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 Kjipuktuk, Mi’kma’ki (now known as Halifax, Nova Scotia). Kjipuktuk 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 White Europeans 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.