COMMIT TO TRUTH BEFORE THERE CAN BE RECONCILIATION
Last week, mass graves of Indigenous children were uncovered in our country. Not discovered but uncovered because Indigenous people suspected, and other people must have known — clergy and teachers, administrators, politicians and undoubtedly many others who had no direct or indirect connections to these heinous acts of murder and inhumanity.
These awful milestones in our national narrative are a function of colonization — one group who were convinced their ways and superstitions were superior to those of the other and thus the other was less valued, treated as less than human and readily dehumanized or discarded.
Our ancestors, for as citizens of Canada they are related to us, treated other humans who would not accept their tricks and myths with disdain, oppression, and an active cancel culture, which led to cultural erasure and genocide.
In our daily lives we all shy from pain, from the acts that we have all committed that are cruel, unkind, oppressive and inhuman but if we do not — as a country — stop, pause and reflect, and confront these acts and make them present for us all then we are guilty of history washing.
However painful it is to confront, these tortures, these deaths, these lives torn from the pages of our history — and there will inevitably be others uncovered — we must face them and accept that this is our genocide. We must weep together, grieve together, understand why together, and collectively commit to truth before meaningful reconciliation can occur.
We must, I believe, also confront the fact that the evil that buried these children, our children, is present today in Syria, in China, in Yemen and many other locations around the world.
We must see our responsibility for all children, and understand the responsibility we all bear for the oppression and erasure of human beings merely because of religion, race, gender and sexual orientation, nationality, class or any other forms of toxic identity abuse.
Vacuous apologies are not enough — we need a national and international conversation, a conjoint act of learning and inclusive responsibility that includes us all or we will continue to perpetrate these crimes through our local and global institutions — crimes against humanity which are reflections of every single one of us.
Bill Radford
Happy Adventure