My thoughts these days center around the horrors of residential schools, and my country’s attempt to eradicate the culture of its indigenous people. The ripple effects of atrocities committed go wide and deep. Generations of trauma manifest in ways no financial restitution, government or religious institution apology can touch.
I don’t know enough to say much—and that is part of the problem. We didn’t know.
This isn’t a time for righteousness indignation on the part of those of us who are seeing history in a new light. It’s time to listen. To seek to understand. To look in the mirror and challenge ourselves and our assumptions. To see our indigenous neighbours not as “other”, but as fellow human beings who carry the burden of generational racial trauma.
I don’t know the answers to how healing can begin to take place. But I’m listening.
