Canada Day– July 1st, the celebration of the confederation of the first four provinces in 1867 — has always been a problematic day for many Canadians. Chinese-Canadians, for example, have referred to it as Humiliation Day, ever since the enactment on July 1, 1923 of the Chinese Immigration Act. It was, in fact, a Chinese Exclusion Act; before that, Chinese entering the country had to pay a head tax. After it, they couldn’t enter and families were separated (severed, really) until the act was repealed in 1946. (This 2017 CBC article offers more detail.)
Japanese-Canadians interned during WWII; Sikhs who witnessed the Keep Canada White demonstrations against the attempted landing by prospective immigrants aboard the Komagata Maru; and, most obviously, the indigenous peoples upon whose lands Canada was “settled.” Our nation has a history of racism and colonialism that our school systems and political policies have been unwilling to address. Further, if we’re honest, we’d have to say that the collective social will to push for change — even to attend and observe carefully enough to know that change is necessary — has been lacking.
We’re waking up, though. What a shame it’s taken the evidence of hundreds of unmarked graves at residential schools across the country to jostle us. But we’re waking up. First Nations leaders, orators, writers, artists have been telling us about the abusive conditions at these so-called schools for decades now. I think of Mi’kmaw poet Rita Joe’s gentle words, trying to get our attention in her simple, beautiful, poignant poem “I Lost My Talk” that somehow, astonishingly, pairs immense cultural loss with hope that learning a new language may mean open and productive cultural exchange, integration.
“I lost my talk / The talk you took away / When I was a little girl / at Shubenacadie school.
You snatched it away: / I speak like you / I think like you / I create like you / The scrambled ballad, about my word.
Two ways I talk / Both ways I say / Your way is more powerful.
So gently I offer my hand and ask, / Let me find my talk / So I can tell you about me.”
(Rita Joe published this poem in 1978; it refers to her time during the mid 1940s at Shubenacadie residential school in Halifax, Nova Scotia.)
Before she married my father, middle of last century, my mother taught at a small coastal reserve school for what was then the Department of Indian Affairs. She was only there for two years, leaving when she was pregnant with me — as a newborn, I was carried in a baby basket woven from bark by the women of that community. Each of my four children has subsequently been carried in the same basket, an elegantly practical, organic, and sustainable design — it now occupies a special spot not far from where I’m writing this post. Eight or ten years ago, teaching First Nations Literature to a class which included students from that same band my mother had taught five or six decades earlier, I mentioned that basket and found, of course, that it had been made by women closely related to those students.
My mother told me once — or did my dad tell me this for/of her? — that during that first teaching assignment, she began compiling a small dictionary of words she learned of that community’s Coast Salish language. But she hadn’t quite realized how deeply rooted the people were, still, in their culture and language, how viable it still was, the momentum toward near-extinction, to cultural genocide, only just beginning to accelerate mercilessly. That recognition didn’t come until she was in her late 70s; it arrived in a visit by a student from Mom’s first posting, a woman who’d gone on to get a nursing degree, and who had kept in touch all those decades.
Mom started crying as she told me what she’d learned that day. Apparently, they’d been reminiscing about those teacher-student days, the one-room classroom, the difficult but–for Mom, at least– exhilarating conditions (chopping wood, hauling water, errands in the rowboat). . . and my mother had commented about how challenging it had been for her as a new teacher. How silent all her young charges had been. She attributed the reluctance to speak to a cultural tendency, but her former student said, “Sure, we might have been reserved. But mostly we weren’t speaking because we didn’t speak English and we knew you couldn’t speak our language.”
I tried my best to console her. If she hadn’t been there teaching the on-reserve day school, those children might have been sent to a residential school, and surely staying home with their families was the better option. And she would have been gentle with them, and kind, and thoughtful. As well, she must have been a good teacher, and they, bright students, because they were speaking by the end of that first school year. She didn’t deliberately “snatch away” their “talk,” as was the mission of teachers at so many residential schools; she did teach them the English that would replace it, but she did her best to listen when they “gently. . . offer[ed their] hand” and tried to “teach [her] about [themselves]”
She had to go back to teaching the following year, newly a mother. My dad, riding a bike to work, was hit by a car and almost killed only weeks after I was born. The convalescence was long and for months, he wasn’t able to work. To support the family, she applied for and got a last-minute posting at another reserve school, this time in the interior of the province. Again, Mom taught all grades in a one-room classroom; while she did, my dad took care of me (and then my brother, a year later) and generally kept house (chopping wood, fetching water, included).
