Wente: Embrace this moment as an opportunity
‘Let’s transform Canada to reflect our values, our thoughts, ourselves’
Two generations.
All the effort Canada put into forcing my family’s estrangement from our land, divorcing us from our community. All that money and violence, and all it got them was two generations. My mother and me. That’s it. All the work to drive my grandmother away, to brutalize her into a life in the city, and yet those connections live on in her great-granddaughter. What a waste. What a colossal waste of time, money, effort, and lives. Sure, maybe you could say Canada got the land, but even that’s fleeting. This country is only holding it for a while.
The same dynamic is evident throughout First Nations, Métis, and Inuit communities. Young people are re-engaging with their communities, their languages, and their land, and diving into the politics that influence them. Indigenous people are present in a wider variety of media. Our young people are on the front lines of protests. It feels as if the future is there, waiting for us to shape it. And while there is much to overcome, much to heal, and so much to change, it feels as if we’re ready for that work — ready to fight.
All that effort and what did it get you, Canada: a hundred and fifty years? Maybe a little less? You threw everything you could at us, every degradation, every act of violence, every means of erasure, and we’re still here. We’re not going anywhere, and we’ll end up getting back all that was taken.
So, just stop. Stop taking our kids, stop robbing our communities, stop jailing us, stop dehumanizing us — just stop. It didn’t work. You tried everything from outright war to financial siege to pernicious attacks on family and community, and yet here’s my thirteenyear-old Anishinaabe daughter, who possesses one of the most marginalized identities in the world, and all she wants is to live with her family, her people, on the same land where they’ve lived for millennia. Sure, she doesn’t speak her language yet. She can learn. At thirteen, she already feels more at home at Cutler than I ever have.
This is how we will heal — over generations. This is how we will get back everything — over time. We were here long before you, Canada. We will be here long after.
Of course, we can get there quicker, build a new and functional relationship faster and with less pain and fear for everyone, if some things just stop. The words of politicians offer me little hope on that score — no matter how well-chosen. But I’m still optimistic.
I’m optimistic because I see in my children and in Indigenous youth across Canada just how tough and resilient we are. And I’m optimistic because more and more Canadians seem to know that great change is required.
The murder of George Floyd in May 2020 felt like a last straw.
When Floyd’s death was so soon followed, in Canada, by the deaths of two First Nations people during interactions with police — even as people took to the streets to protest police violence — it felt as though the world was collapsing.
Black and Indigenous people face state violence every single day — before the pandemic, during the pandemic, and, let’s be realistic, after the pandemic, too.
But coming during the lockdown, while Black and Indigenous people were already being more severely affected by COVID-19 than other communities, those particular acts of violence felt like salt poured in an open wound.
Maybe that’s why we immediately saw public protest on an unrivalled scale, why so many were willing to risk their health and safety to take to the streets to demand change.
Or maybe it was that people who were locked down, hiding from a virus, had less to distract them and more time to listen, more time to march, more time to learn, more time to understand.
Or it was the pandemic itself, exposing as it has so much of the rot that underlies the Western capitalist system: the degradation of the environment, of people’s rights and very lives in the service of shareholder gain and the sick belief that all that exploitation is somehow sustainable when all the evidence tells us it’s not. The pandemic gave us the time and space to think while simultaneously delivering the same clear message: Just stop.
Stop the endless consumption. Stop the endless work to feed that consumption. Stop the hoarding — of everything, by so few. Stop the police; stop them from killing us, stop them from provoking us in order to imprison us. Stop the nationalism that blinds so many to the failure and corruption of their leaders, that sows division when we most need to rely on one another. Stop keeping people poor and sick. Just. Stop.
These systems won’t work to eradicate Indigenous life and culture. We are too strong. And they won’t work to keep people happy, fulfilled, and safe. They are too weak. They need to stop. Something new needs to take their place. We need change.
What I’m asking now is for all of you to help bring it about, to cast aside your fear of an unknown future and embrace this moment as an opportunity to build the country that Canada has always aspired to be — the one it pretends to be — one that recognizes the inevitable failure built into colonialism, one that recognizes Indigenous sovereignty as crucial to the realization of Canadian sovereignty. This is the Canada our ancestors envisioned when they signed the peace and friendship treaties: a collective of nations, living as they want, sharing the land mutually.
I know that vision can be realized, not because I have faith in Canada but because I believe in its people. Our systems and structures need to be dismantled and replaced, but these are problems created by humans and they can be solved by humans. In social justice movements across North America we see engaged and imaginative young people who are fighting for a truly equitable vision of society. Like them we can build new relationships and, in doing so, transform this nation into something that better reflects our values, our thoughts, ourselves.
We can’t rely on governments, institutions, or companies to do this. They won’t. Only we, the people, can and must solve this most human of problems.
Despite all that’s been done to Indigenous peoples, despite all that continues to be done to us and will be done to us today and tomorrow, we were here before Canada and we’ll be here long after it.
Show us that the myth of this country can be replaced by truth, because, frankly, we have shown you enough. It’s your turn.
Excerpted from “Unreconciled: Family, Truth and Indigenous Resistance” by Jesse Wente. Copyright © 2021 Jesse Wente. Published by Allen Lane Canada/Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved