Indigenous Recognition
As a Settler Canadian with Scottish, Irish, and Norwegian roots, I am extremely privileged to live in a comfortable home with my loving family in the area of Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (now known as Halifax, Nova Scotia). Kjipuktuk (and its sibling, Punamu’kwati’jk (”Boonamagwaddy”), now known as Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, where I live) is the ancestral and unceded territory of the Mi’kmaq people, and this territory is covered by the Peace and Friendship Treaties of 1725-1779. All of us who live here today are treaty people now, regardless of where our ancestors may have originally come from.
But there is much more to this history than a simple land acknowledgment can cover.
As a direct result of the centuries-long effects of colonialism after my White European ancestors settled across these lands we now call Canada, our Indigenous peoples are much more likely to have PTSD and to live in unsafe or unhealthy conditions today. For over a century ending only in 1996, Canadian governments and the Catholic Church were complicit in an organized program of kidnapping, family separation, systemic abuse and neglect through their operation of Residential Schools across Canada. This program inflicted severe trauma on several generations of our country’s Indigenous peoples, all in explicit service of extinguishing the lives and culture of the people who lived on these lands long before European contact.
In 2015, Canadian Senator Murray Sinclair delivered the landmark final report of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission into the Residential Schools period of our history, and that report is available for public viewing here. The Commission’s 94 Calls To Action to mitigate the destructive and intergenerational effects of the Residential School system are summarized in this CBC article. You can also read a thought-provoking article called 150 Acts of Reconciliation, authored by my first cousin, Canadian and Indigenous Studies professor Dr. Crystal Fraser with Sara Komarnisky. All Canadians should be informed of this dark part of our collective history, whose effects are still felt to this day.
To whatever extent you are able, I strongly encourage donating money or other resources to a local Indigenous organization in your area. You could also contact your Member of Parliament and/or Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada to express your concerns and call for action on the Commission’s recommendations.
On Western Culture’s Legacy Burdens of Patriarchy, Racism, Misogyny, and Homophobia
A great deal of my work involves helping people heal from the negative effects they have experienced from men exerting their dominance over them. Men themselves also suffer greatly, and a key source of their suffering can be their own lack of experience with facing and processing their own difficult emotions and deepest attachment wounds.
Almost nobody writes as lucidly about the core wounds that men experience from the patriarchy as bell hooks. Here are some highlights of bell’s writing from selections made by Mike Olenik for the Halifax men’s group called Holding Space at the Central Public Library in Halifax, Nova Scotia:
Patriarchy rewards men for being out of touch with their feelings; men are better able to fulfill the demands of patriarchy if they do not feel.
Men of feeling often find themselves isolated from other men. This fear of isolation often acts as the mechanism to prevent males from becoming more emotionally aware.
Since patriarchal parenting does not teach boys to express their feelings in words, very few boys are taught to express with words what they feel, when they feel it.
In my effort to help address some of the negative effects from the emotional suppression habits that are acculturated in so many men, I strive to provide a safe space for men to identify, explore, and share their deepest authentic feelings and emotions with another man—and to co-regulate safely with me throughout the process. To help mitigate the effects of violence against women and other marginalized populations, I also encourage you to donate or volunteer with a local shelter or domestic violence relief organization in your area.