From all accounts, they enjoyed their time there very much, although it must have been challenging. They made friends in both the First Nations community and in the nearby town of what we would now acknowledge as white settlers. I was barely two when we left there, but those two years were foundational in my personal narrative, growing up. As conservative as my parents were in so many ways, particularly as committed, practising Catholics raising a very large family along strict guidelines, my mother, particularly, worked to combat, through education, any racist language or ideas she saw us exposed to.
And once, in Grade 6 or 7, she encouraged me to write, and give a speech about Racial Discrimination in Canada as an entry in the local Welsh Society’s annual Eistedfodd, or Speech Arts Festival. Earlier that year, she’d passed along a library copy of John Howard Griffin’s book Black Like Me, in which he writes of his experience as a white journalist travelling through the American South with his skin blackened as a way to ascertain the level of racism in that still-segregated period.
I don’t remember other conversations between us that were, like our discussion of that book, positive, meaningful, sustained, and interesting. By then, I had nine younger siblings, perhaps ten (eventually there would be twelve of us, including two First Nations foster sisters; their extraction from their birth families, their place in ours is another complicated element in my perception of racist national policy and social attitude). Mom did her best (amazingly, she taught all of us to read before we went to school), and as my husband always said, she was very good with young children). Often, though, she was busy or tired or pregnant or depressed or frustrated and scolding. As well, the closer I got to puberty, the more her strict rules and demanding standard, her resistance to popular culture, her insistence on the superiority of classical music and elegant dress, chafed. My dad was the fun parent, easier to talk to; my mom not so much. I’ve come to see beyond that perspective, but it took decades. . .
But I remember us collaborating on that speech. She didn’t write it for me, or even edit it, but she suggested I could begin by speaking about Griffin’s book and the abhorrent laws that not only allowed, but mandated, segregation on the basis of skin colour. From there, the structure invited the audience to enjoy a self-congratulatory moment as Canadians. Such segregation would never be tolerated here. And then the image that must have disturbed Mom for a decade, the sign she’d seen in the movie theatre of the “white” town nearest her last teaching post. Strung across the last three rows of the cinema, the sign designated the section “Indians” were allowed to sit in. She wanted me to know that as recently as 1955, socially sanctioned racial discrimination existed visibly and harmfully in Canada. And she wanted me to let others know as well.
She was a reserved, shy woman, socially awkward or anxious, certainly not one to speak out against racism or engage in anti-racist work beyond what she did in her family. And her concept of race was undeniably reflective of prevailing attitudes that saw assimilation as the best way forward for Canada and for indigenous people. But her legacy includes my awareness from an early age that Canada has a history of racism; and my sense that I should speak out about that; and the reassurance of her modelling that even doing this in small, quiet, but consistent ways contributes to change.
I try. There’s so much work for all of us to do, and my efforts have been relatively modest, but they’ve been steady and consistent. I’ve listened, read, witnessed, and pointed out unacceptable overt and hidden or disguised acts of racism when I noticed them. I raised kids who, I’m proud to say, try to do the same. And I always, always, included work by First Nations writers on all my course syllabi. Started all my classes by acknowledging that I was teaching on the traditional and unceded territory of the Snuneymuxw people.
So I’ve been Woke, and Troubled, and Troubling. But those hundreds of unmarked graves unearthed in several locations across Canada these past weeks, adjacent to the residential schools those little bodies were sent to after being torn from their families and communities. Well. There’s knowledge and there’s knowledge.
And a few weeks ago I recognized a name in a news article. The order of Catholic nuns that ran the Kamloops residential school where the remains of 215 young bodies were recently unearthed has, until last week, refused to release archival school records. And the name I recognized, the name of the nun who is now President and Board Chair of that order, is the name of my homeroom teacher in Grade 9 at the Catholic girls’ academy I attended for three years before it closed, more than a hundred years after it had opened. She would only have been in her 20s then, I suppose, and we liked her very much. One of my bolder classmates cheekily dubbed her “Sam” because of her initials (the nickname didn’t work as well after the nuns took back their family names the following year, a kind of modernization, I think, in the wake of Vatican II). I’m some kind of relieved to see that she, or the order she speaks for, have yielded to the demands for greater transparency. But the apparent obduracy of her/the order’s earlier refusals is tough to square with the admired teacher I once knew. Realities, and paradigms, shifting. . . And a clear demonstration of privilege, my experience in an academy run by those nuns in stark contrast with that of the students in Kamloops. . .
