Awake

Those who promote conflict benefit from it. Not those who are privy to it, saturated in it. It's more sexy for cowards to tower over power, than realize healing must take place for generations of pain, for so many and provide tools and patience for positive change.

For the criticism of history and the challenge of its recollection through a selection of voices of narrow on change, women, people of colour. Yet disengaged from modifying systems to be put in place to create opportunities for every person to thrive, feel alive. 

How simple it could all seem in a dream, when an inhale of breath into the breast free from the weight of systemic oppressions, anxieties, depressions. Trauma. 

They want to distort us to shift focus from empowering youth, saying that black lives matter and brown lives are important. Bury the image that skin other than white can achieve success, and sustain from being swallowed into dilution that keeps power gleefully fucking privilege. 

Yet it is the poets, the protesters, the journalists, the musicians, the painters, the creators words and expressions that provoked generations. Wealth sunk 6 feet under and enjoyed no life after death, no possibility to resonate with future generations. 

The power is in the people, emerge the issues we need to address, the ideas we see rise in our communities as valuable affirmations. What sort of a world would it be if the rich were poor and the poor rich equally? What would the cost of freedom be away from systemic slavery? 

The essence of human potential is cooperatively an achievable reality. Each child needs to be told they are beautiful, each woman given encouragement and access to elevate intellectual confidence into desired change. This reality sticks with me. 

It was all a dream.

My Resistance of Canada 150: 7 Reasons

I appreciate that I am a Canadian. I recognize the privileges I have, as well as the freedoms. However I will not be celebrating #canada150 for these reasons:

1) Indigenous people have suffered greatly over the past 150 years because of the pass system, residential schools and the Sixties Scoop.

2) The annihilation of Indigenous cultures. The lack of opportunity to reclaim what they lost during colonization. 

3) Implemting with urgency the Truth and Reconciliation Commission's report recommendations detailing the heart-wrenching testimonies of thousands of residential school survivors, their parents and many others.

4) Decriminalizing systemic and everyday attitudes towards Indigenous people. 

5) Urgently providing adequate water, food, shelter and social services in ALL indigenous communities. 

6) Honouring Dish with One Spoon Treaty. Here we agreed to share, replenish and protect the lands we are now inhibiting. 

7) Although Indigenous women and girls make up only 3% of the female population in Canada, they represent 10% of all female homicides in Canada. Indigenous women in Canada face many risk factors, compared to non-Indigenous women. There are nearly 1,200 murdered and missing indigenous women and girls in Canada, possibly more. We need answers, their families need answers and to have their grief taken seriously. 

The Scream, on the cover, The Subjugation of Truth, by Kent Monkman.

My own parents were expelled from their homeland by Ugandan military dictator, Idi Amin. Displacement, rejection and struggle was met by courage, and they have survived - but the recognition of the rapes, death, tortures and brutalization still remains sparse. 

While many of us are out celebrating, please remember the impact of colonization in all our lives and the obligation to tell the truth, and honour the first peoples of the land.