and Elwood Jimmy - Speaking My Truth

This stole strength. This stole identity. Marshall Forchuk is a descendent of aUkrainian internee during WWI in Canada. Ukrainians, Serbians, Croatians,and others with Austro–Hungarian or German passports were imprisonedbehind barbed wired like animals, called enemy aliens, and forced to labourfor no reason other than where they were born. Forchuk said he learned fromhis father who escaped the camps,“You can steal my house, you can stealmy car and you have taken nothing. But if you steal my identity like we didwhen we put First Nations kids into residential schools then you have reallystolen something.” Ukrainians have only recently become white throughassimilation, another loss of culture. All those centuries under duress we heldour culture sacred. With wealth and security we too are losing culture andlanguage—and, as James would say, our medicine bundles.Privilege has come at too high a cost. Ukrainians in Canada became respectedpolitical leaders and professional in every field. Yet our silence about theinjustices done to us re-forms too often in our silence in speaking out againstthe ongoing effects of colonization against First Nations and Métis. Do wehave many of the old terrors of speaking out against authority and abuse? Arewe unconsciously afraid of reprisals, being hurt in a less obvious way? Hasit become normalized to become perpetrators by denying the truth, creatingongoing suffering? This is not how we think of ourselves. We think of ourselvesas good people. Now we think of ourselves as people who have education,power, and authority—not as people who have been made crazy by theviolence and abuse of others. Yet we are still in the cycle of violence … politeand legal violence.Within a contemporary context, papâmihâw asiniy synthesizes a numberof very basic and universal concepts and laws of being. It also magnifiesthe challenges regarding the navigation and negotiation of the relationshipbetween the Indigenous and the non-Indigenous—the world views, the people,the animals, the minerals, the plants—that define and mark the story of thisplace.Elwood, I watch over and over in nature the violence and community buildingof plant and animal colonization, the unthinking ways in which plants andanimals both dominate and cooperate in order to survive, create communities,and create endless adaptations. Can we think, I wonder, about what we aredoing and make choices that embrace the richness of the diversity of nations,the deep wealth that creates possibilities for the planet as it has for us?Can we acknowledge that we are a part of nature, all my relations’ pointsof views, the knowledges that First Nations have always shared freely withthose who were attentive? We are not, as we would believe, the generous ones,Cultivating Canada | 65