One week from today I would normally be putting together some sort of Happy Canada Day post. I'd start looking for an idea this weekend and maybe collect some facts or anecdotes, perhaps a picture or two in anticipation. Canada Day is something I've been proud to share here pretty much every year since I started this little blog all those years ago.
Sadly, this year I can't see myself doing much celebrating. Canada might be a bastion of freedom, a beacon of hope in a violent world or just a place that's pretty cool to call home, what with legal weed, free health care and being pretty much coup attempt free for a long, long time, but there's at least one dark secret in our history that's tainted all that. At least for me.
I usually try to keep this blog light. I like to avoid the darker parts of humanity here, since there are so many places to find that in every day life. This story crosses too many lines to be ignored and since part of my normal practice here is to draw attention to Canada Day, by extension I have to draw attention to that which causes me to skip the flag waving this year.
It's recently come to light that nearly a thousand unmarked graves of Indigenous children have been discovered at the sites of just two (there were around 130 of them, in total) Residential Schools that were run by the Catholic Church at the behest of the Canadian Government. Indigenous children were removed, sometimes forcefully, from the care of their families to be "educated" in the Residential School system from the 1800s to the 1960s across Canada.
What happened to the tens of thousands of children in these schools is heart rending. I won't horrify you with the details but the histories are readily available online if you care to learn about this shameful chapter of our National story.
Life is lived and each of has parts of our personal history that we wish had never happened but there is only damage in repressing. If we are to move forward as individuals we have to learn to accept and fold those parts into our personal narrative. A nation is no different. Canada has to face this and find a way to include this in our national narrative.
It would be so easy to ignore something that happened before I was even born, to brush it away under the carpet of all that is good and strong in this country and celebrate as usual this July 1. For me, that simply isn't going to happen. It would be in the worst taste to fly the flag on high when we've just discovered almost a thousand reasons for it to be at half mast.
As an individual Canadian, I offer my sincere apology to those who suffered this crime and their families. I know there is little power in an apology offered on an obscure blog but I put it out to the universe in hopes that somehow, someway it might do some iota of good. As a nation we must find a way to be accountable for this history and reconcile this horror with our view of ourselves. While very few, if any, of the architects of this tragedy are around to call to account, we cannot wash our collective hands of the guilt. This was systemic, institutionalized and tacitly approved of by generations of Canadians who came before us and there's a collective responsibility we must face and accept.
One day we will celebrate again, hopefully with a deeper, more complete understanding of what it means to be Canadian, including the parts we wish had never happened but must accept and take responsibility for as a nation. I look forward to that day and will be happy to fly the flag and hoist a pint that happy but tempered day.
Not now.
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