Violent relations
Letter from the editor

The winter before I joined Briarpatch I worked at a daytime drop-in centre for the homeless in Edmonton. Most of the community who used the centre were Indigenous men who slept outside throughout the winter, generally in camps pitched in the wide valley of the North Saskatchewan River that winds beneath the provincial legislature, itself built beside the wooden palisades of the Hudson’s Bay Company trading post that gave Edmonton its name.
For the men I got to know while working at the centre, there was more dignity in braving the extreme cold than in entering the city’s shelters. Their circumstances as Indigenous people, homeless on the traditional lands of the Plains Cree and Blackfoot, in the thick of Alberta’s bitumen boom, offer a window into Canada’s colonial present.
One of the most gentle and widely loved of the regulars at the drop-in centre, an Inuit guy we’ll call Simon, loved to play the old upright piano that stood next to the small library of National Geographic magazines. As friends chatted over bowls of instant noodles and played cards while waiting for their clothes to cycle through the washer and dryer, Simon transformed the room with the piano, creating a world in sound that held both the pain and the courage, the dispossession and the resilience, of their lives.
One December evening Simon came in particularly distraught, crying. After staff’s unsuccessful attempts to console him, he went outside to the busy street and tried to kill himself by jumping in front of traffic. A staff person pulled him off the road and sat with him, waiting for the police to arrive. When two officers showed up to take Simon away, he resisted – fought back – as if his life depended on it.
Within the span of 20 minutes Simon had attempted suicide and then defended himself from the armed guards of the status quo, the police, who were called to restore public order and safety.
It was a very Canadian moment, enacting so much of the settler-colonial scene. Untold events like this – countless but rarely broadcast – invite questions. What is the role of settler Canadians in a relentless emergency that has become – and has long been – everyday life for so many Native people? What is our role in a situation where front-line services reinforce experiences of dispossession and trauma, where scores of Indigenous communities live without potable water or decent shelter, and where Indigenous women face unconscionable levels of abuse, violence, and humiliation?
Few settler Canadians have purposefully built the structures of dispossession and incremental violence that generate and maintain these realities. But to the extent that our health, economic, educational, and cultural realities eclipse those of Native people, we have nonetheless benefited.
While we should be thankful for those who do, it is not the responsibility of Indigenous people to educate Canadians about the circumstances of Indigenous oppression. That responsibility rests with us, the non-Natives whose material privilege is rooted in an ongoing colonial relationship we must be able to recognize in order to change. Awakening to this emergency is not a favour to others but instead a step toward a different relationship with these resource-rich lands and their First Peoples.
We are all enriched by the recognition that no one’s potential can be reached so long as that of others is under constant threat.
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6 Comments
Awesome. Very few white Canadians, indeed very few of the now vast number of immigrants of color, see the horror that is life for countless indigenous souls in Canada.
We need to question why.
Keep speaking up for the virtually voiceless. Your points are bang on to anyone who has experienced the items that you ably discuss.
From Johnson on May 9th, 2014 at 11:31pm
Articles like this trouble me because they simplify the historical reality that belies the notions of a generic “settler Canadian. Metis culture was created through trade, kinship, and cultural ties between First Nations (particularly Ojibwe, Huron, Cree, and Kaskaskia peoples) and French Canadians and is vital to understand fully the complex history we share. Binary notions of race were instituted by Anglo-Americans and British colonizers who had no interest in shades of gray. Apparently this is a useful formulation for neo-anti-colonialist publications as well.
From James LaForest on Jun 3rd, 2014 at 1:35am
Thanks for the comment, James. It’s difficult to convey the complexity of centuries of contact within a 500-word editorial (indeed, I didn’t attempt to do so). I would hope that if you explored the breadth of the magazine’s contents over the years, you’d find the complexities and areas of “gray” you mention ably addressed. Here’s an article from 2013 on the question of Metis status: [url=http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/defining-who-is-metis]http://briarpatchmagazine.com/articles/view/defining-who-is-metis[/url]
From Andrew Loewen on Jun 3rd, 2014 at 8:40am
Exactly right Andrew!
From Ajay Parasram in Ottawa on Jun 11th, 2014 at 1:19pm
Thank you for this breathing honesty into media ! I am a White Settler Canadian of Scottish and English heritage and an educator of Indigenous Cultural Competency Development. We need more White settlers learning about the realities and committing to the work of changing unparalleled inequities. I have been working on my own awareness for sometime and at times get overwhelmed by the bottomless depth of colonial harm… Having other allies and advocates to move the story out of the shadows helps. Thank you!
From Laurie Harding in Mill Bay BC on Jun 13th, 2014 at 8:42pm
“Within the span of 20 minutes Simon had attempted suicide and then defended himself from the armed guards of the status quo, the police, who were called to restore public order and safety. “
You’re an asshole. So many I’ve seen and one I helped hold. thanked us all weeks later. It is so traumatizing to be the ones on call, so terrible to see someone at the point. Also I think it’s damn cheap to dramatize and capitalize your short stint as a do-gooder. All about you.
From eagle's nest on Jun 21st, 2014 at 6:55pm