Facing What Consumes You is the Only Way to Be Free
In which I share a short story for Shame Day.
September 30th, 2023
Today is Shame Day, Canada’s new holiday.
Officially, it’s called the Day for Truth and Reconciliation.
Informally, it’s known as Orange Shirt Day.
I call it Shame Day.
Other countries have holidays like “Independence Day”, “Day of the Child”, or celebrations of revolutions or military victories. Now we’ve got Shame Day. We get a day off work to think about Canada’s crimes against humanity. Thanks, Trudeau.
Well, far be it from me to complain about a holiday. Might as well embrace it. In my humble opinion, the government is not truly interested in either truth or reconciliation. I believe that the Canadian state has ulterior motives in promoting Shame Day, and I’m going to explain why in this article.
Let me state up from that I’m not against Truth and Reconciliation Day, however. Far from it. The history of Canada is shameful, far be from me to deny that.
What I’m against is the government controlling the narrative around its own crimes against humanity, and the attempt by the Canadian state to promote a new national mythos based a fantasy in which Canada’s crimes against humanity are all in the past. Hopefully this piece will make that clear.
Let me say it again, though - I’m not against Shame Day. It gives us an opportunity to reflect upon what we now know that the true history of Canada.
Canada’s mythos is irreparably broken, and there’s no putting it back together again. Not so long as the Canadian state continues to exist, that is.
If you ask me, the only solution is revolution.
WHY SHAME DAY?
For those of you who don’t know, Canada is a very weird place these days. It’s not easy to explain how we got to this point, but I’m going to do my best.
This article is geared towards non-Canadians, and is presented as an overview of how we got to the point we’re at now.
You ready for this? Okay, here we go.
When I was in high school, your average Canadian had only the vaguest idea of the history of atrocities committed against the original inhabitants of what is now Canada.
Over the course of the past fifteen years, Canadians have become much more aware of the true history of this country, and it has come as a brutal blow to many of us to come to the realization that we have been living in a country which has deliberately been pusuing genocidal policies for generations.
If it sounds like I’m exaggerating, I’m not. It was state policy to separate ALL children from their parents and indoctrinate them in residential schools where they were prevented from speaking their languages and subjected to abhorrent physical, verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse.
As Wikipedia puts it:
Beginning in 1883, the government began funding Indian residential schools across Canada, which were run primarily by the Roman Catholic Church and the Anglican Church; but also included the United Church of Canada, the Methodist Church, and the Presbyterian Church. When the separation of children from their parents was resisted, the government responded by making school attendance compulsory in 1894 and empowered the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to seize children from reserves and bring them to the residential schools. When parents came to take their children away from the schools, the pass system was created, banning Indigenous people from leaving their reserve without a pass from an Indian agent.
Conditions at the schools were rough, as schools were underfunded and the infectious disease of tuberculosis was rampant. Over the course of the system's existence—more than a century long—approximately 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally.
This is barely scratching the surface, by the way. It gets way worse.
It has been tremendously damaging to the Canadian psyche to learn all this. We used to think we were the good guys, an exemplar of democratic values, a bastion of peace, politeness and decency. And then we found out that we were guilty of atrocities as bad as those of the Nazis.
Ever since, we have been grappling with the fallout of the destruction of our national mythos. What do you do when you find out that you’re the bad guys?
If you want to know why Canada went so hard for the wokeness, this is why. It’s a form of compensation for the shame that we feel for being part of an evil, genocidal regime.
If you an outsider looking in, especially if you are a conspiracy theorist, you might think that Canada’s obession with identity politics is due to the work of a foreign intelligence agency. I can assure you that such is not the case. The truth came out because of a political movement led by the residential school survivors themselves.
What eventually became known as the movement for Truth and Reconciliation began as a spiritual movement. One of its leaders was the prophet Grandfather William Commanda, the spiritual Grand Chief of the Anishnaabe and bearer of three wampum belts, including the Seven Fires Prophecy Belt.
Grandfather William Commanda spent years raising consciousness about the abuses committed at residential schools, and a movement grew for years before eventually leading to an official government inquiry.
I had the privilege to attend only one ceremony with Grandfather Commanda before he passed away in 2011, but I consider myself his follower, because I’ve been doing ceremony with people who learned directly from him for over ten years.
There has been much genuine effort on the part of many Euro-Canadians to learn the truth and to reconcile with indigenous peoples, but the results have been far from satisfactory.
Indigenous women continue to be murdered at a shocking rate, the suicide epidemic in indigenous communities shows no signs of abating, and overdose deaths have skyrocketed in recent years.
This year, the government of Canada has made the “Day for Truth and Reconciliation”, also known as “Orange Shirt Day” a statuary holiday.
You might think that I would be happy about this, but I’m not.
Why?
Because nothing has truly changed. It’s all form and no substance. It’s all fart and no shit. It’s deceptive, deceitful, and dishonest. I think it’s part of the classic Brish tactic to “let them think that they’ve won”.
Gandhi said “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win”. With all due respect, this isn’t true.
The reality is more like this: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they let you think you’ve won, then they pretend to be on your side, then they co-opt your movement, then they win.”
It’s a tough pill to swallow, but it’s true. I could think of twenty example off the top of my head. This tactic will keep working until we get wise.
Canada is still the same, and it’s not going to change so long as it’s still a resource colony for the British Crown. It exists for the purposes of plunder.
Canada is still raping the land as fast as it can, and indigenous people are still abused horrifically at the hands of the police and the “criminal justice system”.
Although many government workers may have good intentions, the system cannot be reformed. It is rotten to the core and must be destroyed.
At this point, the only solution is revolution.
What’s the deal with the Orange Shirts?
For another thing, I don’t trust the “Orange Shirt” thing. It remind me of the Nazi “Brown Shirts”, and makes me wonder whether a colour revolution is brewing. I think the government has realized that they can’t sweep indigenous genocide under the rug anymore, and so they’re pulling some sneaky tricks to control the narrative.
Simply put, I don’t trust Trudeau’s intentions. Do you?
Also, maybe I’m a little fucked in the head, but aren’t holidays meant to celebrate things? I know this will seem insane to some people, but I think there’s a sinister agenda at play here. I think the Powers That Shouldn’t Be are celebrating indigenous genocide and making sure that indigenous people remember their history for a very different reason than that which is being officially feigned.
The hidden message is this - “We stole all your kids before, and we can do it again. So you’d better be good little Canadians if you know what’s good for you.”
That’s right. I think that “Orange Shirt Day” is part of a counter-insurgency strategy. There, I said it.
The slogan of Orange Shirt Day is EVERY CHILD MATTERS, which of course is a knock-off of BLACK LIVES MATTER. I think that alone is telling.
It’s clear that the Canadian state is feigning anti-racism in order to divide the working class, following the example set by the Democratic Party in the U.S.
But who knows. Maybe now that Charles da Turd is Canada’s head of state, the Royal Family has seen the light.
For those of you outside of Canada who think that Canada is a democracy, in reality it’s a “constitional monarchy”, i.e. a monarchy.
Canada’s head of state is the King of England. It is a vassal state.
We’ve been deluding ourselves for 150 years. Let’s cut the crap already.
ALL OUR RELATIONS
The message of Grandfather Commanda was Peace, Unity, and Harmony between all people. He was a a true anti-racist. He opened the doors to Euro-Canadians to participate in sweat lodge ceremonies as brothers and sisters in the Circle of All Nations. After all, are not all four races represented by the four colours of the medicine wheel?
But now the woke ideology promoted by the Canadian state seems to have hijacked the idea of truth and reconciliation.
I don’t think that Trudeau’s Liberals are motivated by any type of desire to rectify historical wrongs. I think they want to control the narrative around indigenous genocide to prevent another indigenous uprising.
WHAT IS THE TRUE PURPOSE OF SHAME DAY?
I think Orange Shirt Day about creating a new myth which accomplishes several disempowering propaganda goals simultaneously.
They want indigenous people to identify as victims, rather than as warriors.
They want Euro-Canadians to be ashamed of their privilege so they don’t stand up for themselves as the government gets ever more authoritarian and insane.
They want to prevent indigenous people and rural whites from joining forces to challenge the Canadian state. (Can you imagine if the Freedom Convoy had allied with the indigenous sovereignty movement?)
They want to turn indigenous people against Christians to prevent an interracial revolutionary political movement from forming based on shared spiritual values.
They want people to to focus on the past crimes of the Canadian state rather than those it is committing in the present.
They want to promote a perverse kind of pan-indigenous mono-culture based on the shared experience of being oppressed. (In reality there is no one indigneous culture in Canada.)
THE CANADIAN STATE FEARS AN ALLIANCE BETWEEN CHRISTIANS AND INDIGENOUS PEOPLE
My final thoughts are this - I think the greatest revolutionary potential in Canada would come from unity between Christians and indigenous people.
I am not downplaying the crimes of Christians against indigenous people. Canadian Christians are well aware, by this point, that the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches played a key part in residential schools.
As Mohawk land defender Karenhariyo has pointed out, however, those churches merely took a contract offered to them by the government. The genocidal policies were instigated by the Canadian state. It was the Canadian state that paid the salaries of the politicians that drafted genocidal legislation, the police that kidnapped children from their homes, and the bureaucrats the oversaw the whole endeavour.
It was the Canadian state that is guiltiest of all. Let’s not forget that.
The Catholics and Anglicans certainly have blood on their hands, but let’s not let the Canadian state pass all the blame onto them.
The Anglican Church is basically a real estate holding company at this point, and Christians in Canada have less power now than the trans lobby does. They’re an easy punching bag.
Note that dozens of churches have been burned down in Canada in recent years, but as of yet not one cop shop has been put to the torch. Why?
I’ll point out, as I have before, that not one person that been charged for a single one of these crimes, leading me to believe that they are being carried out by an intelligence agency in order to promote racial unrest because the Canadian state fears a union of indigenous land defenders and rural whites, many of whom are Christian.
So there you have it - I believe Shame Day is part of a counter-insurgency psy-op.
I’m not against it, though. A day off is a day off. And if we’re going to celebrate something on this new holiday, let’s celebrate indigenous resistance.
STAY TUNED FOR MORE!
Over the course of the next few days, I will be posting some of my best writing on the subject of Canada’s crimes against humanity.
For now, I’ll be posting a story about a very moving experience that I had with a residential school survivor who picked me up hitchhiking years ago. I hope you like it.
Happy Shame Day, everyone!
What Consumes You is the Only Way to Be Free
Once upon a time, I was hitchhiking in B.C. I got picked up by an indigenous man, and he took a liking to me. When you’re hitchhiking, sometimes people will open up to you in some pretty incredible ways. Over my many years of hitchhiking, I have wound up being the confidant of many people whose names have escaped my memory. The fact that you are spending hours with someone you will never see again, who doesn’t know anyone that you know, allows people to take you into their confidence in a very special way.
This man picked me somewhere on the Crow’s Nest Pass in Southern B.C. I was going East. For whatever reason, we hit it off, and he began pouring out his life’s story. He was a residential school survivor. He was a survivor of sexual abuse. He was an activist. He was part of the first wave of men to start talking about sexual abuse that happened in residential schools. He was one of the men who had the courage to break the silence about the abuse that had been done to them. He had traveled far and wide speaking with men about some of the most traumatic experiences that a human being can have.
It was a long drive. I don’t remember how long, but many hours. We had a long, long time to talk, and I was amazed by this man’s incredible courage, compassion, and charisma. Here was a man carrying out his spiritual mission. Here was a warrior. This was at a time when the knowledge of the general public about the true horrors of residential schools was not known to the extent that it is now. You have to remember, ten or fifteen years ago, your average Canadian had no idea about the horrific child abuse that their government was responsible for. This man was one of the protagonists in the movement that brought all of this into the light. He was one of the first to confront the long-held taboo against indigenous men talking about their childhood experiences of sexual abuse. It was not seen as manly to talk about these things. A virtue was made of bottling up this pain. Boys don’t cry.
