Where I Come From: Confessions of a Middle-aged White Man

Where I Come From: Confessions of a Middle-aged White Man.

We “Settler” Canadians – immigrants and the decedents of immigrants – must find a way to real reconciliation. And this means restitution and that is a four letter word… L A N D. But I’m getting ahead of myself… Where we must begin is with a full and truthful examination and recognition of our history with Indigenous peoples, followed by a solemn commitment to righting these wrongs with the sufficient resources to do so – undertaken with Indigenous people leading the way, telling us what they need and how they want it to work. It must be Nation to Nations. No doubt, it will be a long and difficult journey. But we must face and take responsibility for the past, so that together, we can take responsibility for the future. Without this, there is no Canada. Sorry. There just isn’t.

The revelations of the TRC shook me to my core and destroyed every myth about Canada I had held to be self-evident because of my upbringing, my education and my deep desire to believe that Canada is a fair and just society. The violent shame I felt for being so blissfully ignorant, so distracted and indifferent for my entire adult life, was exceeded only by the pain and sorrow I felt for the generations of Indigenous peoples ravaged by Colonialism and Residential Schools. I started my journey then and there. A journey to learn the real history of Canada – a history we have been denied by our education system and the mainstream media. I started to research – with books and online materials. Here is what I have learned:

We are liars, thieves and murderers. The DREAM of Canada does not exist.

There is no polite or politically correct way to put it. Colonialism and its policies, and the legacy of Residential Schools equate to Genocide. Want to call it a “cultural” genocide? Ok, fine. Cultural Genocide. This, I believe, is what the TRC was forced to call it. But honestly, it’s just plain old fashioned capital “G” Genocide.

We are liars because our governments and “the Crown” made numerous Treaty Agreements with Indigenous peoples and we have reneged on virtually every promise ever made (except the one we made to ourselves to get the land). We have taken the land and resources worth trillions of trillions of trillions of dollars and we continue to do so to this very day, not even leaving the scraps for those, without whose generous help and genuine friendship, French and English commercial outposts would have never succeeded as quickly and peacefully as they did. To say that we have failed as business partners, neighbours and friends is a disgusting understatement of grotesque proportion. We have marginalized, oppressed and undermined every aspect of Indigenous history, culture and rights. And we have stripped Indigenous peoples of their irrefutable title to, and full share of, the unimaginable bounty they revealed to the first Newcomers so many years ago – a bounty that we are now extracting and destroying at such an alarming rate, that it may already be irreversible.

What is Privilege?

I was born in 1963 in Toronto. My father was a corporate lawyer climbing the corporate ladder. His father’s family fled Minsk, Poland in the early 1900s. My great-grandfather died suddenly soon after arrival in Toronto leaving my grandfather, his mother, three brothers and two sisters to fend for themselves. No welfare. No social services of any kind. Just an immigrant Jewish family speaking broken English and no adult male in the workforce. To scrape by, my grandfather and his brothers sold newspapers at the corners of Yonge and Dundas in Toronto. After WWI they had to fight amputee vets for the corners. Think Woody Allen meets Quentin Tarantino and you’ll get a sense of what I mean. The seven of them lived in a single room. There was a bag of potatoes under a bed. One day my grandfather told his mother that he just couldn’t eat another potato. His mother said, “I know.” A few months later, she was also dead. It was 1919. My grandfather, Harry and his older sister, Lil became teenage parents to their three younger brothers and sister: Soli, Harvey, Benny, and Min.

My grandfather, Harry Clairman is the boy standing on the far right. The man with the big beard in front of him is his father, Avrum Henach (my father, Arthur Henry was named for him). Harry’s brother, Soli is on his father’s knee. The baby is sister Min. She sits on her mother’s lap – Sora Pesel. Between the parents in the back is sister Lil. The boy in the hat next to Min is Benny. The other child on the far left is Harvey. Within about a year of this photo being taken, both parents had died.

