This is a response to CBC Radio asking if it is possible for us to Celebrate Canada 150
Yes, we can celebrate. And also, that doesn't mean we need to be so immature as to believe it has to be a celebration. Evil events must be acknowledged and processed. But the evil only outstrips and undoes the good if we let it. It also means that perhaps, if we're willing to fight for our humanity, and for the good that once was and can be, that we mourn and grieve what has been done to human beings under the auspices of our nation.
We have many sins, we have many crimes against humanity, and they must be accounted for by our portion of this society. We can also acknowledge that there is much to live for, and much to rejoice in being alive. Mourning and grief need to take place in order for us to regain our sanity, in order for us to come to terms with what has happened, and how we repent and choose the good after having looked at our misdeeds head on. We have to change our attitude, we have to change the way we approach this model of the world we live in, and that comes with two aspects involved. The one is what we choose to make of it, and the other is the vast immutability of its imminent presence, and both parts of that involve and contain our relationship to Aboriginal Peoples.
We have to stop taking our home for granted, and that means that we can't pretend we're entitled to being a pack of free loaders. We need to remember, those of us who have been here for a long time, generations, why we came, to be free, to seek safety, to find refuge and new chances at life, the reception of the gift of a new home. And in that we have to acknowledge that this has only been possible by a relationship that we have abused and neglected. We benefit from agreements that have cost, that allowed us graciously, like a priceless gift, to live here and there is still a fee to be paid in that regard. We are under an eternal lease, and for it we owe rent, and respect, and the duty of humanity, to the First peoples, and to everyone that comes here. We owe our existence in this place to them, and that comes with meeting the arrears we have not been honourable and decent in paying and providing like any semblance of a right to live here requires of us all.
We must fight to become sane, we must struggle to regain our humanity, lost as we took humanity and lives from others. We have to as long as it takes, seek an existence that doesn't undermine the truth, that doesn't seek to wriggle out of our obligations or play games with ethics, we must hold the ground that enables the possibility of reconciliation, and the equilibrium of our so complex and varied composition. There are, all said and done in the round, fifty million minds here, all in someway referencing a concept and a place, that can only make it strong and unconquerable. Our challenge now is to find a way to humble ourselves, to cease the insistence that everyone should live as we do, to recognise that the basis of our nation is much less the Queen as it is the grant of Indigenous persons. To seek what is good in both of us, to work together, and hope that in patience we will be shown how we can slowly be included in their world, without the force that we twist them into ours. Nations can, by the will, become better, reflective of the resilience of nature, and the balanced place of the people who desire in their heart to belong to the soil and their neighbours.
One day, though there will never be perfection, we can dream, and it could be a waking dream, that all of us will find the calm truth that finally, after so long, there is something for us all to celebrate jointly. That it is not a monoculture, or a list of ironclad facts in competition, or the imported views reigning from above! When we can all be peoples together without imposition, and without sacrifice of either our particular collective or individuality.
The faith that this is, for the future, actually possible when we choose no longer to elminate tensions but tight rope across them. That some points of the past can never be resolved, else our souls will never be challenged to understand and come to grips with how large a task our future holds. That what is really asked of us to ensure, for everyone, that life is a sacred compact, in which we hold place, but not rule. When we also see the other in ourselves, see ourselves in the other, and understand that we like the other, are also other to others. When we become geniuses and delight in life for its own sake, ours and the gift of being surrounded by it, it will occur! And it will one day occur!
Curtis James Healey
Owen Sound
