Facing What Consumes You is the Only Way to be Free

In which I share a short story for Shame Day.

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”, “Friendship Day”, 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.

Even Juneteenth, the new federal holiday created by Joe Biden, marks the end of slavery, which of course IS something to celebrate. In the case of shame day, there’s nothing to celebrate. It’s just pointing to an open wound that has never been healed.

Well, far be it from me to complain about a holiday. Might as well embrace it. But in my humble opinion, the Canadian state is not truly interested in either truth or reconciliation. I believe that it has ulterior motives, 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 it from me to deny that. When I call the new holiday Shame Day, it’s not to make fun of it. I’m just calling a spade a spade.

What I’m against is the government controlling the narrative around its own crimes against humanity, and its efforts to promote a new national mythos based on a fantasy in which Canada’s evil deeds are all in the past. Hopefully this piece will make that clear.

Let me say it again, though, lest I be misundertstood - I’m not against Shame Day. It gives us an opportunity to reflect upon what we now know about the true history of Canada.

Why Isn’t Indigenous Peoples Day a Stat Holiday?

I will point out, however, that Indigenous Peoples Day is not a statutory holiday, but Shame Day is. Doesn’t that seem a little weird?

In every culture that I’m aware of, holidays are for celebration - for fun, worship, and quality time with friends and family. In the case of Shame, what are people supposed to do with their day off? Sit home feeling bad?

Perhaps in a perfect world, people would attend ceremonies, educational events, and other events which help people come to terms with the fact that our past is ugly and awful. In practice, people will treat it like any other holiday. In other words, they will celebrate it.

We spend way too much of our lives working. When people get a day off, they’re going to make the most of it. That’s what holidays are for.

You know what would make more sense? Make Indigenous Peoples Day a statutory holiday and the Day for Truth and Reconciliation a national day of mourning, like Remembrance Day.

Remembrance Day, which marks the end of the Great War, is not a stat holiday. Why? It is supposed to be a day of mourning in which we reflect on how terrible war is. It’s not supposed to be a celebration.

It seems to me like Canada is doing the opposite of what makes sense.

Unless, of course, their real goals are different than their stated ones.

Is the Canadian state deliberately pushing a Victim Mentality on indigenous people?

It seems to me like the state wants indigenous people to identify more as victims than it wants them to celebrate their cultures. I wonder why.

Could it be because people who identify as victims are easier to control than people who identify as warriors?

In any case, Canada’s mythos is irreparably broken, and there’s no putting it back together again. Not so long as the Canada continues to be a resource colony for the British Crown, 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 written with non-Canadians in mind, and is presented as an overview of how we got to the point we’re at now.

HOW THE MOVEMENT FOR TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION BEGAN

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 called 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 comparable to 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 has gotten so obssessed with identity politics in recent years, this is why. It’s a form of compensation for the shame that we feel for being part of an evil, genocidal regime. We’re still coming to terms with our demons.

If you an outsider looking in, especially if you are a conspiracy theorist, you might think that Canada’s descent into woke fascism is due to ideological subversion coming from universities, perhaps aided by foreign intelligence agencies. I can assure you that this is not how things started. 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 many years raising consciousness about the abuses committed at residential schools, and a movement over the course of years before eventually leading to an official government inquiry.

I had the privilege of attending 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.

Furthermore, by sending militarized police to invade Wet’suwet’en territory back in 2019, Canada signalled that it has no intention of actually recognizing indigenous rights.

If you ask me, Reconciliation died back on January 7th, 2019. When push comes to shove, the song is still the same.

I hate to be cynical, but it seems to me like “Day for Truth and Reconciliation” is one big virtue signal, in which government bureaucrats pat themselves on the pat for not being as overtly racist as their predecessors while they continue expropriating indigenous land for corporate profit.

SO IS CANADA GOING TO GIVE THE LAND IT STOLE BACK, OR IS IT JUST GOING TO SPOUT MEANINGLESS SLOGANS?

Unless we’re talking about land, reconciliation is meaningless. As far as I can tell, nothing has truly changed. Orange Shirt Day is all package and no gift. It’s all fart and no shit. It’s deceptive, deceitful, and dishonest.

The name of the game is still the same. Canada is still a resource colony for the British Crown. It’s still raping the land as fast as it can, and indigenous people are still abused horrifically at the hands of the state.

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. I think 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.

WHAT IS THE TRUE MEANING OF THE PHRASE “EVERY CHILD MATTERS”?

One thing that makes me particularly sick is the meaningless slogan “Every Child Matters”.

Why, you ask? Who could possibly object to such a statement, you wonder?

Me. It bugs me that it is such a complete non-statement. Is anyone going around saying that some children don’t matter? No. But many are certainly mistreating children, feeding them lies, teaching them to be afraid of non-existent threats, and that obedience, cowardice, and conformity are virtues.

Well, you have to remember that this slogan was rolled out during the dark days of COVID, in which children were being systemically abused in a dystopian nightmare land.

Noam Chomsky once said:

“That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything.”

The slogan “EVERY CHILD MATTERS” grinds my gears because it is meaningless. It is meant into tricking people into associating government power with parental authority, which is the most indisputably legitimate form of authority which exists.

The government wants you to think that they are your mommy and daddy, and so long as people accept the legitimacy of its authority, we will stuck in an abusive relationship with it.

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.

I think Orange Shirt Day about creating a new myth which accomplishes several disempowering propaganda goals simultaneously.

1. They want indigenous people to identify as victims, rather than as warriors.

2. 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.

3. 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 been allied with the indigenous sovereignty movement?

4. They want to turn indigenous people against Christians to prevent an interracial revolutionary political movement from forming based on shared spiritual values.

5. They want people to to focus on the past crimes of the Canadian state rather than those it is committing in the present.

6. 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.)

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 the contract. 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. Let’s not forget that.

The Catholics and Anglicans certainly have blood on their hands, but they’re easy to blame. 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.

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!

Facing What Consumes You is the Only Way to Be Free

Once upon a time, I was hitchhiking in British Columbia. 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 incredible ways. Over my many years of hitchhiking, I've 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 up somewhere on the Crow's Nest Pass in Southern B.C. I was heading East. For whatever reason, we hit it off, and he began pouring out his life's story. He was a survivor of a residential school. He was a survivor of sexual abuse. He was an activist. He was part of the first wave of men to start talking about the 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 it was many hours. We had a lot of 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 general public's knowledge 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 Canada 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 he 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 just 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 he wailed in pain and called out to God and to the spirits. It was somewhere between a scream and a 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 dropped me off on 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 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 was 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 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 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 led 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 cosmologies and God as one.