When I was five or six, I came home from school sad and wouldn’t say why.
My mom kept asking. Finally I told her. I didn’t want to be “Indian” anymore (back when we were called indians). Something had happened at school that revealed to me what people felt about us. Other kids laughing, mocking. Something I was so proud of was suddenly a point of shame.
She told me later what that did to her. Outrage first, then something heavier. She knew that sentiment. She’d lived inside it as a kid because of her awful experience in residential school. The school taught her that being Indian was something to be ashamed of. That her and her people were a product of the devil and it had to be wiped out, removed from every child.
That was the lesson, and it worked. It haunted her for her entire life. Fighting those thoughts or overcompensating with extreme pride.
Once she saw it was affecting me, her son. A new generation. She asked herself one question. What is it going to take to stop this cycle?
I’m part white. When people asked what I was, I apologized. “I’m only half.” Sometimes they answered, “Well, at least you’re not like the others.” I let that go by. I never went to a residential school. I did the job for them anyway. I began to feel the same thing my mom did. There was something wrong with us that had to be corrected.
The house on our west side was a Vancouver Special full of drunks. They’d stand on the balcony over our front yard, laughing, making rude gestures at me. Urinating off the balcony trying to hit me while I was playing. I was small. Some of my earliest memories. The cackling drunken white faces pointing at me. I never understood why. Looking back, it could have been about what I was I suppose.
Fat Tommy lived on the east side. He was a teenager. Son of Italian immigrants. He told me to my face that natives were savages, uncivilized, animals. He talked about the greatness of white Europeans like he’d built it himself. I showed him a drum that was gifted to me and he dismissed it “That’s primitive garbage”
These were the houses I grew up between. A looming balcony on one side with the cackles of evil metal peeing warlocks and Fat Tommy the grand conqueror on the other side.
I heard some version of it everywhere. School. Parties. Restaurants. The bus. Nobody asked for the opinion. It would just…show up unprovoked.
People like Tommy will tell you their ancestors conquered this place and we should be thankful. They carry that around like it’s theirs. Greatness comes down through three centuries, but a school that closed in 1996 is ancient history. I don’t buy it. Pride gets inherited. So does shame. Maybe it’s in the blood. Maybe it’s just how a family talks. I don’t know. Tommy didn’t invent it. Someone handed it to him. His dad was a nice guy. He would come and help my grandmother around the house. Was it the mom? Or was Fat Tommy just a natural born asshole?
Now the same people say the residential school stories are slander. I’ve stopped arguing with them. I give them the facts and they ignore them completely. That tells me the facts were never the point.
On September 30, Truth and Reconciliation Day, a nine-year-old Mohawk boy from Kahnawà:ke rode the Montreal metro in his regalia. He’d just danced at the Children’s Hospital. A woman on the train mocked him. His aunt says she was disgusted by a child in his own clothes. The aunt held up her phone and filmed it. The woman hit her with a bag. His grandmother pushed her off the train.
His aunt on TV said had never been shy about wearing it in public. Afterward he was devastated.
My uncles and cousins have a rule. It was worse when I was a kid. You ignore it or you fight them.
I get it. They’re tough guys. They came up in a harder time and the rule kept them standing. I’ve done both. Stopping the arguments is just ignoring it with better manners.
I’m fifty now. Some days I walk into a room and go numb. Shell shock, almost. A lifetime of opinions nobody asked for. I don’t want to argue and I don’t want to fight. I want to enjoy myself without hearing it. You know like a normal person participating in society.
Now I understand why so many native people keep to themselves. The old men and women you see alone in the city. It isn’t shyness. It’s what’s left after a lifetime of that cultural barrage of opinions and statements and stupid questions.
But it’s still happening. Generations of ignore it or fight it, and a nine-year-old is on a train while a stranger tells him what she thinks of his clothes. If it worked, he wouldn’t be there. Why do we accept it as normal because it’s old?
Either way, they set the terms. Ignore it and we’re managing them. Fight it and we’re answering them. The racist and the critic never have to change anything.
I don’t have the whole answer. I know it starts with building something for our own sanity, not to prove anything to them. Our own businesses. Our own networks. Something that doesn’t ask their permission.
It’s 2026. The day exists to bridge cultures and stop exactly this. It hasn’t worked.
I’m glad he was proud enough to wear it. Now he has a memory of what it cost him. I thought of my mom. I asked her question.
What is it going to take?