Thoughts on Truth &Reconciliation, Orange Shirts, and How My Dad Died
It’s National Truth and Reconciliation Day and Orange Shirt Day, both acknowledging Canada’s past and current atrocities to Indigenous people. It’s also the second year anniversary of my dad’s passing, a Metis man who spent the first half of his career focused on native studies (university professor and dean, authoring books, speaking at conferences) and the last half teaching grade school on remote northern Manitoba reserves. And all of today is happening in an ongoing pandemic.
And so it’s in the context of all of this that I want to tell a story about my Dad — about the day he died.
But first, let’s talk about Covid. In a pandemic that should have been done months ago we’re seeing surging numbers of hospitalized patients that are threatening to collapse health systems in Alberta, Saskatchewan, and northern BC. Surgeries and procedures unrelated to Covid have been postponed or cancelled, leaving people in terrible predicaments and in some cases a terminal prognosis. There is outrage of course both at elected officials and at those who continue to go unvaccinated (btw, get your shots). We’re Canada, our universal healthcare system and its quality of care is something we proudly talk about. HOW CAN THIS BE HAPPENING TO US?!
Us. Who is us?
Let me take you back two years ago to Red Sucker Lake, a northern Manitoba reserve that you get to either by flying in or taking a “winter road” (literally a road built out of the snow and ice only usable half the year). My Dad was just starting his new school year, having flown up a few days prior. He hadn’t been feeling well (he had heart bypass surgery a few years prior) and had gone to a local Winnipeg hospital. Tests were all negative, everything seemed fine, so up he flew. It was a Monday morning, he still wasn’t feeling well, and so he called the nursing station on the reserve who arranged for someone in the community to pick him up. No ambulance, no trained EMTs, no hospital. A couple of nurses is all this community had (not unlike other remote reserves). When they came to pick him up he collapsed. They put him in the vehicle and rushed him to the nursing station. In a stroke of luck, a doctor happened to be visiting the community.
Let me explain this. There are no doctors in the communities. Doctors from Winnipeg or other urban centers will volunteer to do these trips but there’s no expectation or guarantee that a doctor is available. Well what do Indigenous people on reserves do if they’re sick? Nursing station, fly to Winnipeg to see a doctor, or just try to get through it with no medical attention.
They bring my Dad into the nursing station and the doctor begins CPR. There’s not the same equipment you’d see in an ER, and the nursing staff aren’t specialized as ER nurses and likely neither is the doctor (yes, ER specialization for doctors and nurses is a thing). Still, they do their best with what they have. But its not enough.
Antoine Lussier passes away September 30, 2019.
It has taken a global pandemic for the majority of Canadians to experience what Indigenous people deal with every day, and have dealt with for well over 100 years — disproportionate access to…well, everything: education, mobility, infrastructure, healthcare, housing, sanitation and plumbing, access to food and clean drinking water, telecommunications and internet, etc. It has taken a new virus and a segment of our population putting their rights ahead of the greater good to get a glimpse of one facet of Indigenous life.
A common counter point to the state of Indigenous communities is the “huge sums of money” given to reservations every year, as if throwing money at a problem ever truly solved it. It also ignores the culpability of the Ministry of Indian Affairs in preventing Indigenous communities from truly thriving. Remember that before 1960 Indians couldn’t vote in federal elections without first giving up their treaty rights, Phyllis Webstad’s experience at a residential school which sparked Orange Shirt Day years later happened in the 1970’s, and while Winnipeg receives drinking water from Shoal Lake the Indigenous community that lives there was on a boil-water advisory for decades before political pressure lead to a road to be built to get water treatment equipment in. There is no one approach to fixing the incredibly broken relationship Canada has with Indigenous people. It is complex and difficult and challenging, and yet it is an endeavor that all Canadians and Indigenous should strive for…and yes I realize I’m going to piss off Indigenous people with that statement, who see Canada as nothing more than an arm of colonialism that took everything. I also can’t fault that view, because that’s essentially what happened.
It’s all a lot. It’s overwhelming. And I sit here on Orange Shirt Day wondering what my Dad would say. In years past he would call and tell me about the scholars in his class (his kids weren’t students or pupils, they were scholars). He’d tell me about their skills, their talents, their personalities. He always humanized his students — he knew them as people, as humans. I believe that’s what Indigenous peoples have wanted all along, and what a terrible thing that they as hosts to this amazing country were treated as lesser by those who colonized — and are still treated as lesser today. The orange shirts, the truth and reconciliation report and holiday, the rail line protests, the continued cry for murdered and missing Indigenous women — all of this is a cry to be acknowledged as fellow human beings, to be seen as equal and not as lesser than.
We can’t just wear an orange shirt on September 30th and check a diversity box for the year. As Canadians we need to continually educate ourselves on Indigenous history and current events. If there’s an Indigenous cause we feel strongly about, we need to write to our elected officials and engage with organizations working in those spaces. We need to take action and we need to come alongside those that have been suffering for so long. That’s what I’m committing to this September 30th and I hope you do as well.
Maybe it was my Dad’s time. Maybe had there been a huge established hospital on the reserve with a full allotment of trained professionals it wouldn’t have mattered. But what hurts the most is that he didn’t have a chance, and the slim hope he had was based on luck that a volunteer doctor had been visiting. The attitudes and Indigenous policies of over the last century robbed me of precious years with my father and robbed him of years of his life. I can’t in good conscience sit back and allow that to continue.
