Pop 89: Sprung from the land
By MADONNA HAMEL
madonnahamel@hotmail.com
Leger released a new poll asking whether or not we should “cancel Canada Day.” Most of the news media pathetically but predictably took the poll and ran with it, inciting righteous patriotic indignation and shifting focus away from what generated the poll in the first place.
The word “cancel” is both a trigger and a red herring. It was a deliberate choice, meant to add to an already polarized and angry public with definite opinions surrounding “cancel culture.” But the job of the media is to sell papers or online advertising, or however they make their money these days. Outrage sells.
One of the problems with the poll, besides the language itself, is that it poses a yes/no question. Yes/no questions tend to instigate fights. They instantly polarize and shut down dialogue. There is no conversation. There certainly is no listening. There is just barking: No! Yes!
As an etymologist, I look at language to see how we derive and establish meaning. It is worth noting that the word Indigenous is Latin for: sprung from the land, native, born here.
A people sprung from the land, a people who draw spiritual succour from the land, whose ancestors passed down innate knowledge of the land, whose very languages were derived from an intimate relationship with this land and who were stewards of this land for centuries, were suddenly removed from their land, like a baby ripped from his Mother’s breast. And all we can think to ask on Canada Day, a day reserved to celebrate “our” home and native land, is: should we cancel it?
The full-on arrogance of an expanding empire allowed for a language and behaviour that white culture still benefits from today. But shaming won’t change anything. Shame is the tool of the institution that buried the children; we don’t need to use that same tool to confront denial.
Shamed people can’t hear. Shame shuts people down. We cannot come to acceptance of reality while at the same time building a defence against our shame. Drenched in an oppressive weight of shame, we will continue to opt for the lies of omission and silencing. Denial, I’ve heard said, stands for “Don’t Even Know I Am Lying.” We will continue to live in deep denial.
We as a nation were lied to and thus spent centuries lying. We were not taught the whole truth. But we know differently now. (How much more evidence do we need?) The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been working for decades on using appropriate language in dealing with our collective trauma and dark history. It’s our history, sprung from our years in this land.
I’m rereading a book called “It Didn’t Start With You” by Mark Wolynn, a trauma therapist who works with language in treating whole families for depression and anxiety. He concludes that most traumas are generational, that what our ancestors suffered, we suffer. We were born into our ancestor beliefs. Their prejudices and preferences we absorbed, their language, and perspectives we inherited.
No, we didn’t personally, with the encouragement and support of the self-appointed authority of our governing Queen, move into an Indigenous family’s home and watch as their entire family were removed from the land and their way of life. We didn’t personally force them into restricted areas and tell them what kind of work was “permissible” by the Great Mother, a mother they never met but who “thinks of them fondly.” We would never do or say such patronizing and degrading things.
We would never reduce a whole people - who, if left alone, would find their own food and feed their own families - to living on food rations. Some of us have memories of World War II or lean times when we resorted to the food bank, and we would never impose that kind of life on anyone. And we certainly would never withhold food rations from starving Indigenous women for sexual favours.
A century later, it still wasn’t any of us, we say, who personally continued on the same trajectory of identity-stripping and imposed deprivation in an effort to destroy the remains of an Indigenous identity, a spiritual core, a relationship with the land, by kidnapping the children. We, personally, weren’t still bent on pounding the Indian out of them, forbidding them to be with their families, to speak their language, until they forgot the words for things for which there are no words in English. For which there is no other way of accessing a worldview and a subtle but profound connection with the spirit of place.
We would never tell an entire culture to forget itself, its ancestors, its generational inheritance, we say. No, we personally would never do any of these things.
But we inherited and benefited from a legacy of invasion, abuse, denial, maltreatment, and decimation. And now we have come to a precipitous moment wherein we can slough off the old beliefs that, rather than “save souls,” have been responsible for the neglect, damage and denial of our own, as well as others.
Wolynn’s book is really a reiteration of The Great Law of The Iroquois, a long-held Indigenous understanding of influence and effect which states that everything we say and do, in this moment, affects the next seven generations. And everything we say and do, in this moment, is the result of what was said and done before us.
It’s been noted by several Indigenous leaders and speakers that we have come to the end of seven generations of cruelty. This is a momentous place, a dark time when the eye can begin to see clearly, as one writer describes it.
So, no, it did not start with you, dear reader. But it can stop with you - with all of us. We can decide what to say and do, in this moment, to shape a clear-eyed Canadian identity.
And how can we begin? Perhaps with our feet on the ground, in that shared space that brought us here, and keeps us all here and never ceases to feed us and move us, that stills our racing brains and silences our yakking mouths: the land. Maybe, the words will spring forth, out of the land, and the land can teach us what to say.