a lot of people don't know the truth. A
lot of people don't know the true part,
the true story, the true Canadian story
all warts and all. You know, a lot of
people know the mystical Canadian dream
of multiculturalism and inclusion, but
there's a history of racism in this
country that we need to acknowledge.
And people would talk about history, but when they would talk about that history
people often talked about them in hushed
tones, and they talked about them quietly,
and they'd often say, well you know I'm
gonna tell you this, but don't, you know,
don't go around talking about it.
It's the ground we stand on figuratively and literally. In talking about land and
people's attitudes, how do
Canadians feel about living on somebody
else's land? Well we don't like to think about it.
I went to the same grade school
that my mom went to, so it's an old one--
it's been around for over 100 years. And
she remembers that when she was a girl
living in the village that they were 
Mi'kmaq living there. And I was
fascinated with this. Really? Like the
people who lived in the forest, like
they were they were living there in the
in our village? Like, when you were a
girl? Yeah, so my next question of course
is "What happened to them?"
Where are they? Why did they go? And I
didn't really feel I got a, you know, a
complete answer to that question.
Thinking about that question, you know,
"What is colonialism?" And I think a lot in
French, so the idea of les colons, it
truly is tied to questions of land,
right? Colonialism is appropriation of
land and rebuilding of land that's often
based on doctrines of discovery, or the
idea that there is no prior occupation.
Over the past 200 years and really the
most intense degradation has occurred
since the 1940s, which is in the lifespan
of our old people, without our permission
and without our consent
we have been systemically removed and
dispossessed of most of our territory.
We have fought back as our homeland has
been stolen, clear-cut, subdivided, and
sold to settlers from Europe and later
cottagers from Toronto. The last salmon
navigated our waters about a hundred
years ago. We no longer have eels or
salmon in our territory. We no longer
have old-growth white pine forests. Our
rice beds were nearly destroyed. All but
one tiny piece of prairie that exists on
my reserve and Alderville has been
destroyed. 90% of our sugar bushes are
under private ownership. Our most sacred
spaces have been made into provincial
parks for tourists with concrete
buildings on our teaching rocks. Our
burial grounds, our mounds, have cottages
built on top of them. The veins of our
mother have lift locks blocking them, and
the shores of nearly every one of our
lakes and rivers has a cottage or a
home, making it nearly impossible for us
to launch a canoe. Our rice has nearly been
destroyed by raised water levels from
the Trent-Severn Waterway, boat traffic,
and sewage from the cottages.
Our children have been taken away and sent to residential schools, day schools, and now an education
system that refuses to acknowledge our
culture, our knowledge, our history and
Indigenous experience.
I grew up in a non-Native family. I was
adopted into a settler family. My
grandparents are from a family that have
a heritage homestead and we celebrated the
hundredth anniversary of the homestead
two years ago. On both my adopted
father and adopted mother's sides, and I
grew up with in that atmosphere farming
and actually learned a lot from my
grandpa about, you know, as a newcomer he
had a deep appreciation for the land
that he lived. And you know I mean it was
it was one of those interesting
histories where I'm learning about this
settler perspective and the
love of the land, and, you know, coming
there; but my family not really having, 
or not wanting to think about how it
is they came to have the land that
they had, right? Even though my grandpa
would go out and he would find
arrowheads and he would find stone tools
on his land. I mean it acknowledged it,
but didn't take it that next step, right?
In terms of how did I come upon to have
this land? How did my parents get this
land, right? And have it as theirs, and own
it, you know, as property. And so I didn't
grow up with that idea either, right? 
It was like we'd been, you know,
my actual ancestors had been erased,
right?
Just leaving remnants.
In terms of my family lineage in one, two,
three generations, I guess, they've all
been a part of the story of colonization
in Canada. In the 1850s there was a whole
migration of Scots that came to southern
Ontario up around Huron County,
and populated it. And that's all been
treated, eh? They populated it as a
result of treaties being signed with the
people in that area. So they were living
on Indian land. And that generation,
back in those days they had lots of kids--
big families just to support the work of
the farm. But of course  when
the kids got bigger, they wanted their
own land, so there was a subsequent
migration--the next generation, my
grandfather, out to Manitoba in the 1880s.