Here’s how I’m going to close this post, which has taken me the better part of Canada Day to write. I’m going to put into action something I’ve been contemplating ever since I moved my blog in early May. As you know, I’ve chosen to keep my blog ad-free and to bear the operating costs (several hundred dollars annually, since that big move) out of my own pocket. I spend countless hours producing “content” here and facilitating a sense of community, and I find much gratification in doing so, but I continue to resist any temptation to monetize.
Except. . . it occurred to me that one way of measuring or seeing the value of what I do here might be to ask you to contribute to a cause I see as worthy. I’ve been mulling the idea, and mulling it, and then today my daughter posted something on Instagram about the residential schools and her commitment to research. Since she wanted to make a financial contribution as well, I sent her a link to this fundraiser and told her I’d been thinking of asking you to contribute to it as well. She wrote back: “Go for it, Mom! I’ve just donated!”
So I donated as well, and then sat down to write this post. The funds being raised will help build an Independent Urban Indigenous School in Nanaimo, a school district where my four children did well, but where First Nations kids often have a much tougher time. This newspaper article explains that indigenous students at risk have been supported, over the past seven years, through a small alternative program. Have a look at the fundraiser’s short video to witness some moving student testimony. But — with the worst possible timing, given the recent news about residential schools — the School District recently announced its decision to “consolidate” the program: to assimilate it, in other words, within the very structures that indigenous kids have often felt excluded by. So the Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre has resolved to build their own school and educate indigenous kids within their own culture.
I keep thinking of the baby basket I was cradled in, and it’s hard not to think of First Nations women who made such baskets for babies who were, only a few years later, taken from them in the name of education. I think of how a teacher I considered inspiring and thoughtful and supportive could defend a system so flawed. I think of what I learned from my parents and what I’ve tried to pass on to my kids. And I think I’d like to support a program designed by an aboriginal group (Nanaimo Aboriginal Centre) to educate aboriginal kids. It’s about time. . .
I won’t know whether or not you choose to donate — unless you somehow indicate that when/if you leave your name at the fundraising still. Contributors and non-contributors will be equally welcome here as readers. But I hope you will see my request as a reasonable alternative to monetizing my blog — a tangibly validating and gratifying return for the effort and expense I voluntarily direct into this blog.
Whether or not you donate, I continue to welcome your comments. And let me assure you, the next post will be much, much lighter. I’m thinking maybe Outfits or Garden or Grandchildren. 😉
And just in case you missed it 😉 Here’s the link to that fundraiser. Let’s put our money where our Woke is!
So beautiful. Really touching. xo
Will donate; will respond very soon. Just wanted you to know.
A.in London
Author
Thanks, April! It’s a post I felt vulnerable about, so I especially appreciated the early feedback.
What an interesting beginning to your life! Your mother’s time as a teacher among the people must have given her a deeper connection to their way of life. I was thinking yesterday about how little I learned about First Nations in school and how I have to « unlearn » a lot about exploration and colonization. I shared the link for the Go Fund Me on my Facebook page. I’m really not sure how Canadians go forward to make amends (impossible) to the Survivors.
Author
Thanks so much for sharing that link, Joanne; I think it’s such a good cause. I also think it’s good that these recent finds are pushing us all to learn and unlearn. Listening is a solid first step, I believe.
Have donated. And this really resonates, growing up in a family where the maternal figure is committed to racial justice, as best she can be in her era and circumstances. But you kept her teachings going, that’s the thing. Thank you. And now, even those of us (I mean me) who did not keep up the good fight in any strong way, as the history of the USA and Canada is revealed, we have to do better too.
Author
Thank you! We can only do our best now, right? Do better, do our best. . .
I feel that you’ve been working hard at this for a long time. xox
What a post! What a complicated tale of personal memories and political and social history, of the things we knew when we were small, and those we didn’t know and those we suspected and never talked about… I can relate to everything you write. What do we celebrate on “national holidays”? How do the deeds (and omissions) of former generations affect the way we look at the world? What are we responsible for? Can we make amends, and how could that happen? What do we say when people tell us to let bygones be bygones? Or, on a more personal note, what does it mean for me when I find out that my lively, adventurous, educated aunt, an independent woman, highschool principal, always available when my parents were in need of support, applied for membership in the Nazi party in 1942 from sheer opportunism, because she wanted to make sure to remain in the civil service?
