​Reconciliation Calls for a new Story of Canada

A Fair Country: Telling Truths About Canada
Ralston Saul's Argument Deserves Reading

I would like to pass on to you some words that review John Ralston Saul's book, A Fair Country-Telling Truths About Canada, to encourage others to read his assessment of what is needed in Canada to support decolonization and reconciliation. Under the current circumstances, those not connected to Indigenous history can support healing by re-educating themselves.

It's important that non-Indigenous Canadians realize the depth of the wound that nearly two centuries of collective moral injury has cut into the human spirit of Indigenous Peoples. Granted that our ancestors who inhabited all lands: we are each Indigenous and from somewhere else at other points in time.

We each are alive via ancestral pairings. Time-travel into ancestral research woke me up to that fact. I've spent a full year doing as deep a dive as I could to focus on such research. After this year, a story is forming that I hope, over the coming year, to bring to life.

 Each pebble of information gathered over the year has taught me that Indigenous matters are deeply important for me and our family. Our family's roots run deep in Indigenous history, much deeper than I imagined when I started researching.

Recovering from trauma has been a twenty-five year road travelled. Some days, it feels like coming home sharing what I've learned. Trauma wounds are plenty in Canadians. What I've lived and others in our circles have lived: I simply can't tell that story any longer  as if I had only been in Disneyland for the weekend.  To recover took surrender. Surrender took self-destruction to achieve. A battle lost long ago forced surrender into mythic places in stories. A myth is a story form innate in human beings.

There is a story inside of us all. We all share the need for story-telling.  But, for some, the need goes unmet because life takes hold and responsibilities invade our creative mind   my eyes have been opened to my own story, I don't know how to 'be' Canadian anymore. But I've embraced an identity that's Cree-Irish, with a bit of Brit tossed into a mongrel soup.

The Truth and Reconciliation process gave all of us a call to adventure for those willing to learn. The work of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Woman and Girls added to this.

The churches that were employed by Canadian governments caused a depth of suffering unimaginable to most. Denial and ill-willed politics were behind this, yes, but who was really  responsible for the genocide of Indigenous people? For on-Indigenous peoples, denial is no longer an option. The history is only still dark because too many seem too afraid to simply flip on the light.

Ralston Saul's book is something offered to assist our way towards taking collective action. Past generations have failed to address this reality. But this is our  history making moment, a time for both reckoning and a fresh start for those so willing.

Re-education is a decision. For those who hope that seven generations ahead, what's decided today will produce healing for  the trauma suffered by Indigenous Peoples, still standing as victims of human rights abuse in Residential Schools.  Silence implies consent and once reality bites, who in right mind would allow ourselves to ever have ignored what was happening.

No more pretending. I  can't hide from reality.. Brits and Cree; Metis, Scots, Irish all still carry the wounds of history.

Who is it that's responsible for this genocide?  Understanding your own potential for darkness, is the best method for dealing with darkness in others.

The following is an excerpt from, A Fair Country-Telling Truths About Canada by author John Ralston Saul.
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THE POWER OF A STORY
A dancer who describes himself as a singer will do neither well.

To insist on describing ourselves as something we are not is to embrace existential illiteracy.  We are not a civilization of (Only European) inspiration.  

We never have been.  

Our society is not an expression of peace, order and good government.

It never was. To accept and even believe such fundamental misrepresentations of Canada and Canadians is to sever our mythologies from our reality.

Playwright and novelist Tomson Highway points out that, "Languages are given form by mythologies."  To accept a language that expresses neither our true selves nor our true mythologies is to disarm our civilization.  

It is to cripple our capacity to talk and to act in a way that reflects both our collective unconscious and our ethical standards."

" . . .  we have shrink-wrapped ourselves into a very particular description of our civilization and how it came to be.  We have wrapped ourselves so tight within that description that it has become a straitjacket that expresses the history of another people, a history that would have produced a very different civilization than the one we have.

We are a people of Aboriginal inspiration (as much as European); organized around a concept of peace, FAIRNESS and good government.  That is what lies at the heart of our story, at the heart of Canadian mythology.
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. . . .If we can embrace a language that expresses that story, we will feel a great release.  We will discover a remarkable power to act and to do so in such a way that we will feel we are true to ourselves."  (Within: Be Reconciled).

~ A Fair Country, Telling Truths About Canada, John Ralston Saul
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A Fair Country Telling Truths About Canada by John Ralston Saul