Canada Day: A holiday for remembrance, not necessarily celebration
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I have learned a lot about the past in recent weeks, and I fear the essential truth of this important observation by George Santayana in 1905.
My first lesson was a formal one: I completed a training program offered by the provincial health authority for its employees and volunteers, to enhance Indigenous Cultural Safety.
The training program grew out of an increasing awareness of the pervasive racism and stereotyping in the provincial health system. Just one example: a First Nations person exhibiting signs of a stroke runs a great risk of being dismissed as “another drunken Indian” when they seek care at an Emergency ward.
I considered myself a fairly knowledgeable, enlightened person. Although I never learned about colonial oppression of first peoples as a child or youth, in the last few years I’ve learned a lot and tried to check my own assumptions and prejudices.
But the training opened my eyes much further. Among the things I found out: Inuit people in Canada’s north were forced to wear metal identification tags at all times, so the religious orders “responsible” for them didn’t have to learn their “hard to pronounce” names…
