Today I’m going to step briefly outside the bounds of our normal course of business.  This post is not about whales and dolphins, or about our treatment of them.  It’s not about the environment or taking care of the natural world.  It’s not about advocacy, or about how to be an effective activist.  But what it is about is where we need to be as a people in order to be successful in all those other things that we’re about.  CCA knows that the kind of world we live in will determine whether the one we strive for every day, one in which our treatment of other sentient species is compassionate and just, will even be attainable in the first place.

For our readers who don’t live in Canada, you may not be familiar with the events that prompted me to make this decision.  Findings at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School indicate that the remains of an estimated 215 children were buried at that site, in the province of British Columbia.  Soon after, surface surveys of unmarked graves at the Marieval Indian Residential School at Cowessess First Nation in Saskatchewan suggest hundreds more were buried there.  No one can doubt that we will find many, many others.  These schools were essentially an attempt at forced assimilation across the country, over a 120 year period ending the 1990’s, without even the pretense of obtaining consent from the children’s parents or communities.  These recent findings add to the evidence of what we already knew about the terrible conditions in these places.

With even a rudimentary knowledge of our nation’s colonial history, these events are shocking but entirely unsurprising.  

These tragic findings have prompted a great deal of discussion here as to whether we ought to cancel Canada Day celebrations.  Though I have an opinion, I’m not going to weigh in too much on that.  There is a much larger question at play, about which we should be a lot more concerned.  We have a great deal to celebrate in this country, but it’s still useful – indeed essential – to recognize how we’ve come to be where we are, and where we want to go from here.  

Many have expressed anger that some municipalities have already cancelled celebrations, often accompanied with the suggestion that “groups of activists are tearing down the country” rather than acknowledging its many successes.  But is that what they’re doing though?  Before we start questioning others’ motivations, perhaps we need to examine our own.

All well and good to be outraged about calls to cancel, but if we’re among the people vowing to not be silent on that issue, perhaps we should ask ourselves whether we were similarly motivated to speak out on much more important issues that have come up lately.  For example, whether we ought to examine other residential school sites to see if similar horrors took place there.   Now that Marieval has happened there’s very little doubt that these investigations will take place, but up until now there was plenty of resistance to this idea.  Seems to me a no-brainer.  We shouldn’t be too quick to assume that Kamloops was an isolated event.  I’m sure that if 215 bodies were found in my back yard, the police would be interested in having a look at my other properties.  That fact it wasn’t obvious in this case is rather troubling.  The question of further investigations shouldn’t have been contentious.  If we’re outraged about the cancellation of Canada Day celebrations, we probably should have been outraged about that as well.  

Canada, is among those nations that qualifies as a great place to live, and as its citizens we are very fortunate to live here.  I also intend to do my part to keep it that way.  But one of the things that will require is that we acknowledge our history.  We have a moral obligation to do whatever must be done to correct for our mistakes, as well as whatever we can to afford our fellow Canadians an opportunity to heal.  If we don’t stick to the principle that every single person matters as much as every other, then we’ve taken a big step down the road towards being no different from every petty dictatorship, feudal state or aristocracy that’s ever existed through all of history.  That’s not us, not who we want to be.

Those words clearly ring of stating the obvious as I write them, but I nevertheless feel the need to say them here, as sometimes we need to give our heads a shake and remember to put things into their proper perspective.  

Finally, if I may take this back to whales and dolphins for a minute…  My job is largely about getting people to care about the fates of 3,000 sentient beings deprived of their liberty and languishing in tiny concrete pools, forced to perform for our entertainment, among a host of other issues that effect their well-being.  How much harder is my job if I happen to live in a society that is willing to sacrifice the well-being of any given segment – big or small – of its population?  Hiding from the truth of our history because it is too unpleasant to face will not serve us.  Many of us still say things like ‘the past is the past, let’s move on’.  Sorry, no, we don’t get to do that.  We can shine a bright light on the past, acknowledge our mistakes, and learn from them.  Then we get to move on. 

For The Orca’s Voice, 

Phil, Canadian Cetacean Alliance