Pellerin: Truth and Reconciliation Day will have more power if we all get to observe it

Today is the second National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Not that it’s national, or doing very much to advance reconciliation yet. For that we all need to work a little harder at being solid allies to Indigenous peoples, friends of the truth and partners in making the future better than the past for everyone.

Establishing this day is the federal government’s response to “Call to Action” 80 of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which submitted its final report in 2015. It took six years to establish the first such day, and now, one year later, not half the country observes it.

It would be a fine understatement to say we are not feeling much of a sense of urgency on this file — in stark contrast to the speed with which the exact same federal government proclaimed a statutory holiday for the death of Queen Elizabeth II. We don’t always have to act within days. But between that and six years …

Statutory holidays aren’t just there to give us three-day weekends. They are a signal that a particular society cares so much about the significance of something that it forces employers to give their employees a paid day off work so they have time to observe it.

If everyone who agrees that the need for reconciliation at the government and business levels is urgent took the time to write an email to their elected representative to that effect, it would help in getting a day set aside to mark it. When enough of us speak up, governments listen.

You can tell how much people care about something by what they’re prepared to sacrifice for it. Shutting down workplaces and giving employees a paid holiday costs some people money. They don’t want to do it unless it’s really important to them, I guess. Like celebrating a 19th-century queen each spring, or some “civic” something or other in early August. You’d think a day to honour the memory of tens of thousands of children who were mistreated, raped and killed in residential schools that were designed for the specific purpose of “killing the Indian in the child,” and whose deaths weren’t even recorded and whose bodies were thrown in unmarked graves, might be worth just a little bit of effort.

I know for individual people it’s hard to know what to do to advance reconciliation. We weren’t there. We didn’t do any of those things and had we been there we would have objected to cultural genocide. But we are here now and we all have a moral obligation to do what we can to help fix it.

The simplest first step is to take the time to learn what was done to Indigenous peoples in Canada. There are many resources available, including an excellent free online course on Indigenous Canada offered by the University of Alberta.

Imagine what it would do to you to have your babies ripped from your arms by agents of the state, taken away to be “civilized” and never coming back. Or how you would fare in life if you’d been raised by parents who had been repeatedly raped in those schools. If you’d grown up in families with empty chairs and unanswerable questions.

Then think how you would feel if, having lived with that multi-generational pain and trauma, you were confronted every day with a mainstream society that can barely bestir itself to care enough to take one day out of the whole year to reflect on what it can do to help you heal. Or worse, that openly denies the need to do anything to help you, insisting it’s your problem if some people are using substances to dull your pain.

On Sept 30, at the very least, we should pause our regular busy lives and think about what we can do to help. The work is complex and will take generations. We all have a moral duty to start. Now.

Brigitte Pellerin is an Ottawa writer.