because you are truly lamentable about what had occurred, or because you eventually HAVE to open the fridge because you require nourishment? Or maybe you open the fridge because you are less concerned about the life trapped inside, but more concerned about the fallout, about the fly landing on and contaminating your food?

I understand that no amount of apologies will bring back the hundreds, possibly THOUSANDS of lost souls from the residential school system, but this is a CLEAR indication that some measure of reform needs to be enacted to heal and provide reparations to Indigenous communities.

Revisiting the remarks on residential schools in the Canadian citizenship study guide is a start. But more needs to be done. So much more.

So back to the land acknowledgments. As I stood with my stepdaughter to receive the land acknowledgment prior to her virtual graduation ceremony, I felt like I finally understood its importance.

For decades Canada chose to deny Indigenous people their birthright, their dignity, their homes, even their very lives, and pretend like the nation is a shining beacon of acceptance and equality. Of diversity realized.

But that narrative flies into the face of the truth. The least we can do is acknowledge that our nation and our quality of life came upon the backs of those who inhabited this land before us.

This Canada Day, do your part. Don’t celebrate: REPARATE. Give back to those who have had to endure injustice time and time again.