Don’t get me wrong. I am not comparing, let alone equalizing. Yours is a different tale, a different country, different crimes and different tragedies. And in contrast to all that the dignity, beauty, and simplicity of that basket… Thank you.
(I cannot contribute to your fundraiser at the moment for technical reasons, but I will on a later date.)
Author
Thanks so much, Eleonore! Your country has had so much to grapple with over the last 75 years, and I would imagine many families will have confronted the painful contradictions like the one you faced with your aunt’s compromised past. We humans are complicated and we don’t always live up to the standards we set for ourselves, the morals we meant to live by. I wonder how much your aunt struggled, later, with that opportunistic choice she made . . .
I am afraid she didn’t. As far as I know, she logged in happily into the general social and political amnesia that prevailed in this country up to 1968. It was her younger sister, my mother, who, not unlike yours, kept alive the feeling of historical shame and social responsibility and passed it on to her daughters.
Author
Good for your mother (and her daughters)! And for your country as well, overall, which from my perspective really did try to confront its past once it shook loose that amnesia.
Thank you so much for this posting, Frances. The photos of that First Nation basket have had a powerful effect on me, as did hearing your experiences growing up and learning all you could about First Nations. Knowing what the basket meant to your family, what it continues to mean is so poignant–how the power of the basket continues to grow in light of all you/we now hear and read about almost daily.
I appreciate your link to the video about the Tsawalk Learning Centre, of hearing from those youngsters and for the opportunity to give to this community. A fitting way of remembering not only those who created your baby basket long ago, but all the First Nation generations who have followed. May the centre continue to help the new generations embrace and share the beauty of their stories and culture.
Author
You’re very welcome, Mary, and thank you for your thoughtful words. I do think the fundraising project is a worthwhile cause to support and I’m grateful that you do as well.
Oh my Frances! So beautiful,so poignant,so sad…..what an inspired and wonderful post! It made me cry….for all the lost children and families,all the lost happiness and joy and lives and moments and stories ……for your beautiful and thoughtful gesture…..a plethora of different feelings
Let this day be the day of kindness and memories and hope
Dottoressa
Author
Aw, thank you, K, I’m so pleased to know it touched. you. xo
Thanks for this, Frances. Beautifully written. You are the real deal, my friend. And I so admire you. xoxo
Author
You’re so kind. Thank you! xo
Thank you Frances for this posting. Very emotional reading for me. There are so many layers of suffering and I wonder how our society can begin to repair the many many years of interference? Teaching our children is a beginning I think, because as you know, it wasn’t taught to us.
Janet
Author
I’m glad you found it relevant, Janet. So true that there are layers upon layers. Teaching our children and pushing for policy change wherever and whenever we can wield some influence, even if it’s just at the ballot box. I think we can keep this momentum going. . .
That basket is a thing of beauty Frances – as is your post . Your mother would be proud of you
Author
Thanks so much, Wendy! I wish I’d let her know more often that she made me proud as well.
That fundraiser could not be more fitting. Thank you for sharing this.
Author
It’s an important cause, isn’t it?! What ridiculous and tone-deaf timing, that consolidation notice. . . your kids and mine did well enough out of that school district, but it’s so tough for others.
Thank you for such a personal and thought- provoking post. Thank you too for giving us the opportunity to contribute to a worthwhile and meaningful initiative.
I spent part of Canada day reading “21 Things You May Not Know About the Indian Act,” by Bob Joseph and had to keep putting it down to reflect. What really struck home was the fact that many of the Act’s provisions were in effect until very recently and some still are today. I can only hope that recent events concerning the graves at residential schools will finally move us to make some substantial changes.
Author
You’re very welcome, Frances, and thank you!
I read through that article today — we all should. I think many would be shocked to find, as you point out, how many unjust provisions of that Act were so recently in effect.
I remember researching to teach a text a few years ago and reading a transcript from BC legislature, sometime in the early ’30s, I believe, when concerns were addressed about “Indians” being educated and possibly taking employment from “white” citizens. It was agreed that the curriculum offered would be at a much more basic level. In some ways, I think that discovery shocked me even more than seeing those graves unearthed — it put paid to any touting of the higher (“civilized”) values of education.
