How do you plan to celebrate Canada 150?

What are you doing to mark Canada 150?

One starts, I think, with a slowlydawning realization that this year, 2017, will be acknowledged in most quarters with joy and gratitude, but that it is not a cause for celebration among Canada’s indigenous people.

The commemorations should take note of that reality. Our country has a deep, dark side of its past. We from the dominant culture, must hold that truth, too. The dark and the light co-exist.

I recently saw a troubling statistic: Canada’s white women are in 6th place among all the world’s countries for their well-being. Canada’s native women place 63rd on that scale.

This must haunt us all. Let the Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls soon to start, throw light on all the causes of a dreadful Canadian statistic. And on the solutions.

Even our individual and neighbourhood commemorations can begin with acknowledgement of the pain and bad policies that damaged the original group on the land.

We are three months in to this significant anniversary year now, and marvellous creative ideas keep cropping up, which I hear about as I go around.

Some friends are going to Manitoba to walk a part of the trans-Canada Trail. It is complete now. Another woman told me she is asking her husband to dig up the front lawn and plant a vegetable garden. A grandmother is taping (I believe it is called PVR’ing), the whole series Anne, a poignant, new eight-hour production on CBC TV.

My street is planning a June Canada 150 barbecue, to begin with the singing of the national anthem in both languages, then burgers, and a quiz on Canadiana. A man told me he is going to climb the CN Tower. Another is going to “learn, really learn” 10 new bird species. A book club member is reading all five Canada Reads titles, even if it takes a year. Another friend is paddling for the first time in the Dragon Boat races in June. Whoever said we Canadians were a sedentary bunch?

Our cultural institutions beckon. Who’s in for the National Ballet-created dance, which we can all dance together in a public space, because it’s simple choreography? There are instructional videos on the National Ballet site. We’re certainly going to try it on Manning Avenue in June. First step: slap the wall on one side and then on the other. I vividly remember Expo 67, when the country was 100 years old. That’s 50 years ago. It turned out to be an exuberant, six- month-long celebration of us. I was living in Dorval, Quebec in a bungalow at the time, with a husband and two small kids, and I had been a skeptic for months. All that mud being moved to make a site, I scoffed. And a dome! Who was Buckminster Fuller anyway? Those national pavilions; just promoting their own commerce. Plus, where was one to park?

I was dead wrong about our centennial exhibition. It shaped and encouraged us. We cheered about this country. It had francophone flourish and fun. The Expo site had quality day-care, costing a pittance. I had fiddleheads for the first time, and Arctic char. My spouse found a hidden parking place under a bridge somewhere, and delighted in showing all our visitors around. We had season-long passports.

This time, no Bobby Gimby singalong, but the Toronto Symphony (www. canadamosaic.tso.ca) has a beautiful offering: 12 renditions of the national anthem in Canada’s most-spoken languages: in Punjabi, Tagalog, and Mandarin for starters. Via Rail offers in July, for 12-25-year-olds, a Summer Youth pass for $150, anywhere in the country. And at UBC, an 800-year-old cedar log is hand-carved into a reconciliation totem pole.

We look back, in order to look ahead with more resolve and better vision.