My Dad’s mother was born in Canada but her family was from Russia. Her father also died young, 32, of an appendicitis. He worked as a tailor at Eaton’s, (one of the only jobs open to Jews in Toronto at the time) and my grandmother had to leave school in grade 6 to help support the family. The image below is from a book called “Immigrants – A Portrait of the Urban Experience 1890 – 1930” by Robert Harney & Harold Troper, published in Toronto by Van Nostrand Reinhold, (c)1975. No one knew my great grandfather was is this book. One day my grandmother was in a book store. She picked up the book and flipped through it. She burst into tears and almost fainted when she saw the picture of her father. She started to yell and scream. Everyone in the store was very concerned until she explained what had happened.

 My great-grandfather Harry Willer at T. Eaton Company 1912.The caption in the book simply says, “Jewish tailors making Eaton brand clothing, 1912”

My grandmother’s family on my mother’s side was also from the edges of Russia, or the Ukraine as it was referred to. They fled the Cossack led pogroms after my grandmother’s grandfather was hung in a tree outside the family home (more of a shack really, dirt floor with a loft for sleeping. In the winter they brought the cow in for heat). Hiding by day and walking only at night, my grandmother’s family walked for two years from Russia to Germany, the little money they had sewn into the hem of my grandmother’s skirt. They arrived in Toronto in 1922.

My mother’s grandfather on her father’s side was a bugler in the Russo-Japanese war. He was shot in the chest, but survived. They also came to Canada in the early 1900s and settled in Whitby Ontario. Likely they were “granted” the land, or paid very little for it. The farm they lived on is now part of Highway 401. A small family claim to fame is that my Mother’s father, Jack Starr, founded the Horseshoe Tavern in Toronto in 1947. My Great Grandfather, Louis Starr (the bugler that was shot) was also a founding member of Toronto’s Kiever Shul. The First Russian Congregation Synagogue in the Kensington Market area of Toronto. It is still an active synagogue today.

The man sitting on the left with the two children in front of him is my great-grandfather, Louis Starr. His brothers are next to him. His wife, my great-grandmother, Henach, is the woman on the far right. This may be Manning Ave. in Toronto.

My father grew up on Danforth Avenue in Toronto in the back of his mother’s store. “Willer’s Ladies Wear”. They bathed in the kitchen sink that was separated from the beds with a curtain. There was an outhouse in the rear lane. On Saturdays his mother gave him a dime so he could take himself and one of his “really poor” friends to the movies. He excelled at school, skipping two grades and entered high school at Jarvis Collegiate at age 11. It was pretty rough for a young, skinny, Jewish nerd, but he managed to somehow take it in stride. From Jarvis, he eventually found himself on a scholarship, studying economics at Princeton University in New Jersey. One day he asked a professor how much money he could expect to make as an economist. The professor laughed. My dad dropped out and enrolled in law school at the University of Toronto. He married my mom while still in law school and my mom worked as a teacher supporting him through graduation.

A number of the lawyers and law firms he worked for in the 60s and 70s were anti-Semitic and he was blocked from advancement and even partnership at one in particular. Whenever that happened, he would quit and find another firm eager for his work ethic and growing reputation as a pragmatic problem solver in large and complex transactions.

We moved from a small house in Don Mills to a bigger house in North Toronto in 1966. Let’s say October 22, 1966. My family paid $59,000 for the house. In today’s crazed Toronto housing market, it is probably worth over 2 million dollars. My mom stayed home looking after 3 kids and a house in her early twenties. Later she started a successful furniture business – “A Special Place” – that she and my older sister ran for close to 40 years. North Toronto was a very nice place to grow up. When I was 8 years old we put a swimming pool in the backyard.

There were only a few Jewish kids at Allenby Public School when I first attended in 1968. I was called Kike quite a bit at first, then just once-in-a-while, and some boys threw pennies at me. A teacher once picked me up by my hair for running in the halls, but I don’t think it was because I was Jewish. It really scared me and it hurt a lot. I went into the bathroom and cried. I was seven years old. I remember being excused into the hall for some reason when the class sang Christmas carols, but I may have had something to do with that …. I hated being Jewish and going to Hebrew school because it made me different. I didn’t want to be different. I convinced my parents to let me quit Hebrew School so I could play house league hockey on Saturday mornings instead. Can’t get much more Canadian than that, eh?