The treaties had been signed in
the 1870s, and so my grandfather and
his brother traveled out to Manitoba
just south of Riding Mountain National
Park off the Yellowhead Highway now, and
homesteaded. Were given land, and were the
dominant people in what became a little
town, Angusville.
I have ancestors who came to
the United States as settlers and
colonizers and they participated in
colonialism by buying lands that were
obtained by the government in unethical
ways and buying those lands very cheaply
and, you know, after they bought the land,
doing, you know, like there's
this farming term that they call
"breaking the land" which I just find
really, it sounds very violent. And
this is what they did, they, you know, I'm
sure that there was a lot of destruction that
was done by my ancestors on the lands
that they farmed. And I know that I also
have ancestors who participated in the
logging industry and I'm imagining that
they were logging old-growth forests in
what's now called Wisconsin. So they
settled on the lands of Anishinaabe
people, and before those lands were where
where Anishinaabe people lived,
Dakota people had lived there. And also I
have ancestors who settled in Nebraska
in the lands of the Omaha Nation there. I
think that they probably perceived the
Indigenous people of the land as less
than human and according to Scripture
they were here to dominate and rule over
them, so they had every right in their
own minds to push them off the land, to
kill them, to change them however they
wanted, and so they stole this land and
then became wealthy on it.
you know we just didn't end up here by
accident.
You know, like even though I didn't come
from you know ancestors who were
educated or wealthy or anything like
that, I come from very sort of
like peasant roots, no education,
you know maybe grade three in some cases,
that kind of thing, right? But they still
were able to farm on land that, you know,
right? So you have to, you know, and none
of this happened by accident. You know,
whatever flyer made its way down to the
Ukraine that got somebody on a boat, you
know, saying that there's free land in
Canada to have for whoever wanted to
work it. Yeah, they worked their
butts off, fine. No one's gonna say they
didn't, you know, but you know they were
able to do that on on land you know that
of course, was you know, effectively
stolen from other people,right?
So, and now I'm here four or five generations later,
and still have my nice little
parcel of land that I'm living on.
It was when we adopted Abby that we
recognized that the very lands that my
parents and grandparents were welcomed
onto were the lands that her
grandparents were dispossessed of.
In 1920s they were contemplating draining a
lake in between Abbotsford and Sardis,
Sumas Lake there. They were gonna drain
it in order to make farmland. And the
local Sto:lo peoples were
resisting that, and saying no, like this
is where we live.
They had villages around the lake. They
even had homes and fishing sites built
on that lake on stilts, and that's where
my daughter's great-grandparents,
great-great-grandparents lived, right?
Right on that lake, right around it. And
so they were dispossessed, removed, no
doubt many of them ended up at
Coqualeetza Residential School right there
in Sardis.
When you think about it, all the things
that happened to us,
You know, the legacy, and to occupy us and
to separate us from our lands.
You know we were land-based people. When they named those lakes, they fished in those lakes.
When they walked in the mountains, you know, when they went to pick their medicines
they knew where they were going,  they knew what they were doing.
I'm also a descendant of a removed
community, in 1907, that still
endures that legacy, still exists, very
much struggles with the violence that
happened to us when we were forcibly
removed off our lands so that Manitoba
could move in all of these farmers into
our territories. And I started to learn
about why there were Native people in
Selkirk. I always wondered why, like why are
there Native people in this town? And all
of them were ironically north of
Manitoba Avenue, all the Indigenous
people that I knew, and so all of my
auntie, my uncle, everyone lived on the
north side of Manitoba Avenue.
And that's because people had moved into
town, when they were removed or when they
moved in from the north, they moved to
either the cheapest area or the, you know,
the area where,  that was, my father grew
up. And that's the place where all
the Indians kind of lived.
We did some research recently, and of course there
was very little written about who lived
on the land before the Mennonites.
But there was talk about conflict between
the Mennonite farmers and the Aboriginal
people in the area, and I know from other
texts that weren't specific to that
particular spot that the Aboriginal
people were farming in that area at one
time and were kind of legally pushed off
the land by the government who started
making rules to make it impossible for
them to survive as farmers there.
