This morning, I sent the following to my Liberal member of parliament. Do you know who your MP is? Are they also a member of the same party? Maybe this is a letter you can forward to them.
E-mail from constituents matter. Many e-mails from many constituents matter more. Many thoughtful e-mails (I tried to be so) even when forwarded with few edits matter still more. We. can. influence. That's what responsible citizenship is about. Look up your Liberal MP's e-mail address at parl.gc.ca and fire it off, too, okay?
Hi <name of your Liberal MP>
<I'm quoting something someone posted on FB but I feel strongly this way, too.> <For what it's worth, my status with regard to First Nations Membership is ... >
I'm calling on your leader, our Prime Minister, to repudiate, disavow and do actual things to reverse the policy embodied in something his father said.
Recently, someone posted on Facebook one of those annoying graphics-with-texts in them. I call them annoying because it means you can't copy/paste the text somewhere else in order to interact with it. But that's okay. I'll type it in here.
The. Rt. Hon. Pierre Elliott Trudeau said, "If you no longer speak your language and no longer practice your culture, then you have no right to demand aboriginal rights from us, because you are assimilated with the ruling power."
The graphic has a split face, on the right is Pierre Trudeau's face, on the left, his son, Justin's.
This would be a good moment for our current prime minister to quote his father explicitly, to disavow and apologize for the statement -- not just as a statement of his father but as of one made by his predecessor in the office he holds -- and pledge now, and act promptly to undo the structures established by the cabinet department whose animus (despite its several-times renaming, rebranding) has often been that echoed by the one time Deputy Minister, Duncan Campbell Scott: "I want to get rid of the Indian problem ... Our object is to continue until there is not a single Indian in Canada who has not been absorbed into the body politic and there is no Indian question and no Indian Department." Even if that kind of policy was meant kindly (I'll allow that he may have thought it was so far as he was concerned, but I'm inclined to doubt it, and it hasn't worked out that way, ever), it's racist and offensive and a piece of our past that must be actively turned away from if only to lend a shred of credibility (and a very tiny shred at that) to our self-congratulation in looking across the border to the south (and their looking across the border to us), to say that on race we're at least not as messed up as they are.
For starters piles of First Nations communities have not had clean water much longer than Flint, Michigan has suffered under that lash.
"Not a racist" was never good enough, and now we all know why. It's time for even the Canadian Government to start turning towards striving to become anti-racist.
Sincerely,
<your name>
Are you going to?
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