Oh, Canada

A child, probably five or six years old, with chin length dark hair and a sparkle in her eye, climbed onto my lap. I noticed the lice right away. I’d been told I’d need to check my hair for lice when I got home. Now I knew why.

She and her friends wanted a game of tag with us. We obliged. Someone whispered that we should share our dinner because it might be the only nutritious meal they ate that day. Spaghetti with canned tomato sauce.

She was beautiful. I can’t remember her name.

I was 13, part of a group of teenagers and church leaders from the city, invited by an Indigenous pastor to run a day camp for the children in his community. We were prepared for an adventure, but not a week on an Indigenous reserve.

We learned kids camp songs and games, participated in team building activities and read one news article on some of the challenges indigenous people in Canada face and some of the scars we might see.

I remember packing boxes of supplies and shelf stable food to feed our team for the time we’d be away. I remember stacking tins of tuna and fruit cocktail, boxes of macaroni and cheese and cereal, and bags of the powdered milk I would mix for breakfast every morning. I remember the milk was disgusting but also tolerable because it tasted like a mission.

I remember climbing onto a tiny airplane, which couldn’t have held more than 20 passengers, after 24 hours of driving across Ontario in a van filled with the aroma of half a dozen other teenagers and sleeping on the floor of a church in a community at the end of the road (unless you wanted to wait for the ice road in the winter). I remember our ears screaming in protest as that tiny, unpressurized plane ascended and descended, landing on dirt runways, dropping off bags of mail and taking off again for land even further north.

I remember scanning the earth, from the plane’s oblong window, an endless stretch of green dotted with blue and a sense of awe. Beautiful.  

I remember the 10:00pm summer sunsets, unmarred by smog, and how the clouds felt so low we could’ve touched them, how it seemed we were in another world even though we hadn’t left our province.

I also remember strict instructions to leave the personal care products that might contain alcohol at home alongside hushed conversations about why that were beyond my understanding at the time.

I remember rationing showers and toilet flushes (complete with a rhyme about how to let the water colour determine when to flush #ifyouknowyouknow) because the only clean water came in a once a week water truck delivery.

I remember chatting with kids my age, other little 13 year olds, about whether they were going to drop out of school after grade 8 or move to the city, a several hour flight away, for high school.

I remember splurging on fresh lettuce one night for dinner at the (only) local grocery store and feeling shocked at just how expensive it was. 

I remember how kind the people were, hosting a community BBQ for us, trusting us with their kids at day camp, and gifting us each a handmade moosehide beaded moccasin keychain that still smells perfectly smoky two decades later.

And then I remember leaving, exchanging their home with its beauty and challenges for my home with its privileges and concrete.

Honestly, it was a bit of a relief: not scrutinizing ingredient lists, clean water at the turn of a tap, choosing my courses for the high school around the corner and lettuce for two dollars.

It was also a little uncomfortable. Reverse culture shock, they called it: reconciling an incredible, humbling experience, one of my first exposures to life without the luxuries and privileges my ethnicity afforded me, with the fact that I hadn’t left my own country. My adolescent brain mostly let the discomfort fade to a distant memory because I was home.

Home.

A peculiar concept.

Because now I know that the land I consider home once was (still is) the same endless stretch of green dotted with blue, the land of late night sunsets, the land belonging to the eyes of the survivors of residential schools (and the eyes that didn’t survive), the ones almost certainly related to that little girl with the sparkle in her own eyes. 

Why didn’t anyone tell me this as we stacked cans and boxes, discussing the necessity of lice checks when we got home and the ways we were going to help? Why did they warn us about the scars, yet gloss over the origins of the wounds? Why didn’t we know that they evolved from interactions with settlers who share our bloodlines? 

Did no one know? Did they think we were too young to understand?

As the same tiny airplane taxied down the dirt runway more than 20 years ago, heading south, picking up speed and leaving the community behind, I think our memories of the inequalities and injustices shrunk along with the land we thought we were leaving. Out of sight, out of mind.

Is this why the Indian Act was written and the reserve system was created or just why they haven’t changed much? Is this why there’s still no clean water? Is this why we’re still finding graves and protecting records? Is this why we’re struggling to acknowledge the past and present realities of the Canada we think we know, the one that sustains us, the one we’re celebrating today?

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If you live in North America and would like to see whose land you consider home, visit the interactive map at native-land.ca.

To read a copy of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s “Calls to Action,” a report of urging Canadian governments to work together to make changes to policies and programs affecting Indigenous people, specifically with respect to the harms caused by residential schools, visit trc.ca/assets/pdf/Calls_to_Action_English2.pdf.

For a child-friendly version of the Truth and Reconciliation Committee’s “Calls to Action,” visit https://fncaringsociety.com/sites/default/files/child_friendly_calls_to_action_web.pdf.