This is a badly burned hotel that has been abandoned it would seem along side the Trans-Canada Highway in northern Ontario. I must admit, sometimes I think of Canada this way. Not always, thank goodness., but too often. Is this what Canada is like? I will come back to this photo later.
I love travelling, and an essential part of travel, for me, is learning. I want to learn new things about new places from new people. Or, learn more about places I already know to some extent.
One of the things I wanted to learn about was Canada. I lived in Canada my entire life except for the last 10 years where we lived in Arizona for 3 months and Canada 9 months each . Give or take.
I thought I knew Canada. But did I really know it? Of course, not. I had a lot to learn. One of the things I have been trying to learn more about for at least a decade and even more, is the relationship between indigenous people and the descendants of the European settlers as well as an amazing array of immigrants and their descendants who came to live in Canada a country that was already clearly occupied. They have all made for an incredibly interesting place here in Canada. Not a melting pot. Rather, a hodgepodge.
What is a hodgepodge? According to Vocablulary.com
“A hodgepodge is a random assortment of things. A dorm room might be furnished with a hodgepodge of milk crates, antique mirrors, and a poster of a kitten hanging on a branch with one paw. Hodgepodge is a funny-sounding word for a somewhat funny occurrence — a grouping of things or people that don’t fit together.”
They don’t fit together. Yet they do. Somehow, inexplicably, they do. They make it work. The phrase is partly French and partly English. Pretty appropriate to Canada. We have been trying to put the French and English together for hundreds of years. Lately, we have come to realize there is another very important group of people we neglected for too long. These of course are the indigenous people who were here all along. Yet painfully, awkwardly, and wrongly forgotten or neglected. Again, according to Vocablulary.com,
“In the case of hodgepodge and hotchpotch, the rhyme is not an accident. These words came to English from early French in the form hochepot. The spelling was changed to make the second half of the word rhyme with the first. In French hochepot was a stew of many foods cooked together in a pot.”
I love stews. Through ingredients into a pot heat them up and enjoy. Great in theory. But does it work? We must admit it has not worked very well in the past. But we can do better. I think we want to do better. First, we must be willing to learn and willing to change. We must in humility admit our mistakes of the past and honestly try to do better. That is what reconciliation is all about.
How can we do that? I wanted to think about that and how we got into this hodgepodge in the first place. As Chief Justice Murray Sinclair, the Chair of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada often said, “You can’t understand where you are unless you understand how you got there.”
I wanted to consider that on this journey through the eastern part of Canada. How did we get into this hodgepodge? Is there a way out?