White Boys Know the Drill:

An Open Letter About Our Path

About Forts and Paths

Confederate flags and swastikas were what counted for diversity in Valois, Montréal, in the early 1980s. There also were Maple Leafs, Red Ensigns, Union Jacks, Fleurs-de-Lys, the Irish tricolor, and a proud Jamaican flag stuck to a door. These flags didn’t fly so much on poles, though we had those too. They were on t-shirts, stickers, and licence plates, and could be as temporary as a graffiti tag or as long-lasting as a tattoo.

Each summer, passing by these and other cardinal signs of the suburban frontiers of childhood, I would follow an older neighborhood boy and build a fort up by Ponner’s Pond, the “undeveloped” land at the end of the fenced runway. Once Dorval International Airport, now Pierre Elliot Trudeau International Airport, and who knows, maybe someday just ‘Justin,’ each name is notable in the history of expropriating Indigenous territory. Only children, we were in the wild, just developing another fort on Mohawk land.

Building the fort was difficult and dangerous. In the settler society children uncannily re-enacted through playful drill, there was a chain of command in the wild. He was addressed as captain. The fort was built from the scraps of roofing tiles and other materials usefully abandoned. Scraps, and other things besides, were left at the silent end of neighborhood care and surveillance. The fort we built, and the experiences there, were located at the end of a well-worn path. It was nestled between neighbors’ houses. It was carved out of routine. The path is still as clearly marked in the mind as it was in the field into the woods. I refused to recruit neighborhood girls and vandalize the only Black-owned home on our way; even collaborators might have limits. At the end of that path, often each day over the course of the summer and into the fall, I was tortured and raped in and around the fort, until it became too cold, or this routine was interrupted by my family’s annual summer visit to kin, and refuge, in Pictou County, Nova Scotia.

About Shores and Refuge

Refuge is relative. For a white kid, looking back into a fragmenting abyss at the end of that path, Pictou County was a maritime salvation, at least when school was out in Montréal. Schoolhouses still weren’t fully desegregated in the Nova Scotia of my lyrical, nostalgic, childhood. But this was a distorted dignity in a community as lyrically whited out as an Alistair MacLeod novel, saturated by colonial nostalgia traced onto Miꞌkmaq land. It was a community whose local movie theatre, in New Glasgow, had become justly famous for providing a choral performance of politely silent cowardice and cruelty, a white relief foregrounding the courage and dignity of Viola Desmond. Refuge is relative.

My mother attended her Pictou County schoolhouse in the 1950s. This was just after the end of mandatory province-wide racial segregation. Violence between children was my mother’s defining memory of her rural school. Schoolhouses, like universities, remained community centres carving a path of violent homogenization through repetition. It was part of the drill, with moments of grace between. Everyone was packed in rows, from kindergarten to secondary school. They sat in a ranked childhood of settler social hierarchy and enforcement. Abuse upon subordinates was visited by the same children who attended the front and back pews of the local church. Decades later, the church would feel like a site of safety to me, however ephemeral. But my mother remembers her schoolmates, her community, beating and burying a disabled child to nearly die in a snowbank outside the schoolhouse. Settler violence rippled through its own community, overturning lives, even as it continued to furiously crash onto the shores of Miꞌkmaq land. Endless tides of inter-generational colonial trauma, human flotsam from Highland clearances, and other atrocities, crashed together in cramped classrooms on the shifting but eternal shores of the Miꞌkmaq.

I would be dead but for settler society, though as a survivor, am almost dead because of it. Compassionate pastors and youth group leaders at the local Presbyterian church in Valois, and members and allies of Montréal’s intersecting LGBTQ2S+ communities, offered some shattered youth dignity, safety, and respect. Churches and dance clubs were a refuge of embodied practice and joy. Canadian flags and Fleurdelisés repeat through my memory of these places too, along with doves of the Holy Spirit, courageous Pride, and pink triangles in defiance of so many later and recent incarnations of Nazism.

About Drill and Repetition

Drill, and the repetition of embodied practices, were a youthful salvation from childhood terror. Municipal soccer leagues and YMCA Judo dojos crafted discipline beneath flags. We trained, by way of discipline, in combat. Sure, sport can seem like a violent, eugenicist, colonial institution based on cultural appropriation, political expropriation, and economic exploitation, but that’s only because it’s more open about it than all the other institutions that make up our society, and that’s including healthcare and education.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, imperial flags, stitched to childhood memory, also flew during the games of the Colored Hockey League. This decades-long league was built by athletes who faced down a segregationist settler society off the rink. Flags are part of the history and changing contradictions of a colonial society. In the Colored Hockey League, Black athletes faced off in sport, but with each other. Black Nova Scotians had been enslaved builders of much of Halifax’s early wealth. Black Nova Scotians remained segregated along an urban frontier of slums, like the players of the Africville Sea-Sides, in their Africville of dignity and refuge. They lived, they worked, they played, they built community. All this was in spite of the waves of racist exploitation that deliberately and desperately crashed on to them.