Thank you for your beautiful post. I , too have donated.
Author
Thank you for caring and for donating, Pamela.
Your post is a beautiful tribute to your mother and her efforts to make you think about racism and how to combat it. Living among people of a different culture provides enormous education. Knowledge is of utmost importance. And that basket – such a treasure!
Author
Thanks, Lorrie! I think that living so closely within that community must have given her insights she quietly drew on — perhaps even without always recognizing their source — all her life. The basket reminds me of that.
Thank you for writing this, Frances, and giving me a window into your formative years and the influence of your mother, family, and early education. The baby basket is beautiful, and touched me. I appreciate that you spent Canada Day doing this – I tried to do something similar. It’s hard to know what is the best path for us, but like you (and your mother) I think it’s important to keep speaking out and taking real action. For what it’s worth, I am always happy to read this sort of post, which actually appeals to me more than the lighter stuff!
Author
You’re very welcome, Beth, and thank you for your thoughtful words. I’m not sure of the best path at all, except that it probably is going to involve at least some discomfort. So it’s good to have some company — thanks for letting me know you find this sort of post worthwhile.
Powerful words Frances. I too was greatly moved by this glimpse into your early life. I have forwarded this post onward to some friends and family.
Any object like your basket that is hand made has stories to tell of the makers. Apparently baskets can not be made from a machine. So, each time we use a treasured basket, we will be honouring the person whose hands formed it.
Ali
Author
Thanks for passing this post along, Ali — that means a lot!
It’s so true that the meaning of this basket (beyond its usefulness and its aesthetic merits) have to do with the hands of the woman who made it. The skill, but even more, the generosity of a Coast Salish woman making the gift for the baby (Me!) in the belly of the community’s white teacher (My Mom!).
Have read your blog for a long time but have never commented. I found today’s post both interesting and poignant.
Thank you for keeping your blog ad free and providing a link to this worthy cause to which I have donated.
Author
Thank you for reading all that long time and thank you so much for commenting today. Thanks especially to finding the cause as worthy as I do, and for donating to it. All so much appreciated.
Hi Frances, I’ve just woken up and read your post with my coffee.
It’s left me feeling emotional, … but so much more informed … so thank you!
As your posts always are, it’s beautifully and eloquently written and I particularly appreciated the connections you’ve recalled … both yours and your mums.
I’m so glad you chose to share this and suggest we may like to make donations ( great idea!) I’m more than happy to and will do it soon.
Have a lovely weekend and thanks again for sharing this. 😘
Author
Thanks, Rosie! Your thoughtful words are much appreciated. And thanks as well for sharing the link to the post and for donating to what I believe is a very worthy one.
I’ve just donated Frances and I plan to share your post as well.
Rosie xx
A beautiful and moving post; colonization is incredibly complicated and so clearly shows the individuals caught in the jaws of a nation-state. Am donating locally, in Mi’kma’ki.
Author
Thanks Laura! It’s very complicated indeed — and so many of us have many reasons to feel good about our country, but we also need to confront the nasty parts. And good to know you’re donating in Rita Joe’s place.
Thank you, Frances, for this remarkable family history; her moral centre, her integrity shines forth and you carry her legacy forward.
I have heard for decades about the genocide happening in the BC residential schools. (It was described in specific terms, including the unmarked graves.) It has taken this long for the institutions to admit what happened. The churches have a debt of shame that no apology can erase. The practices of forced removal, and physical and emotional abuse was repeated where I grew up in Northern Michigan.
Such an extraordinary post! There is so much history in both out countries that has been swept under the rug, Even now there are forces fighting not to bring these horrors to light. I am trying so late in my life to educate myself and to try to do better, support causes I believe in, to the small extent I am able.
This is such beautiful, beautiful writing! Thank you for sharing your complex experience – and for telling us more about your origin, your mother. I’m off to donate to your charity of choice, which seems like an excellent organization. We can love and atone simultaneously. I feel this is one of the great gifts our Indigenous cohabitants and partners have shown us. xoxo
Author
Thanks, Krstin, for the kind words, and for the donation as well. Loving and atoning simultaneously — a powerful notion!
Thank you for this beautifully written post, Frances. I hope you consider submitting it to news and literary outlets in Canada and the US. I will be sharing it as well. We have so far to go.
