Wisdom From Lori

 

Judge Brian Giesbrecht said it was time for indigenous people to move on. I know that sentiment is shared by many Canadians. It is very common among privileged Canadians.

Such statements are not just disingenuous, but also plain old fashioned ignorant. Compare this with the wisdom, understanding and deep empathy of my cousin Lori—one of the good people who are not blinded by privilege—who posted it on my blog. I am reposting it because I fear too many did not read it.

 

“Even though my maternal family was starved, beaten and most of them, including my grandfather, killed by Stalin, and, my grandmother, mother and her siblings , mere children, were forced to walk from Ukraine through Poland to reach Germany where they were imprisoned in forced labour and concentration camps and starved again, and even though the Canadian government who took them in as immigrants and made them pay back their passage, and the Canadian Government took away my people’s right to speak their own language and ignored their signed treaty to provide schooling in their own language, which led to me never being able to learn and speak my own language, and even though those events have coloured every minute of my entire life, I cannot pretend to understand the enormity of the experiences of indigenous Canadian people who endured these sorts of tortures and more, AND DID NOT HAVE THE ADVANTAGE OF WHITE SKIN or European heritage to give them even one advantage in their recovery from their experiences.
I can understand and support the healing efforts now being made by indigenous culture, and hope that someday we will stand together as a world culture without doing evil to one another.”

 

I wish more people like Judge Giesbrecht and other white people were as wise as Lori.

One thought on “Wisdom From Lori

  1. Cousin, you do me a great honour to repeat the words and understanding I drew from my Mennonite upbringing.

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