Wreck-On Silly Nation

The early days of reconciliation were dizzying. An entire industry built itself with the promise of doing better in the future.

There were reconciliation music shows and tours with Canada’s biggest musical exports, headlining shows and shouting around about not being mean to Indigenous People anymore. Occasionally, they invited an emerging Indigenous musician to sing a song or two on stage.

There were reconciliation grants, projects, festivals, and conferences for brand new non-profit (and for-profit) organizations formed with the title RECONCILIATION somewhere in it.

A bunch of Chiefs started a corporation to buy a goddamn pipeline in Canada. They called it Project Reconciliation. Seriously.

Reconciliation was here, and it was hot. Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, was hugging Indigenous Elders on TV and occasionally said dumb things like he would “decolonize the government.”

But a few of us were on to the charade. We knew better.

I had the great benefit of touring across this country and talking to people from all walks of life from all stretches of this land, and I knew for a fact this moment was too good to be true. I knew it wasn’t true. I knew because I talked to people, and they told me what they thought. I know how dark the corners are in this country.

In 2016, I toured a live show across Canada called “Wreck-On Silly Nation,” which took an honest and angry look at where this reconciliation thing was taking us.

I curmudgeonly said we ought to pump the breaks on reconciliation and centre decolonization as the National project, but I was consistently called an activist, anti-Canadian, and anti-reconciliation. I don’t care, I was right.

It’s 2023, and gone are the days when folks blindly threw their time, energy, and sometimes money behind anything coined reconciliation.

I think people now realize that if we’re going to be serious about reconciliation and whatever it can be, it will take more blood, sweat, and tears than anyone first realized. It turns out undoing the harms of colonization is a fuck of a lot more work than first imagined.

The project in this country ought to be decolonization, not reconciliation.

The Fluency Failure Of Reconciliation

For a majority of those who entered into the work of reconciliation with open hearts and minds, they gained fluency in the language of reconciliation: Indian Residential Schools, truth, reconciliation, residential school survivors, sexual abuse, loss of language and culture, torture, food and medical experiments, death, electric chairs, colonization, forced assimilation, land theft, broken treaties, intergenerational trauma, and cultural genocide.

A devastating list. All of them, truths.

I don't believe Canadians were prepared for what they learned. How could they have been?

This fluency has created a base level of understanding of a new set of words, concepts and truths Canadians had to grapple with for the first time.

And these words aren’t just words floating innocently out in the world. These are our lives we are talking about. These are the lives and the experiences of our parents and grandparents.

People often tell me, “I never heard about this in school.” “I'm so ashamed. How could this happen here?” “What do you mean? The last residential school in Canada closed in 1996?”

Appalled and shocked, many Canadians were called to the front lines of reconciliation, ready, willing, and able to try to do better.

To gain fluency in reconciliation, Canadians became experts at flogging themselves with parts of the truth of what happened here, but even that has reached its limits. I’m not into self-flagellation, but I imagine you eventually reach your limits and look for someone else to take over the flagellating, or you get bored and make a sandwich.

Being fluent in this language became the introductory level goal of reconciliation and, at the same time, it seems, is the end goal for many in the reconciliation movement in Canada.

This is why I believe reconciliation is stuck in Canada. For a good number of people they believe they’ve reached the end when we haven’t even really started.

This is why many people who genuinely gave their oath of support to reconciliation are burned out and have turned away from the work, they understand this. The fluency of reconciliation has failed them, and more importantly, it has failed Indian Residential School survivors, their families, and their communities.

The fluency level Canadians achieved was akin to the level of fluency you might attempt to attain when you go to Italy for the first time, and you learn just enough of the language to know how to order a glass of red wine or ask where the bathroom is.

The first words I learned in Anishinaabemowin, the Ojibway language, were the swear words. I fucking love the motherfucking swear words. I don’t know how to use them in a sentence, but I know how to say them, and I kinda know what they mean.

Canada can kinda use the fluency of reconciliation in a sentence, but I don’t know if they know what the words mean yet.

Measuring The Failure Of Trying

I can give this country credit, it tried. It did.

A genocide is hard to come back from. Trust us. We know.

The fluency failure of reconciliation needs to be examined.

It needs to be articulated.

It needs not to be replicated.