@susan this is such a good idea
Author
Such kind and encouraging words, thank you! I would very much appreciate having the post shared. . . and I will consider your suggestion, as well.
When I attended Alison’s art class in France, I met a married couple who lived in the NW Territories and worked with the local First People. It was the first time I heard that name. I thought it was so poignant and respectful. Their work was a type of social work dealing with families and children. I can imagine their distress as the news of the graves was revealed.
No country has a lock on this type of discrimination. All countries depress/suppress the weak who are without a voice. So thankful for individuals, like your sensitive mother or my art classmates, who stood/stand up for change. You have done that here in your post, Frances.
Beautiful photos of a meaningful object in your life. Beautiful words expressing heartfelt concern over real-life issues. Thank you for sharing.
Author
“First Nations” or “First People” are poignant and respectful terms, from some perspectives and also powerful terms of reclaimed identity that rebuild individual and collective self-esteem, I believe. I’m sure you had interesting conversations with the couple you met in France — we’ve never met, but you strike me as a very good listener.
Thanks for a thoughtful comment, and for your kind and encouraging words about my post.
Thank you. I try.
What an amazing post, Frances, so very powerful. And the basket…wow. Trying to understand and do better by each other, that’s the necessary work in front of us. Your Mom seems to have provided a good foundation for you to build upon.
What an incredibly worthy cause; I’ve made a donation.
Author
Thanks so much, Susan!
Hello Frances, thank you for your efforts in writing this post, I’m sure it wasn’t easy. Gerry and I have donated. Like everyone else we have been reading and learning over the last little while – there is so much need that it’s overwhelming, but we appreciate finding out about this school and donating to something concrete. T.x
Author
You’re very welcome — and you’re right, not easy at all, but seemed important to try, this fraught Canada Day. Thanks to you and Gerry for donating. Funny, I was just thinking of you the other day, wondering how you’re doing. Five years, I think, since our lunch together. xo
Has it been that long ago? Wow! We are well, thank you. Older son got married last year (small backyard wedding, already planned but had to be postponed a little). Our other son has been working from home in Edmonton all alone for the last year and a bit (but was able to come home twice between lockdowns – for his mental health!). Gerry is working from home – he retired from the army but moved into a public service job. Same unit, just no uniform! We spend a lot of time dreaming about and planning our next trips abroad, I’m sure that you and Paul are the same! T.xx
Author
Good to catch up like this. Congrats on your son’s wedding. And good that your other son has work and a home to stay in, but that’s so hard to be alone, especially at that age.
Yes, we’re dreaming about our next trip abroad, getting desperate to see our daughter, grand-daughter and great son-in-law.
I was led here by Lisa from Amid Privilege and greatly appreciate your thoughtful words on this gut-wrenching revelation. As a Chinese American, I am well-aware of the Chinese Exclusion Act which directly affected my parents when they married in 1953. My mother was matriculated at the University of Toronto ( she had provisional British citizenship being born in Singapore) and my father was on a student visa in the States coming from Shanghai. But that is another story for another time.
I dare say every nation if it looks closely enough will discover its own shameful historic acts. We cannot undo the past but I believe we can and should improve the present and future. Awareness and acknowledgment can facilitate more constructive action at a micro and macro level. Whereas maintaining secrets and ignorance often leads to corrosiveness from within.
Thank you Frances for your moving perspective . As an American citizen on our day of Independence, my enjoyment of the holiday will be tempered with the knowledge that freedom has not been equally granted to all, then or now.
Author
Thanks for this thoughtful comment, one that reminds us again how much the past is still with us. And while it can’t be undone, it can, as you say, be acknowledged in such a way as to “facilitate more constructive action at a micro and macro level” to “improve the present and future.”
I very much appreciate your verb choice in your last sentence: “tempering” our enjoyment of national holidays doesn’t need to mean destroying or necessarily dampening that enjoyment. As Bach demonstrated so convincingly, tempering can allow us greater diversity (proper tuning allowed music to be played in all 24 keys) . . . and bring us harmony. So here’s to your Well-Tempered Independence Day!