My Dad is on the left. He couldn’t skate but he still came out and helped. I’m second from the left in the front row. This was my second year playing hockey. 1972. We lost in the finals that year 2-1.

Both my sisters and I attended University. I have a BA in English Literature from McGill University and a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Concordia University. I married my high school sweetheart in 1990. We also lived on the same street as little kids for a number of years. We have two girls who both attended university. One is now married and working as a chef and baker and the other just finished a degree in Performing Arts. I have 5 nieces and nephews who have all attended university except for one because he is just entering high school. For the most part, we are all reasonably healthy, well-adjusted people. We come from decent, loving, hard-working families that focussed us on getting a good education. This is not to say that there aren’t problems. There is always baggage and personal struggles. There is hardship, disappointment and some tragedy. That’s life. But by and large we’re ok … doing pretty well … living our lives and enjoying the fruits of our labour.

Tout-le-gang in June of 2014 celebrating my Dad’s 80^th. His dementia was getting pretty bad at this point and he died December 31, 2015. I am on the far left. My wife, Susan is in front of me. My sisters, Cara and Paula are beside me. Our parents, Arthur and Natalie are in the middle. The rest are spouses, children, nieces and nephews, aunt and uncle. The Clairman and Starr names have been joined thus far by MacKellar, Gotkin, Weislow, McTavish, and Kiersnowski. I was just told that the first of the next generation is on the way….

I recount this personal history because when my ancestors came to Canada in the early 1900s, Indigenous children as young as four or five years old were being stolen from their homes (and this started in the 1850s) and forced into Residential Schools where they stayed for months and months at a time completely shut off from their parents and families and left to the mercy of, or should I say, delivered into the torturous hands of, the nuns and priests. Few were treated ok. Received an education. Most were neglected and severely malnourished. Virtually all of them, through generation after generation, were told they were dirty and inferior, that their languages and cultures and ceremonies were dirty and inferior, and that they must adopt Christian values and customs. Speaking their languages was forbidden and often harshly punished. Talking to siblings was often forbidden and harshly punished. Even if some received a Colonial education, almost all lost their sense of belonging, their sense of self, their identity and culture, how to nurture, how to trust, how to love …. And as we now know, tens of thousands of beautiful, innocent children with their whole lives ahead of them were brutally physically, emotionally and sexually abused. They were beaten and raped by priests, nuns, teachers and so-called caregivers and they died either directly or indirectly as a result.

Stay on this for a moment…. Think of your family history. Your parents, grandparents and great grandparents as children. Think of your own childhood. Think of your friends and family. Flip through that photo album in your head. Now think of your children and imagine a knock on the door. Imagine a pounding on the door, and imagine if they had taken you, your brothers and sisters, your cousins and friends, your own children, just as they had taken your parents, and their parents and theirs…. Taken why? Because you spoke a different language? Because you had different cultural and religious ceremonies? This is why my ancestors fled Russia and Poland! Where would we be today if the history of Indigenous peoples was our Canadian heritage?

Kent Monkman’s “The Scream”, from his show “Shame & Prejudice: A Story of Resilience “

About 150,000 children were forced into these schools. The stated goal of the government was to “kill the Indian in the child”. Parents who resisted faced prosecution and jail – though some did manage to hide their kids from the authorities – a precious lucky few….

According to official records more than 6,000 children never came home (but some put this number closer to 15,000). And for those that survived, the trauma and abuse they endured changed the arc of their lives and family history forever. FOREVER! The drug abuse, alcoholism, physical and sexual abuse, mental illness, rates of incarceration and alarming rates of suicide we see today are a direct result of the malicious and targeted racist policies of Canada. Oh Canada…. And according to Dr.Cindy Blackstock, executive director of the First Nations Caring Society, there are now more Indigenous children under care of the government than there were at the height of the Residential schools…. CANADA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS! And guess what? The funding and services that these children receive are a fraction of what non-Indigenous children receive. So much so that in 2016, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ordered the Canadian Government to  stop this discrimination and equalize funding. More than a year later, the Trudeau government is still dragging their feet, AND CHILDREN ARE STILL DYING.

