The majority of Caucasian Canadians like to tell themselves that racism, domination, and oppression against Indigenous and Afrocentric people is an American problem. Until you can look yourselves in the face, and acknowledge the truth, there will always be a veiled darkness that prevents you from being in the true process of transformation. You’ll be stuck as caterpillars masquerading as butterflies.

Just prior to Canada Day in 2021 children spoke to you from the grave – two hundred and fifteen dead children called you to honesty, so you could not celebrate reaching colonial goals without being aware that you celebrate brutally won victories, pyrrhic ones.

For many decades I and others have been calling you to look at where the legacy of those dead children have taken you.

For decades, Indigenous and Afrocentric people have been speaking and you have refused to really listen.

Now, today, thousands of living children, most of them Indigenous, traumatized by inept child protection systems and apathetic communities are crying out for you to look at what your systems, your ways of being have done to them. And you are refusing to look. Until you see them, and lift that veil of darkness you will never be able to see your true self.

The sad thing, or maybe just the reality, is that you won’t really give a damn until your children are the ones screaming to be seen and heard. And we know this, because you’ve demonstrated just that by creating screaming convoys and flocking together and labelling “the others” covidiots in this season, because you are afraid for YOUR life, freedom, and power.

And that’s okay. Because freedom always comes. The sad fact is that oppressors can only hope that those whom they oppress with complicit silence or active persecution will not seek vengeance when in the fullness of time they win their freedom.

You can only hope that one awakened to love leads the people to freedom, unity, and reconciliation, instead of one consumed by hate who will orchestrate a bloodbath.

You’ll function as caterpillars with your version of butterfly ways. I hope that one day you will allow the veil to be lifted so that you can become real butterflies with butterfly hearts and ways. Because although love will eventually ultimately win, your choices now determine whether that journey will be fraught with pain or alive with joy.

“What you resist persists” (Carl Jung).