As we were driving through eastern Canada on this trip, I kept thinking about the original human inhabitants of this wonderful country. The Indigenous people of what we now call Eastern Canada. I kept thinking about a television series I saw on CBC Gem, called Telling Our Story.
For over 500 years the lives of the people who occupied Eastern Canada, particularly in what we now call Quebec, were disrupted, but they survived. As the narrator of The CBC series Telling Our Story said, “History with a capital “H” was told from a single point of view, but those days are over.” Thank goodness for that. The European/Canadian point of view has been dominant too long. It’s time for a fresh look.
I know some of my friends are tired of hearing indigenous stories. They’ve heard enough they say. But those stories from an indigenous perspective are only very recently been available to us. The story of white settlers have been around for hundreds of years while the indigenous stories were not listened to. I think it is time for a change and we can hear these stories for a few years more.
Spiritual colonialism of Indigenous people was as disruptive as the political kind. Until deep into the 20th century and even beyond, Canada has tried to impose its religion on the Indigenous People of North America. The indigenous people of Eastern Canada want to speak out and tell their story. This time, we really should listen to it. We could learn something.
As one of the Indigenous artists said on the show, “People don’t even know us.” That is true. What a pity.
So, I am trying to tell their story to my friends. I am not appropriating their story. But as Niigaan Sinclair once told me what I could do to assist reconciliation, was to talk to my friends. So that is what I do. Many of them, no doubt, are sick of hearing me. But as Sinclair said, “they won’t listen to me, but maybe a few will listen to you.” Probably not very many but I think he has a point.
As one of the young Indigenous girls on the series said, “spirituality for me is a sense of connection to the land which makes me feel whole.” I think I could stop right there. She summed it up. And amazingly, these words echoed ancient words of a culture from the other side of the world, India. The word “religion” is derived from an ancient Indo-European word religio, which means connection or linkage. And that is what she was saying. It is a powerful message. It doesn’t need any supernatural beings either. Though it does not deny the possibility of the supernatural. Religion is about connection. The connection of people to each other and to the land.
Another man on the show, much older, said, “spirituality is totally different from religion.” I think he meant religion of the western colonial kind. There is another way and we can learn from it. This is not a call for anyone to abandon their own spirituality or religion. It is merely a call to open eyes.
As Alexandre Bacon, an Innu from Mashteuiatsh, said,
“If you read the Book of Genesis it says that God created man to rule over everything that flies, that crawls, that swims. Man stands above all other animals. He is meant to dominate nature, to control it. Whereas from an Indigenous point of standpoint, we are an integral part of nature. There is no hierarchy. The bear is our brother, the moose is our brother. And when an animal gives its life it deserves our gratitude.”
No part of the land rules any other part. Humans are not put on this earth to rule it. They are put on earth to be a part of it. That is the indigenous perspective. Not the indigenous perspective. One of perspectives.