While my grandfather and his brothers got a foothold in Toronto, selling newspapers for pennies before and after school, our famous poet of confederation, and head of the Department of Indian Affairs, Duncan Campbell Scott, and the many other racists within the Canadian government, ensured that thousands of Indigenous children contracted and died of Tuberculosis – despite well documented findings and the pleas of officials like Dr. Peter Bryce. These children died alone, frightened, far from homes where their parents, in many cases, weren’t even told of their awful fates. There are unmarked graves all over this country that hold the remains of children that never made it home…. The last residential school did not close until 1996.

As noted my father grew up poor, bathing in a sink at the back of a store in the late 1930s, early 40s. But when he turned on the tap, clean, drinkable water came out. One generation later I was swimming in our backyard pool. If you think that an Indigenous family given the same opportunities today* would be any different, then you have been successfully trained by the colonial powers that perpetrated the crimes being described herein. For it is only possible to accept the subjugation, mistreatment, marginalization, oppression, abuse, displacement, and systematic state-sanctioned elimination of Indigenous culture and peoples if you accept that they are inherently inferior. What did our Canadian forefathers, Including John A. MacDonald, call them? Heathens. Savages…. The dehumanization of the “other” is an oldie but a goodie, and it is alive and well all over the so-called democratized world. The holocaust comes to mind, as does slavery, but let’s not go there, lest I be accused of hyperbole…. Wake the fuck up Canada.

*And maybe they don’t want that kind of opportunity. Maybe some want the opportunity to follow their ancestral traditions, or merge these with a modern sensibility the way many cultures are informed and guided by their traditions and rituals in a modern context. The key here is having the opportunity. An equal opportunity in every sense of the word.

I walked to and from Allenby PS every day, but regardless of how different and lonely I sometimes felt, at the end of each day I went home to a safe place where I was fed and loved and looked after when I got sick. One day in grade six I was at a hockey practice. My stomach started to hurt. It started to hurt a lot. A brief ambulance ride, and within a couple of hours I was in surgery at Toronto Sick Kids Hospital having my appendix removed. Everything went well. I was right as rain in a week or so, unlike my great grandfather….

While I was in the hospital my hockey team voted me captain. Maybe they felt sorry for me. We won the championship that year. I scored the winning goal and somehow there is a picture of it. There is also a picture of me with the trophy. These pictures were taken by a boy who lived around the corner. His name is Andrew Eccles, but back then he was just Andy. He is a very famous photographer now.

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We were taught about “The Indians” in school. I think it was grade 3. The different tribes. How they lived on the land. The fur trade. We took a field trip to Sainte Marie Among the Hurons. We saw a longhouse. It was nice. It was history. The way things were a long, long time ago. You know, birch bark canoes and moose with big antlers. And the cool, kinda scary stuff from the west coast – killer whales and spirit faces – black and red fish arched into circles. We learned this song. My wife, Susan remembered the words:

Land of the silver birch
Home of the beaver
Where still the mighty moose
Wanders at will
Blue lake and rocky shore
I will return once more

Boom de de boom boom, boom de de boom boom
Boom de de boom boom, boom.

Down in the forest, deep in the lowlands
My heart cries out for thee, hills of the north
Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more
Boom de de boom boom, boom de de boom boom
Boom de de boom boom, boom

High on a rocky ledge, I ’ll build my wigwam,
Close to the water’s edge, silent and still
Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more
Boom de de boom boom, boom de de boom boom
Boom de de boom boom, boom

Land of the silver birch home of the beaver
Where still the mighty moose, wanders at will
Blue lake and rocky shore, I will return once more
Boom de de boom boom, boom de de boom boom
Boom de de boom boom, boom.