Often, this pent-up hurt would manifest in acts of violence, often against women and children. The jails in Canada are full of indigenous men whose crimes trace back to their unaddressed sexual trauma. This man recognized that what needed to happen was for men to heal, and that in order to heal they needed to be able to talk about what had happened to them.
The movement that he helped create eventually led to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and now everyone knows that Canadian is a genocidal state guilty of abhorrent crimes against humanity. I hope that somehow, magically, I meet this man again someday, because I am sure that he would remember me.
Why am I so sure? Well, because I met this man on a very fateful day. It just so happened that we were going to be passing right by the residential school where he was incarcerated as a child. Perhaps the reason that he opened up to me was because he was all too aware of where our route would take us. He didn’t want to be alone. He wanted someone to be there with him, because there was something that wanted to do, something he was afraid to do.
Imagine, this man – afraid. This man, who had inspired many men to face their deepest fears, was afraid. And not a little bit afraid. Terrified.
He had it in his mind to confront that fear. He had never returned to the grounds of this residential school since he escaped many years before. Now, he wanted to go there.
But he didn’t know if he could do it. Maybe when he got close, his cortisol would spike and his foot would press the gas and he’d flee the demons like he had so many times before there. It wasn’t like he hadn’t driven through Kamloops before. And there I was, his companion on this fateful day.
There was a reason that he had to do it. Perhaps it was to prove to himself that he could, but there was also the matter of visiting his friend’s grave. I don’t remember the specifics, but his best childhood friend had died there, and he held the school’s staff responsible.
I don’t remember if there was a physical grave, but he treated the entire grounds as one big grave. At a certain point, we came to a place and he decided that this was the spot.
I don’t remember the details. I remember the sound of his voice as h. I remember him wailing in pain and he called out to God and to the spirits. It was somewhere between a scream roar. “They’ll pay for what they did to you.” is what sums up what I remember witnessing, though I don’t know if he said those exact words.
Afterwards, he stopped me off and the highway and I never saw him again. I went on with my life, and later became heavily involved in supporting indigenous political struggles. When I look back now, this doesn’t seem like a coincidence.
So maybe this man changed my life. I don’t know. But on that day I just knew that God had placed me on this man’s path in order to play some small part in his life’s story.
I’ve gone this far without mentioning that this man is a Christian. Does that change the way that you feel about him? The work that he did was primarily through churches. Does that surprise you? If you’ve spent enough time in native communities, you will know that many native people are devout Christians. This man was one.
He told me about an experience that he had, I believe it was either in prison or soon after he had gotten out of prison, at a time when he was very angry. Someone had gotten him into a sweat lodge, at a time when he waking up to the hurt that was inside him. He told me that he had a vision and Jesus came to him.
After the door opened, he went out of the lodge and collapsed, crying and the shaking on the ground overpowered by some sensation unknown to his mind. He felt like a blown fuse. In the flood of energy, something in him had given way, and he would never be the same. The lodge-keepers followed him out to hold space for him in this moment of supreme vulnerability. When his convulsions had subsided, they told him to get back into the lodge.
After the round he told the lodge conductor what he had seen. He told them he couldn’t go back in. They told him that he had to, that he needed healing, that the medicine of the lodge was what he needed. He told them that he had seen the face of Jesus. He knew he was Christian.
The elders told him: “We don’t care who you pray to. Just pray.” They got him back into the lodge, and it took him many years to him to figure out how to feel about this whole experience. He came to see no contradiction between the Red Road and his Christian faith. After all, the Red Road lead him to Jesus. I think his attitude was that there was one Creator, and whether you call that Creator Jesus or not, it’s still the same creator.
This is the kind of experience that leaves an impression on you. I was raised Christian, so I have my roots in that conception of God. Years later, I started going to sweats, eventually becoming a Sun Dancer. But I think I always understood the unity of creation that exists in indigenous cosmovisions and God as one.