Oct 02 | The Law of our Land

This piece arose out of a decision to rework an earlier entry. For #OrangeShirtDay, I was going to re-post this piece, written shortly after my last full day at the TRC in 2013. I went back and re-read it, and I saw that I had changed in my soul since writing it, which surprised me, as I didn’t feel like my feelings had changed much, but clearly my expression of them has. Today, I find it self-centered and maudlin, focusing more on my own white guilt than on the stories I heard, and expressing more concern with the terror of the past than the continued abuses that shackle indigenous people in Canada today. I don’t think it’s a terrible piece…but I can see, as I said before, how my soul has been changed over the four years since I wrote it. I decided to write something new, and I may even make it a yearly ritual, to see how much my soul changes over time.

 

Last Sunday, on the 24^th of September, I joined with members of my church in a second Walk for Reconciliation. Tens of thousands of people re-traced the route we took four years previously – this time in better weather. We arrived at the Reconciliation Expo, where I participated in my first blanket exercise, led by Kairos. You can learn more about those here. It was described to witnesses as a sort of “experiential history lesson.” For those who have seen it: I was one of the millions of indigenous people killed by disease brought over by European settlers, centuries before reserves and residential schools, which meant I went back to my seat quite early.

We were asked to share our most powerful moment when it was through.

For me, it was the image of two people standing back to back. This represented an indigenous person and a child who had returned from residential school. Children beaten for speaking their language, scourged and silenced for attempting to preserve their cultural identity, despite great bravery and resourcefulness in the face of such abuse, often returned home having lost some or much of that identity. Forcibly stripped of memory and shackled with shame, they often returned to find themselves alienated and confused by what had once been intuitive.

This often forced a wedge between them, their families, and their communities, all of which was symbolized by these two people standing back to back.

Revisiting some of my blog entries from my time at the 2013 TRC events, I am struck by the memories of listening circles and testimonies, of the people who came to tell their stories, with and without fear but never mincing words, and what a beautiful and terrible gift it was to hear the truth.

I am struck by the memories of tears, the memories of emotional exhaustion that was palpable for everyone who entered that blessed site.

I am struck by what for me has become the scent of reconciliation: sage, truly a spirit in itself, omnipresent and enfolding, a healing herb which for me as a settler not only soothes but stings, as so many medicines do, calling me to not only pray for and contribute to the healing of others but to be healed from the soul sickness I carry, being complicit in the system of colonialism that once was and that continues to be.

I am struck by the mixed feelings of uncertainty and comfort: uncertainty because I walked among indigenous people as a foreigner, and yet also felt at home in the smells of medicine and the sights of Coast Salish art and regalia and the sounds of drums, because I grew up hearing these songs and seeing these animals and smelling these smells (sage smells like healing; cedar smells like home).

In my un-erasable foreignness I remember the all-encompassing arms of home embracing me when I stepped off the plane after my emotionally turbulent adventures in England, the land of my ancestors, and once again saw the art of Bill Reid; when I rode over a bridge and saw the fir trees; when I re-acquainted myself with the bigness of everything here that sustains me and the people who have cared for it for thousands of years.

And in the ocean of these spiritually tangled memories, I remember Audrey Siegl’s joy in May when I told her it was my first time singing the Woman’s Warrior Song, the unmitigated delight of her embrace, and my own surprise at her spontaneous welcoming of my voice: “Oh! I have to hug you!”

I am a settler child…and I belong to this land. I am bound to her laws, and reconciliation is only one of them.

And yet, I suppose, in a way it is the only one.