The fluency of reconciliation doesn’t work because it doesn't measure the expectations, wants, needs, hopes, and dreams of Indigenous Peoples. It does not speak the language of liberation and freedom in Indigenous Peoples’ homelands. It falls wildly short of all of those things. In fact, it can’t imagine those things.

Some people reading this will be offended by this piece of writing. I’ll likely not be hired for speaking gigs, and I may lose other professional opportunities because of my stance here. I have to be okay with that.

The work we have tried has failed. We have lost our way. We have to admit it.

We tried.

We failed.

We must recalibrate and keep going.

Case in point, territorial acknowledgements.

They're doing territorial acknowledgements at Toronto Blue Jays games.

Toronto Raptors games.

Toronto Maple Leafs games.

Territorial Acknowledgements made the big leagues.

When these acknowledgements started in academia, did anyone believe they’d find their way out of the academy and into the beer and popcorn of the Average Joe sports fan?

This was a victory.

This was brand new territory.

We had never been here before.

It turns out that acknowledging stolen land and not giving it back is now a big eye-roller for most, but I think it’s an important step. The conversation around territorial acknowledgements is continually evolving, as it should.

For me, it felt good the first time I heard them.

It felt good to be acknowledged in that way. It felt good to know whose treaty territory, whose traditional territory I was in. It felt good to understand that there is a relationship there that needs to be identified and perhaps scrutinized and ultimately fixed to be in a good relationship with each other.

Because that, my friends, is ultimately what reconciliation ought to be about, is rebuilding the forever reciprocal relationship with the world around you - the world you and I live in.

My understanding of what life ought to be as an Anishinaabe person it to be in good relations with the world around me.

This is nearly impossible in the face of colonization. If reconciliation is worth anything, its efforts should go toward allowing Indigenous Peoples to rebuild their lives as they deem fit.

It will take decolonization to achieve this.

The base level of fluency in reconciliation does not consider decolonization as the project because it is not brave enough to do so. It implicates Canada, and yes, Canadians, as the benefactors of colonialism.

And, colonization is totally bad, mmmmmkay?

What Do We Do Next?

I don't necessarily believe that people have completely changed their minds about reconciliation. It might be that, you know, the equitable and just future that Joe and Janet Canada promised Indigenous Peoples during their pledge to do better became an afterthought during the COVID-19 global pandemic. And something about the existential questions of humankind's deepest worries, like who's got the toilet paper, derails the efforts towards answers and solutions to the social and political responsibility question reconciliation asks us all to answer: what do we do next?

In the early days of reconciliation, the answer was, “Well, just do anything. Do anything.” There's no blueprint for what reconciliation was then or is now.

Reconciliation is whatever we make it.

It’s not mandated by law.

It’s just an idea. An idea that Indigenous Peoples deserve humanity. How this country can attempt to restore some semblance of respect for us as a People worthy of our humanity is a project Canada needs to offer us, I’m sick of begging for our humanity.

And. I know it’s hard. A genocide is hard to come back from. Trust us.

Sadly, there is no book at your local bookstore called “Reconciliation for Dummies,” or, “The Genocide Diet,” or, “The Life-Changing Magic Of Tidying Up…The Mess Colonization Made,” that you can pick up off the shelves, turn to chapter six and go, “Aha, I finally get it. I’ve got an idea!” That book does not exist, though, I will contact my agent to pitch it when I’m done writing this essay.

If you’re handcuffed by the question of what to do next, respectfully, it's probably because you didn’t really do anything meaningful in the first place. Showing up once or twice doesn’t materialize into the deep systemic change sought by Indigenous Peoples in their homelands.

For some, the work of reconciliation invigorated the sense of purpose and responsibility that the movement carries in its purest form. But for others, the pain and the trauma that Indigenous people suffered historically and contemporarily, was just too much to bear. It was easier to look away and sometimes just flat-out ignore or deny.

"If you deny that that happened — if you deny the whole residential school system and its impact on Indigenous people and the trauma that was created from those schools and the deaths — then, of course, it should be seen as hate speech." - Eleanor Sunchild

Sadly, Indian Residential School denialism is on the rise in Canada, so much so, that calls to enact legislation to make IRS denialism a hate crime in Canadian law have gained momentum in the past year. Eleanor Sunchild, a prominent Indigenous lawyer in Saskatchewan, lobbied for IRS denialism to be added to the criminal code in Canada alongside Holocaust denialism.

Is the work not hard enough? Now we’re fighting against this bullshit.