A powerful image has made the rounds on social media in the days since the Cowessess First Nation announced the horrific discovery of as many as 751 unmarked graves, mostly containing the remains of Indigenous children, at the former site of a Saskatchewan residential school.
The photo, shot by Donna Heimbecker, shows the doors of the St. Paul’s Co-Cathedral in Saskatoon splattered in paint and smeared handprints, with the stunning message, scrawled in blood-red: “We Were Children.”
The reaction to such a provocative act generally followed the same predictable pattern.
There are the vows of support, but there are others who express their understanding of the justifiable rage out of one side of their mouth only to disavow such acts of civil disobedience out of the other.
There’s a lot of handwringing and hot air wasted over the “right way” to protest, usually from those deeply entrenched in a system of power they stand to benefit the most from.
But let’s face it: paint washes off.
It’s much harder to erase the blood and tears spilled by generations of Indigenous people who have had their families, their communities and their identities ripped from them at the hands of a callous and self-serving government, a white majority fuelled by hate, and a complicit RCMP and Catholic Church.
Since the remains of 215 Indigenous children were found at a former residential in Kamloops last month, it seems some Canadians are finally waking up to this country’s long history of oppression and systematic dismantling of our First Peoples.
To those non-Indigenous people, I ask: what took you so long?
It shouldn’t take hundreds of dead children for people to finally start paying attention.
Canadians have a long history of ignoring our problematic past and present of racialization and colonialism, rooted in a Victorian sense of politeness that would rather avoid tough conversations than face them head on.
Martin Luther King Jr., who has been whitewashed over the years to conform into a symbol of gentle pacifism in order to better fit white America’s acceptable notions of Black protest, named this kind of tone-policing as one of the greatest threats to Black advancement in his famous “Letter From a Birmingham Jail.”
“The Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is...the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice...who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you see, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom...and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’”
What’s become clear for Canada is we can no longer wait for a more convenient season.
That will require us to accept inconvenient truths about this country we hold dear if we want to ensure a path to justice for the original inhabitants of this land.
