‘If they can learn to hate they can be taught to love’
Faeeza Moulla’s great-grandmother was a passive resister in apartheid South Africa.
At one point, she even hid Nelson Mandela in her basement.
That spirit of resistance of a political system that promoted racism flowed into Faeeza.
In her second-last year of high school, she and her classmates took to the streets of Cape Town to protest.
Across the country in Vereeniging, her future husband Mohamed was witnessing similar resistance to the institutionalized racial segregation.
Both were classified as Indians in the race-centred system that was nonsensically arbitrary, Faeeza’s mother was classified as coloured. Black and white were the other two categories.
When Mohamed came to Canada as a 16-year-old university student in 1976, he was surprised to find a department of Indian affairs.
“I thought that I’d left this department of Indian affairs back in South Africa,” he said.
But this department was meant for “Indians” like Alma Poitras from Onion Lake First Nation in northern Saskatchewan.
Poitras was six years old when she lost her long braids at St. Anthony’s residential school.
Visiting Lloydminster as a child, she remembers “little white kids” throwing stones at her.
But among Poitras’s earliest memories is her father’s advice for his children: Unlike a cat that would reject a stray kitten, “We’re not animals; we have a way of understanding each other,” Poitras said. “Don’t reject each other. … We’re all kind of pitiful amongst ourselves, we need each other.”
As a grownup, the years of racism had gotten to her. She had “ugly feelings” for white people — moniyaw in her Plains Cree language.
She finally started letting go of her resentment in 1983, at an alcoholism treatment centre in Saskatoon.
“I was very lucky that treatment centre was for all kinds of people. … It was all colours of people in there that were suffering just like me, and that’s where I got to learn to forgive,” said Poitras.
Poitras and the Moullas opened a public forum on racism at the Treaty Four Governance Centre in Fort Qu’Appelle.
Hosted by the Multicultural Council of Saskatchewan (MCoS), 30 people gathered inside a gigantic teepee to share their stories in an intimate conversation.
“It’s important to have (racism) not be a scary taboo subject,” said Rhonda Rosenberg, executive director of MCoS.
From angry social media comments after Colten Boushie was killed last summer, to anti-immigrant and anti-refugee sentiment, racism “is something that we can and need to talk about … so we can keep recognizing it and rejecting it,” said Rosenberg.
Engaging people in conversations can help them think, “Oh, I hadn’t thought of it that way before.”
“We’re all the same in this circle, we’re all equal to one another, except maybe different levels of understanding, different levels of learning, but we’re all the same,” said Poitras. “We all have stories to talk about how to understand racism; I’m not the only one.”
“Meeting people and talking and sharing our stories is so important because it breaks down this racial divide we’re so used to,” added Faeeza Moulla.
In honour of the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on March 21, MCoS held another public forum last Monday in Saskatoon.
Rosenberg hopes she can move the conversation across the province in the fall, having gentle conversations for “a more inclusive understanding.”
“I think there are lots of people out there who don’t have all the information and don’t know how to find it either,” said Rosenberg.
Mohamed Moulla capped off his story with a quote from Mandela: “No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin or his background. … People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love.”