I remember watching one of the moon landings in the school library. 1969 maybe, or 1971? I did a project on JFK. I did a lot of projects on fish. Mostly freshwater fish. Largemouth and Smallmouth bass. Northern Pike, Pickerel and Muskellunge. I found out that the Latin name for Northern Pike, Esox Lucius, translates loosely to Water Wolf. That was cool.

This is my grade 3 class – 1971-72. I’m second from the left in the second row. I don’t think my hair wasn’t really that long. It’s a strange shadow or something. I remember most everyone in this photo, but I won’t name them here. There are a few guys that I am still very close with. We have been friends since kindergarten and grade 1. We get together a couple of times a year. We all have children and everyone is doing pretty well.

1972 was a super big year. The Canada – Russia Summit Series. They rolled TVs into our classrooms on metal stands with long extension cords. The whole school watched the games from Russia. And as Paul Henderson scored the winning goal for Canada, and we all went crazy knowing that Canada was for sure the greatest country ever, Carla Williams, was being sold into adoption for $6,400. Part of the Sixties Scoop, she was taken overseas and sexual abused by her adoptive father for seven years. An estimated 20,000 Indigenous children were literally stolen from their mothers’ arms and adopted out to non-Indigenous families between the late 1950s and mid 1980s. Their fight for recognition, an apology, and compensation continues today.

This is an excerpt from: The First Canadians: A Profile of Canada’s Native People Today By Pauline Comeau, Aldo Santin

Carla was four years old when she was placed with a non-native foster family. Three years later, her natural father hanged himself. The following year, in 1972, Carla was placed for permanent adoption with a Dutch couple, who then moved back to the Netherlands. Carla did not see her brothers and sisters again for seventeen years. The adoption was dissolved within a year, but Carla was unable to escape the nightmare her life had become. Her adoptive father pursued her through a succession of foster homes. A prominent physician, he obtained visitation rights and used those opportunities to sexually abuse her for the next seven years. At the age of twelve, four years after her initial adoption, Carla tried to kill herself; she was placed in a psychiatric institution. She remained under psychiatric care as an outpatient for another three years. Carla gave birth to two children during that time, each fathered by the abusive physician and seized by local child welfare authorities. She married at nineteen and was forced into prostitution by her new husband. Over the course of the next four years, Carla would have two more babies, each by different men, and again, each seized by child welfare authorities.

 I wonder what my life would be like if I was born into an Indigenous existence and the transgenerational grief and suffering imposed upon them by Canada. Thank God I’ll never know. I have enough trouble dealing with my own life and personal baggage and that’s with a solid upbringing and absolutely every opportunity – sports teams, music lessons, summer camp, family vacations…. Wasn’t this what every Canadian kid had, more or less?

We moved into our North Toronto house in 1966. My Dad, Mom, big sister and little sister. I said October 22, 1966. That was the same day that 12-year-old Chanie Wenjack froze to death after running away from Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ont. He fled abuse not realizing that home was some 600km away, Ogoki Post on the Martin Falls reservation. I was 3 and got my own big bedroom that day.

So when you hear the word privilege, or better still, “white privilege”, realize that no one is saying that you and your family didn’t struggle, or work very, very hard for what you have earned. Understand that no one is blaming you for what happened, or for not knowing what was going on as we grew up. It was (and still is), purposefully hidden from us. What I have learned is that our privilege is all the things we took (and take) for granted – like a well-equipped school to go to. Like turning on a tap to fill a glass, or a pot, or to brush your teeth at night. Like being looked after right away by a doctor when we got sick. Like knowing that if we studied hard and dedicated ourselves to something, we could grow up to do pretty much whatever we could dream of because we had the opportunity. We took (and take) this opportunity for granted. It is a privilege that Indigenous peoples have been violently denied. And they have been denied it by the same society that granted it to us. (There is a lot more to white privilege than this, but that is for another day).

