‘What is there for my people to celebrate?’

On Saturday there will be fireworks, parades and parties from coast to coast as Canada celebrates its 150th birthday.

But Donna Dubie wants no part of it.

She has never flown the red-and-white Maple Leaf flag at her home.

And when the national anthem plays, Dubie doesn’t sing “Our home and native land.” She sings: “Our home on native land.”

Like many other indigenous Canadians, or “original people” as she prefers to say, Dubie sees the 150 years of Confederation as a shameful time in our past.

“What is there for my people to celebrate?” asks Dubie, who is Haudenosaunee from Six Nations Turtle Clan.

History backs her up. European settlers took the land, forcing the indigenous people to the sidelines of this rich and beautiful country.

The new, white leaders sent the original inhabitants to impoverished lives on reserves. To this day, many still suffer there, with substandard and crowded housing, badly-built schools and poisonous drinking water.

Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister, believed that indige-

nous children should be taken away from their parents “who are savages,” he told Parliament in 1883.

On his watch, 180,000 children were removed, sometimes by force, and imprisoned in 140 boarding schools across the country, run by churches.

Thousands of these children died of disease or while trying to escape. Those who survived were permanently scarred by trauma and abuse, alienated from their own culture, language and family.

Dubie understands the long shadow of that experience. Her father, orphaned when he was a child, was sent to live in unspeakable conditions for nine years in the Mohawk Institute Indian Residential School in Brantford.

Later, he would talk about it when he drank, she said. He was cruelly abused there, starved, beaten and spoke of being forced to help dispose of babies born to girls who were raped and impregnated by the adults in charge of them.

Like so many residential school survivors, Dubie’s father entered adulthood with no idea of what kindness and nurturance looked like. He passed on the same violent, abusive treatment that he had experienced to Dubie and her three brothers.

Dubie said her mother tried to protect the children, but “she was always overwhelmed by my father,” she said.

To survive in those schools, you had to fight hard and not feel too much. As an adult, “it was actually scary for him to feel calm and loving.”

But her father also tried to shield his children from harm. He moved the family to Toronto when Dubie was four, and pretended to be Spanish or Mexican when people asked.

He refused to live with his family on the Six Nations reserve because he was afraid the authorities would take his children and force them into those schools, too.

The last residential school closed in 1996. They left a long, poisonous legacy.

“The community you see today is the outcome of that,” said Dubie. “People are damaged. They are broken … They don’t want anything to do with their culture.”

It all helps to explain why aboriginal people are just three per cent of Canada’s population, but make up 26 per cent of people who went to jail in 2015-16, according to Statistics Canada.

They die earlier and have more health problems than non-aboriginal Canadians. They’re less likely to grow up in a family with two parents, graduate high school or be employed.

And discriminatory treatment from government still haunts them. Until the middle of the 20th century, government agents could stop any aboriginal person and demand they show a pass, which showed they had permission to be off the reserve.

Even today, routine medical procedures like getting a tooth filled or seeing a specialist for a hearing problem have to be approved by a bureaucrat from the federal government. That can take months.

Dubie founded and now runs The Healing of the Seven Generations, a Kitchenerbased community centre to help indigenous survivors of residential schools, and their descendants, heal from the suffering.

She says it has helped with her own healing to do this work for and with others.

Today, 18 months after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission released its 94 calls to action, indigenous people across the country are now looking to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to make good on his promise to implement them.

Trudeau appears sympathetic. He has talked about a “nation to nation” relationship with indigenous people.

He raised hopes by making symbolic changes, such as removing the name “Langevin Block” from a key government building in Ottawa because it was named after an architect of the residential schools.

But talk is easier than actual progress. That is coming slowly, and the big-ticket spending items, like clean water and better funding for education for children on reserves, are still elusive.

Canada’s original people are getting impatient, Dubie said.

Better education for all Canadians would help create political will for real change.

But across the country, “there really isn’t an acknowledgement that Canada was created by displacement of indigenous people,” says Jean Becker, who is senior adviser on indigenous initiatives at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Becker, who is Innu, also taught university classes on indigenous issues and culture, and “what I have encountered, year after year after year, students … don’t know anything about the residential schools,” she said.

The grim history is included in the elementary curriculum at public and Catholic schools, but “by and large it’s not being taught,” she said.

Without that consciousness, how can Canadians begin to make amends?

Ontario’s social studies curriculum for Grades 1 to 8 does not clearly spell out the content that children are supposed to learn. Instead, it describes general learning goals, with suggested examples.

For example, the Grade 6 curriculum calls for study of “significant developments in the history of two or more communities in Canada” and offers examples teachers can use such as internment of Japanese Canadians in the Second World War, religious freedom for Mennonites or the impact of residential schools for First Nations families. It is up to individual teachers to choose what part of history should be taught.

Dubie said none of her six grandchildren — the oldest is 17 — learned about residential schools when they were at local public schools. She thinks there ought to be specific requirements that it be taught, and special training for teachers.

A representative from the public school board said Thursday that awareness of the need to teach indigenous history and culture is growing. The board partners with local indigenous organizations and has dedicated staff to provide teachers with resources. Courses in native studies are offered at high schools, but are not required for all students.

However, a specific requirement that students learn about residential schools would have to come from the provincial government, which controls curriculum.

Both Becker and Dubie are pleased that more and more Canadian institutions and teachers are making public statements that acknowledge they are on the traditional grounds of the Neutral, Anishnawbe and Haudenosaunee peoples.

The latest is a plaque that has been installed at the Student Life Centre at University of Waterloo. A ceremony to mark the installation takes place Friday.

“I’m honoured that they’d do that,” said Dubie. She hopes more institutions will follow.

“If someone surrenders the idea that they own the property … there’s a better chance of our being compensated for it in the future.”

Becker agrees the words “evoke something very real.”

It’s actually a protocol among indigenous people who are in the territory of another people to acknowledge that “these are the people living here, and these are the people who are allowing you to share this land with them,” she said.

Both Dubie and Becker said that actual return of land is one of the most important things Canadians can do to make restitution for the wrongs of the past.

Becker said her Kitchener community centre is overcrowded. She sees that many downtown churches are selling their land and buildings as attendance dwindles. Instead, they should consider gifting the land and building to an indigenous group like hers.

“Indigenous people in Canada need land,” Becker said. “We will always be poor and disenfranchised without land.”

Even the job of teaching students about traditional medicines made from plants requires fields and forests and streams.

But land means more than that. It’s that sense of being sustained by the Earth that’s missing when you can’t roam.

Becker remembers growing up in Labrador. “We lived outdoors. We learned from playing outdoors,” she said.

“I don’t see how any attempt at reconciliation will ever truly occur without the return of some of the land.”

James Boppre works in Kitchener as an advocate for aboriginal people who are involved with the court system. He’s part Cree, and that sense of land and place means an enormous amount to him as well.

Born in Kitchener, he spent summers at a place his family owned close to the Saugeen River near the Lake Huron shore.

His parents are dead. On Canada Day, he is going to take their ashes to the lake and have a ceremony for them.

He and his 13-year-old daughter, JaimeeLee, will prepare a special meal of dishes that his father and his mother enjoyed when they were alive. They’ll share the feast beside the water.

Then he will take a small cedar raft he made, just big enough to hold two bowls, also made of cedar, that contain the ashes.

“I’m going to put them out on the water” and set fire to the raft as it floats, he said.

“I know their favourite spot.”