For an immigrant like me, the meaning of Canada Day keeps evolving. This year, what is there to celebrate?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/06/2021 (1277 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Like most immigrants I arrived on these shores to be a part of white Canada; Indigenous peoples on Turtle Island are simply erased from the world’s consciousness.

Since my arrival, Canada has been seismically jolted every few years by Indigenous movements such as Idle No More, findings from the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and the Final Report on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, and stalwart individuals speaking up on social media, free from the constraints of the gatekeeping traditional media.

All of them have forced me to reckon with my place in this country and along with that, an evolving understanding of the meaning of Canada Day. Let me explain.

Every morning I wake up, I’m aware I have a lot to be grateful for. As a person who first came here not out of economic necessity but the privilege of “trying something new,” I feel grateful for the love I found here, for the physical space, the incredible beauty of the land, the job I have, my freedom to advocate for social rights, the relative political stability.

In my early days, when Canada Day rolled around, I thought the muted celebrations — flags and a picnic-y atmosphere rather than military parades — expressed a quieter pride, a more sophisticated expression of patriotism than the crude jingoism down south.

I ruefully accept now that I quickly adopted the Canadian value of smugness in relation to our giant neighbour.

Unlike settlers who come to take over a place, immigrants who also come to settle here aim to fit in to existing structures.

For many immigrants, fitting in means ingratiating ourselves to whiteness — or norms that privilege Anglo-Saxons — consciously or otherwise.

It means swallowing the insults, internalizing the thinly veiled contempt for our names, our accents, our clothes, our customs, our very identities. We chose to come here, we reason with ourselves, it’s better than our situation in X, Y or Z country. So we roll with the punches and focus on the good people we meet.

Most of all “fitting in” requires remaking ourselves to appear non-threatening to white people and distancing ourselves from those who ramble on about identity.

“Where are you from?” is a legitimate question for us. Pre-digital communications, it took a generation to go by for the non-Europeans among us to realize that it’s a question we will never not be asked.

We think building wealth will earn us respect. As individuals sometimes it does. We want to live in “good” neighbourhoods to provide opportunities for our children, not realizing that “good” means white (or at least middle-class) and that whiteness will penalize our children.

We do this because we don’t understand intersectionality; we don’t see how class and race intersect with power. We reject notions of white supremacy because we assume it maligns white people of good will. Like the local populations we have no ready-made analysis of oppressions. Our analysis remains in the experiential zone, often wordless.

Black scholarship gave me the language to recognize the experience and helped me understand my identity as a woman of colour. Indigenous scholarship created another paradigm shift by shaping my understanding of my relationship to Canada. Both saved me from losing myself.

When I first heard of Indigenous people — “Indians,” people said, and it confused me greatly to be labelled “East Indian” — they were referred to as faraway people tucked into reserves by choice, living the life of a bygone era. What a diabolical social narrative to create around a resilient people stubbornly, steadfastly refusing the logic of coloniality come what may.

Understanding I was in white Canada on stolen land brought a different tension to my understanding of fitting in. If the British had settled in India, how would I view new arrivals who ignored us as backward on our own land and looked up to the British trying to emulate their ways?

This thinking shifted my focus from my relation to whiteness to my relation, nay, my responsibilities as a settler of a different sort to First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples.

Like many people who agitate for social change, I am an optimist. Which is why the new understanding led me to mark Canada Day not for its founding but for the potential of what it could be.

That has come to a shuddering halt this year, a year where the past has come roaring into the present. The TRC had given us a conservative estimate of about 3,000 children’s deaths in residential schools from physical abuse, malnutrition, disease and neglect, suicide or while trying to escape the schools. They said the numbers would be much higher.

The discovery this month of almost 1,000 unmarked grave sites at residential schools in B.C. and Saskatchewan has only just begun to pull the veils off the country’s darkest secrets.

Are we in a celebratory mood? Come July 1, what will we be celebrating?

The past, of a nation founded by wrenching the land from its stewards to exploit its vast resources? With the grief of families torn apart on its conscience? With the blood of children on its hands?

The present, which continues that exploitation and abuse, with its persistent rejection of accountability? Canada Day: So what if we are terrible? Everyone is. Canada Day: Wouldn’t you rather be here than elsewhere? Canada Day: Fireworks, because we said we were wrong and now we’re moving on.

The future, that will remain more of the same because we keep expending our energy piling rubble on atrocities past and present?

History isn’t a sorry tale of yore that gets magically resolved along the way. Acknowledging past wrongs, changing laws and policies are necessary but only go so far if the attitudes that inspired them don’t change.

We may no longer have residential schools, but Canada removes Indigenous children from their families at a rate that ranks among the highest in the developed world. Of all children in Canada, only seven per cent are Indigenous, but they account for nearly half of all the foster children in the country.

There are more Indigenous children in care than there were in residential schools at their peak. On top of this, Canada continues to fight First Nations children in foster care in court denying them compensation, denying non-status kids access to health care.

We may be Jekyll to some but we are Hyde to others.

Celebrating Canada Day or not may not matter to the ground realities for First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. But what message do fireworks and flags send to our brothers and sisters grieving their losses from the horrors inflicted in the name of that flag?

And having sent that message how can we possibly sleep at night?

Shree Paradkar is a Toronto-based columnist covering issues around race and gender for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @ShreeParadkar