I once believed that every Canadian child had this opportunity. This is what we were taught to believe. Many still believe. It is a despicable lie. The willingness to investigate and accept the truth is the very first, very small step on the long journey to reconciliation. So weep as I did, when the vail of distracted indifference falls away and you see the faces of the tortured and abused and murdered children that never came home. And weep as I did when you hear and read and see the stories of the broken men and women who somehow survived, only to succumb to the crushing pressures of poverty, oppression, and their untreated trauma and victimization, with no support or models on how to cope and heal. And weep as I do, when you see that very little has really changed and that the legacies of Colonialism and Genocide continue to this day, virtually unabated, fuelled by indifference, corporate greed, the inept and destructive Indian Act, its policies and machinery, and the racist lies and ignorance that still exists all across these lands. But know this. Our tears are meaningless. They are an insult to the dead. An insult to the sacred survivors, and to the undying, indestructible resurgence of Indigenous pride and cultures that continues to grow. For sympathy and empathy are just more empty rhetoric if they are not accompanied by a sense of urgent obligation and appropriate action. So turn off Netflix, HBO, the baseball, football or hockey game, once-in-a-while and lean in. Start with some of the books and online materials that I am using. It’s time to stop pretending that Canada is something special – fair, progressive, egalitarian. We are none of those things until we reconcile and do the very hard work to make amends for the ugly truth at the core of our Nationhood.

EVERYTHING we have in this country is built upon stolen land. It is built upon lies. It is built upon the graves and remains of those who befriended us and who we betrayed. And now that we all know, a failure to act is an act of complicity.

So what you gonna do about it?

1: LEARN

There are a lot of issues and they can feel overwhelming. But when you feel overwhelmed (with this or anything in your life), think of what these people have gone through, and are going through, for generation after generation…. Their courage and resilience is a testament to their culture and spirit. We need to match that strength to create lasting change.

Do me a favour and re-read this essay a few times. Follow the links I provide, and as I say above, start with some of the books and online materials that I have used. It is our responsibility as Canadians to know our real history. Listen to the podcasts in your car so we can understand where Indigenous thought and leadership is coming from and how we can help.

2: GIVE

Give generously to Indigenous charities. 10, 20, $50 a month or more, will not change many of our lives, but it can have a real impact on the lives of Indigenous children and their families. Here are two organizations that are world class, run by two of the most amazing, dedicated women that you could ever have the honour of learning from.

The First Nations Child and Family Caring Society of Canada

The First Nations Child & Family Caring Society stands with First Nations children, youth, and families for equal opportunities to succeed.

Using a reconciliation framework that respectfully engages First Nation and non-Aboriginal peoples, the Caring Society provides high quality resources to support First Nations communities to empower children, youth and families. The award-winning Caring Society is proud to work with our partners in Canada and around the world to promote the rights of Indigenous children, youth and families.

Indspire

Indspire is an Indigenous-led registered charity that invests in the education of Indigenous people for the long term benefit of these individuals, their families and communities, and Canada.

Our vision is to enrich Canada through Indigenous education and by inspiring achievement. In partnership with Indigenous, private and public sector stakeholders, Indspire educates, connects and invests in Indigenous people so they will achieve their highest potential.

3: TALK

Talk to your friends and family about these issues. It’s encouraging how most people agree that something needs to be done to right these wrongs, but the conversations have to lead to action. Encourage each other to get involved in any way possible. Speak up when you hear negative stereotypes being expressed and engage that person in a conversation. It’s our job to teach Canadians the truth and dispel the racist-based myths and misconceptions about Indigenous peoples.

4: ACT

Email your MP and MPPs, your mayor or anyone else you know in public service and ask what they are doing with regard to Indigenous issues. Tell them your vote depends on how these issues will be addressed.

5: CONNECT

Look for ways to connect to Indigenous communities where you live. They are there. There are Friendship Centres all across the country. Maybe they could use some volunteers? June 21 is National Aboriginal Day. Go to a celebration to show your support. Take in Art exhibits, film and music festivals and Pow Wows. We are missing out on an amazing part of our heritage. Show a willingness to listen and learn.  It’s the first step towards understanding and in rebuilding trust.