And then that land was given to the
Mennonite community which is my
husband's family, who became quite
wealthy as a result. And the Aboriginal
people in that area are now relegated to
the reserves,
and the two communities don't mix.
The neighborhood that I live
in is very close, and sort of borders on
a community that is referred to as
Rooster Town, which was a sort of a primarily
Métis community that was here
especially from the late 20s to the late
50s and then was forcibly
removed and displaced by the city of
Winnipeg. So when I walk around you know
outside of this home, I'm you know, the
more I learn about that particular
history in addition to, you know,
the Indigenous peoples that were here before
that particular group as well, it just
really it shrinks history down or makes
it very close to me. So even though my
ancestors came over decades and decades
ago it doesn't feel like that time is
that great to me at all. Like it feels
like it's very present and very now.
I am the third generation Canadian on this
land. And on paper, and according to our
government, I own land here, and force
would be used if it was ever contested.
That's how the system works
When I learned about the removal, when I
learned about the violent history of
dispossession, when I learned about how
the treaties had been treated in the
Selkirk area, I suddenly understood
that history. The light kind of, light
bulb kind of went off for me and I went,
now I understood what I grew up with.
When I look at a building, like I work at
the beautiful campus at the University
of Manitoba.  We're in this
really beautiful city of Winnipeg,
and we're in this beautiful place called,
originally called Manitowapow,
this beautiful place you know formally
called as Kanata, and you know and I see such
pain in such devastation and such a
violence that's taken place for these
things to be what they are now. And I see
these things as so sick, so full of... These
buildings right here are washed with the
blood of the people that were removed -
in order to for this place to be. I tell
my students you know what does Pembina
Highway mean, and this is highway that
comes right here, and they can't tell me.
Nobody knows what that highway
means. And that highway which was created
by Métis trade, you know, and and so then
you know, and the Métis fiercely fight for
this territory. They were fighting
because this was who they are. This is
who their livelihood, 
their their being,  is in
every blade of grass and is every, is in
the names of this place, is in the wind.
So I've travelled, you know, I've sat with many
nations and ceremonied with them, but also
heard their stories of the sacredness of
their lands, their waters, their lakes,
their streams you know some of the
elements there and what means to them.
You know, what what it means to their nation.
So I got the privilege of sitting
with them and hearing that that sacred connection
 you know, of knowing this is where I came from.
we can't do all of this on our own.
It's not all on our shoulders. And people want to put it on all our shoulders.
People want us to solve everything. Solve your problem, It's your problem, you solve it.
It's like no, you know, this isn't our problem, right?
This isn't the Indian problem.
This is a problem of the land, right? 
This is a problem of, you know,
this place that we now call Canada.
And in some ways a good starting
point for me anyway is is to try to go
back and and know as much about, as a
settler, the ancestors of settlers, the land
that you're living on now in the history
of it, and who lived there before. And
what exactly transpired to make it so
that they are not living here now in the
ways in which they did previously. And my
take on this is that if, you know,
if everyone in the country we call Canada
did this, if all non-Indigenous people
did this, maybe we would just be miles
ahead in this great project.
It really is supporting Indigenous
struggles and resurgence around
land, if that is the foundation.
Murray Sinclair says this: your
responsibility is to repair what was
broken, to return what is lost, Like
that's huge, right? But you begin small.
You get to know your place that you're in.
This is not an Indigenous issue, we talk about Aboriginal issues. This is a Canadian issue.
We did not put ourselves where we're at today, and in
order to change things you have to know
where you came from and where
you're going and that takes honesty.
That sense of where I come from has always been 
really solid and firmly rooted on the banks of this river
and in this part of of Manitoba.
And you know, it's interesting, I picked up my
great-grandfather's oral history, and you
know my family has been here for many
generations along this river,
And I got that strong sense of understanding
better why I feel the way I feel about this place,
and why, for example, when I go
away to work or study, that I feel this pull
back here. There's certain things that I can only do when I'm sitting on this land. As much as love other places, and other people,
There's something truly firmly rooted in this place for me, so...
to this go
