Oh Canada

I have nearly fourteen feet of books on Canadian history, which I didn’t fully realize until I started packing up my books in preparation to move. Some of them are ones my great-grandfather had in his collection, some from my grandparents, but mostly they are ones that I have purchased over the last thirty years.

My Canadian history classes in high school were the most boring subjects I was required to take. My grade 10 course was taught by one of the PE teachers. He would cruise into class as the bell was ringing, hand out worksheets or play a film strip, and then sit back at his desk biding his time until the bell signalled that he could go back to the gym. He didn’t bother to learn anyone’s name, other than the guys on the football team. His son was in my grade, but we were not friends. One day, shortly after we got our second term report cards, Scott asked me what I had got in Socials 10. I had got a ‘B;” I didn’t understand why my mark was lower than I expected because I was a good student, had done well on tests, and handed in all my assignments. Scott looked me in the eye and said, “guaranteed my dad does not know your name and he made up your grade. Girls get Bs and Boys get As. He is sexist. Go ask him.”

So I did. I respectfully asked to discuss why I got the grade I did in his class and how I could improve. He took a slow look at my face trying to place what class I was in. I did not give him any hints because I knew his son was right. Finally, he asked what block I was in and I watched him uncomfortably run his finger up and down the class list trying to figure out who I was, so he could tell me why I got the grade I did.

My grade 11 Social Studies class was even more dismal. The teacher seemed to be away for most of the year. Every class we had a different substitute teacher who assigned us to read the textbook and answer the questions at the end of the chapter. When the teacher did show up to class, each time we had the same lesson on “The Pineapple Express.” He would draw a map of Hawaii on one chalk board and the coast line of the BC and Washington on the other board, and then would proceed to explain weather patterns and ocean currents. Needless to say, I did not retain much from the textbooks, other than there were three of them, one blue, one red, and one green.

I started my undergraduate degree with a clear plan to learn as much as I could about Canada. It had to be more interesting than what I was presented in high school. There was a crack in the narrative I grew up with when news of the atrocities in Rwanda started to come out. Canadian were not friendly and not good peacekeepers. It bothered me, but because the turmoil was far away in a country I had never been to my mind was able to file it away as an isolated incident.

During my undergrad, I read, almost exclusively, Canadian literature in my free time—Margaret Atwood, Margaret Lawrence, Alice Munro, Carol Shields, Stephen Leacock, Ann-Marie Macdonald, Wayson Choi, Timothy Findley, and Mordecai Richler. I majored in Canadian History and took as many electives as I could in Canadian geography and anthropology. I can see now how much of my academic study was driven by a desire to figure out where I belonged and what it actually meant to be Canadian. After I graduated, I started to read more Indigenous, gender, and working-class histories. I needed an explanation for why things were they way they were.

In my twenties, I enthusiastically participated in Canada Day celebrations. I liked seeing people with temporary flag tattoos on their cheeks decked out in red and white. I proudly wore my Canada Kicks Ass t-shirt, which memorably one year, I was stopped by a woman in her late 60s who said, “tell me, dear, what is the Canada Kicks Association? I have not heard of it before.” I fumbled through some sort of answer and she merged back into the crowd shaking her head. I felt proud to be Canadian.

Canada kicks ass.

Something shifted in me when the words “cultural genocide” were used to describe Canadian Residential Schools for Indigenous peoples. Canada’s 150^th celebrations felt tainted and insincere. Should we really be celebrating our history as a nation? While I had been teaching about the impact of residential schools for years by that point, there was something about those words, cultural genocide, that hit harder. Partly it was because I had two kids in elementary school when the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report was published; I couldn’t fathom someone taking my children to educate them far away from me. And partly it was because I felt like my decades of reading Canadian history had not been enough. Not enough to fully grasp the impact of people’s stories not being told.

Based on my own high school experience, I understood why people felt shocked that they did not know the atrocities the Canadian government had sanctioned against Indigenous peoples. Some people in my circle firmly believed that Residential School survivors had exaggerated their experiences and others were feeling a bit unmoored at the realization that our public school curriculum had failed to give a full picture of Canada’s history. I understand the ignorance then, but what about now?

This Canada Day, I did not go out to join in festivities. The city has been awash in flags and people wearing red and white the last few weeks with Fifa games playing. But after the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa in 2022, I am uneasy seeing a flag on a hockey on the back of a truck. It does not feel like the same the patriotic symbol like it was when Vancouver hosted the Olympics in 2010 and Canada won the gold medal in women’s and men’s hockey. It has been hard to reconcile that the flag has been used to signal white supremacy. I have felt conflicted about it all day.

I’m grateful to live in Canada, but the nation has some reckoning to do to atone for its cultural genocide of our Indigenous peoples. I have seen change in the last ten years in school curriculums and cultural awareness, but it doesn’t seem like enough. I am hopeful, maybe naively so, that people will embrace the truth of Canada’s history and work towards reconciliation.