Today is Truth and Reconciliation Day. It is a statutory “holiday” for us, and I always feel troubled about having a day off. I’ll wear my orange shirt today and give a donation to the Indian Residential School Survivors Society. But all of that still feels a bit performative.
This morning, I was reading the 3rd volume of Eknath Easwaran’s commentary on the Bhagavad Gita. He was recalling the testing of the atomic bomb in Micronesia; there were 67 nuclear tests in the Marshall Islands from 1946 to 1958. It is a horrific story of the insensitivity of colonialism. There was displacement of inhabitants, cultural loss, environmental damage and severe health consequences. Sound familiar? The scientists wore heavy protection from the fall out, but the Indigenous people and the American sailors were assured that it was safe to drink the water and eat the fish. Those people developed cancer at five times the rate of people who had not been exposed to the radiation.
Then, as I was listening to CBC radio, a news item about the Bishnoi gang came on; Canada has just declared this group terrorists. They have been targeting Sikh businesses and vocal advocates of an independent Sikh state in the Punjab. There have been allegations that the gang is a proxy for the Indian government, oppression at arm’s length. All of this with the backdrop of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the horrific war in Gaza. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Then, an interview on CBC radio with some of the family of Murray Sinclair, former member of the Canadian senate, a First Nations lawyer who was the chairman of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Niigaan James Sinclair, his son, talked about how angry he was that he had to share his Dad with Canada. But near the end of Sinclair’s life when he was ill, James spent hours with him at the hospital and ultimately made peace with his sacrifice. My Dad’s philosophy was to lead with love, he said. He was doing it for us, he was always thinking of us, wanting his family to have a better life. Sinclair’s traditional Ojibway name was Mizanay Gheezhik, “The One Who Speaks of Pictures in the Sky”. Let’s hope he is still guiding our global reconciliation journey from his perch in the heavens.