Fascinating tale, well told. I deliberately strive to counter thoughts and views that I know are not mine but can jump up like a reflex and I am sure come from childhood experiences/beliefs and cultural norms that no longer fit our world – as if they ever did. With my own children I have expressed very clearly my views on racism, sexism, capitalism (just about every damned ism going) and they are remarkably free and open-minded, both having lived in other countries since they left home and experienced other cultures. No country can honestly claim clean hands but it is more important to acknowledge the past, to teach it to the generations that follow and to counter bigotry and hatred where we can. You can’t cancel the past (Year Zero never a wise choice…) but you can see if for what it truly was. May your basket continue to hold loved ones close.
Author
Thanks, Annie. So important to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and also push against racist policies that are so persistent. And still deeply entrenched.
Tempering. Thank you both for the perfect word to describe what we need to do.
Author
It’s good, isn’t it?! So many effective connotations.
Outstanding, moving post. Thank you.
Author
You’re very welcome! Thanks for the comment!
Donated to the website today.
Author
Thanks so much for encouraging this hope!
Frances
All we ‘first world’ countries have shameful histories which we mustn’t sweep under the carpet any more. We like to think we live in more enlightened times, but still these terrible acts continue. In our (UK) case, we shun the arrival of desperate migrants to our shores, and the increased demand on food banks fills me with despair. Thank you for this thoughtful article.
Elizabeth
Author
You’re welcome, Elizabeth, and thank for your thoughtful comments. We can do much better!
Dear Frances,
A few days later, this post still resonates. Truly can not stop thinking about it. How remarkable your family took in foster children, a. when they had so many children born to them, and b. that this act-making room for 2 more at the table-saved 2 children from the dreadful fate we now all understand was a possibility.
Have donated just now, but withheld my name from the site, as that is my preference. Just now looked at the video on the students which is simply touching, reminding me of the brief profiles of students on the site for Gatoto School in Mukuru, Nairobi, Kenya, where my beloved cousin is so involved in fund-raising. Just to hear the students words: what the school means to them; what it might have saved them from moves me deeply.
Am so glad you pushed through the feelings of vulnerability and then pushed “send” on this post. I feel enlightened and touched and better for knowing about this. Thank you.
A.in London
Author
I’m pleased to know the post resonated with you (and thank you for donating toward the school). As with your cousin’s work in Kenya, education is key wherever.
I think my parents were remarkable in welcoming my foster sisters into our family (adopting them would have meant legally extinguishing their First Nations identities and rights, which my dad thought unfair and not his decision to make). But it’s so complicated and not really my place to comment on — except to say that they were removed from their own families and from their own culture — and they lived their visible and racialized minority more than I think we could acknowledge.
Thank you for your moving post. I donated.
I hear what you are saying, Frances, about the “complications”. Your father’s sensitivity about it ,,feeling it wasn’t his right to make such decisions, lest certain rights could be extinguished as you say. It seems your family had all the right instincts, innately, and I applaud them for doing their best even if they could not have known the domino effect of some of those complications, maybe. They tried to help and that is a fair bit more than many do. So many things I am certain you did through life where your parents had cause to feel pride about the person you became. I can see where you felt proud of them, too, for sharing what they had for the common good, even if it wasn’t a perfect effort. They did their best given complex circumstances, and without the insight we have as a society only many years later.
Would you like to teach a small group of FN young people again, introducing them to writers of their culture who may speak to the struggle they may feel about speaking in 2 voices to be heard as the poem said? I bet you would be so well received by them, especially when they learn you raised 4 teenagers at once. I am certain they would warm to how inclusive you are and how you do that with seeming ease. Not trying to fill your hours!!!, just thinking I could so see you with a group of students like these who need teaching, but some tlc and a maternal influence, just as importantly who could teach then so much about art, poetry, nature, sketching nature, mixed media to tell theirs stories, other lands, maybe even cooking sourdough bread?!
In a short series of workshop-style classes. If I lived there, and you were game, I would happily do all the leg work and coordination so you could just teach them your myriad skills. They would be all the richer in experience for knowing you or someone like you. A. in London
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Thanks for another thoughtful comment, A! As for the teaching, I’ve done exactly that work and found it very satisfying. Increasingly, I’m pleased to see indigenous students becoming teachers (sometimes former students of mine, teaching some of the same works they stayed in my classes!). I’m pretty content now to play a quiet supporting role.
You must be an inspiring force and resource in your community! 😉
Brilliant post Frances. I didn’t know about that basket or your mother’s teaching years. Thanks for taking the time to weave this beautiful essay.
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Thank you! It was satisfying to write and to pay my mom some homage.