Every Child Matters, not just the ones in orange

Growing up as a Treaty Indian in Canada, I am no stranger to government propaganda. 

When I was a kid in the 80’s, the enemy was Iran or Iraq, depending on whose oil we wanted at cheap costs at the time. At the same gas stations where we bought the fuel we had destabilized their nations for you could buy novelty shirts that dehumanized entire peoples, making fun of their holy places and expressions. I remember calling people horrible things that compared them to animals and throwing around the word “terrorist,” like I knew what that meant.   

I was a child desperately wanting to fit into colonial Canadian society, so I remember saying awful horrendous things. Luckily, when I was growing up in the prairies we had few immigrants from those places, and none in my school to witness the atrocious behaviour of ignorant children who themselves were victims of propaganda. But in Canada, the dehumanizing propaganda wasn’t just directed at the supposed enemies from the Middle East.  

“Wagon burner.” The first time I heard this was in elementary school and the term was coming from a teacher. For those who are unfamiliar with it, it is a derogatory term for First Nations people. 

“Savage.” “Bush Monkey.” “Dirty Indians will never amount to anything, all they do is drink. Barely even human.” All these things have been said about my people and I was called all of them before I was 10 years old. Statistically, First Nations people abstain from alcohol more than any other group of people in Canada. 43% of First Nations completely abstain from alcohol compared to less than 25% of white folk. But that’s also beside the point, and I again find myself arguing
within a framework bound by racist assumptions. I’m trying to remind myself that racism isn’t based in fact or logic. It’s just propaganda. 

The dehumanizing things that were said to me, about me, were reflected in official state policy.  

It wasn’t until I was five years old that the Canadian government agreed I was human. Prior to that, I and all Section 35 Indians in this country were considered wards of the state. We were the last marginalized group to get the vote, in 1960, which was the same year we could finally hire a lawyer. It was illegal for us to leave the reserve for decades. It was illegal for us to carry out our traditional funeral rights. We were subjected to kidnapping by the state. We were sent to re-education camps. They called them residential schools, but they were re-education camps. Many of us didn’t return from them. My father ran away from one three times in his life. He suffered horrendous traumas there that he carried with him til the end of his days.   

When I was in school as a child, the teachers and principals in elementary made certain I knew I was less human than my melanin-deficient peers.   

They were civilized and I was a savage.   

As I grew, I began to realize that maybe the people who treated me and my people with such disdain were not my friends. It was a hard and lonely lesson for me to learn. It was isolating for a boy who just wanted to fit in and be a part of something.   

But I met people who helped me learn and feel part of community.   

I met many Chilean immigrants who were escaping a dictator who had been installed by the colonial regime of the United States. They became my friends and my world expanded. Many in my own Indigenous community were traumatized, still are, if I’m being honest.  But I met other indians who were just the right amount of traumatized as I was, and collectively we could heal. We would have conversations about if we could choose our oppressors of the settler nations that tried to take over the Americas, who would we choose? We know what happened with the British settlers.  

They used to treat the Irish, Scottish, and Italian settlers roughly the same as us. They were considered human but they were dehumanized through language and pop culture, at least for a time. We would debate what life under a different colonizer might have been like. What would the French, Dutch, or Spanish have done differently? Would those settler nations have treated us as less than human? Meeting people who had fled countries colonized by the Spanish reminded me that it doesn’t matter who the colonizer is, colonialism is the same everywhere. Eventually, my world expanded enough that I met “the enemy” I was taught to hate as a child.   

They weren’t that bad.   

They cooked funny food, not the moose meat, spam, and bannock I grew up on. But it was tasty and I eventually learned to absolutely love it. The people as we grew tight would call me Habibi, which I later learned was a term of endearment. This always made my heart swell. Some say French is the language of love, but I tend to disagree. I became friends with many in those communities.   

Eventually, I realized that the reason I believed they were the enemy was because I had been taught that they were the enemy, I had absorbed the propaganda, I knew that if I wanted to fit in, I had to claim these people as my enemy, too.  I was told the military was there to protect us from them and I, like most young men, have a bit of a hero complex. For a time, I thought very hard about joining the military.   

But they’ve never invaded my land, they never forced my people onto reserves, they never made laws that called me less than human. They never called me dehumanizing things as a child. They never forced my grandparents to feed their family off of gophers. But the Canadian government and her Indian agents did. 

But we invaded their countries. We stole their resources. We made entire peoples our enemy and bombed some of their countries into the dark ages. And all the while we called them things that I won’t repeat again to my dying day.   

Today I see the same thing happening again. There is a fresh enemy to dehumanize, an entire people reduced to “terrorists” so their genocide can be made palatable. They are forced to live in the same kind of prison the colonial state of Canada forced my people into. It’s a burning irony that Canada has apologized to us for her crimes against us, yet defends and perpetuates the exact same crimes on another people.  

I keep asking myself, “Will land claims for them make up for this? Will state apologies make up for the loss of loved ones?” No, probably not. They weren’t for me and my family. Our economies are irreparably shattered, our traditional education gone, and nothing can bring back my loved ones.  
 
Today is about Truth. Today is about Reconciliation. The truth is Every Child Matters. Not just the ones wearing orange shirts, but also the ones wearing keffiyehs.  

Reconciliation starts with a permanent ceasefire.