Until the nineteenth century, the vast majority of people who fell upon the continents of the Americas were Africans in chains. European waves of traumatized flotsam had settled these shores. Christina Sharpe, writing in a long intellectual tradition, reveals that in their wake, suddenly wealthy and white slavers left behind the Black millions drowned, but not forgotten, sunken below the crashing waves before shore. Enslaved survivors of the journey across were the remainder, still living in the wake of their ancestors. Enslaved domestic Marie-Joseph Angélique courageously burned settler Montréal in defiance of indignity. Sharpe writes how her people arrived awakened, in a wake of grief. They arrived at the beginning of an ever-present existence of constant white surveillance. A moment for reckoning. The present is more than just a single moment, and Black people have received constant white attention and inhuman disposal from before the moment they arrived on these shores.

Their deathly routine and torturous labor in the sugar cane plantations sated Atlantic settlers with sweet-tasting rum. With sugar and rum came new taste-defining elements to Atlantic identities. African and Asian people’s deathly drill, torture, and sexualized subordination, all under colonial surveillance, produced so much of the British Empire’s intoxicating sense of wealth and of self. It was only for children of Britannia to “rule the waves,” and whose elect, however widely cast adrift across the ocean, were never to “be slaves.”

This empire required organizing at a global and individual level. In the twentieth century, The Royal Canadian Air Cadets, and the Canadian paramilitary scouting system, were special sites for cultivating personal development. Canadian flags and other traditions defined the discipline that was drilled there. Cadets was particularly suited to children looking to tame the monstrous inhumanity unleashed in them, even within the very borders these flags framed. Flags were never more sacred than during drill in Air Cadets. Drill could be a drag, but it wasn’t torture. Other cadets in file also notably seemed to have an unnerving ability, or disability, to stand in place, dissociated, for long periods of time. Cadets taught some of us to weaponize our neighborhood wounds, ranked in respectful silence under the flag.

In these institutions mixed the damned and the saved, victims and executioners, and so many of us between. Sort of like the university system, these were traumatizing institutions for the traumatized. As institutions, they begged discipline and subordination while also providing, for some, a foundation on which to build a broken spirit and to defend oneself, or to subordinate others, depending on one’s path. They provided discipline to meet the cruelly-ordered society just beyond their boundaries. From cadets and sports, I’ve inherited courage, self-purpose, a bloody nose and a few broken bones. A more than fair exchange for a local white kid. They provided a different path. But this path was developed through institutions historically carved through violent colonialism, white supremacism, sexualized conquest, and genocide. All built around forts.

In 1993, I was working dead-end jobs around Valois. A story of rape and torture emerged in the headlines on the news rack at the counter I worked. It was a story, back from across the ocean, on other shores. It still haunts me. Shidane Arone, a Somali boy not much older than I was when I began to follow the path into the woods, was tortured, raped, and murdered by Canadian soldiers on a base where swastikas and Maple Leafs intertwined, deep in their wilderness play overseas. Hundreds of Canadian soldiers were on base. They wore the sacred national symbols. How many silently heard a child scream in the fort as he was repeatedly raped, burned, beaten over hours, then murdered by Canadian soldiers in a flimsy tent? This fort wasn’t hidden at the end of a children’s path, but was part of a massive Canadian rescue mission of care. None on base spoke out, none intervened, until far, far, too late. That silence under flags is certainly a form of discipline and drill, but it isn’t exclusive to soldiers in this society.

That atrocity, more public and photographed than others, continues to haunt Canadian military missions. There is no rehabilitation of such an institution. But what of the citizens who celebrate, fund, demonize, and forget our armed flotsam washed onto others’ shores? Where did all these forms of both military and civilian settler discipline, of closing ranks, come from? White boys know the drill.

What did I make of young veterans in Valois, recently returned from the destruction of Yugoslavia? All I heard was trauma. What we all wanted, without daring, was rehabilitation. None of us spoke out. None demanded, as Dionne Brand has, for a reckoning. Maybe we didn’t dream of a reckoning out of fear. Reckoning. It is a word, like grace, that also repeats in my childhood of relative safety and comfort, at least when sitting in the ranks of wooden pews. If abolition was the only possible solution for the Airborne, what of other violent repressive institutions in Canada today? What of their reckoning?

About Silence Under the Flag

This is a much broader issue than a conversation with young veterans, or about the Airborne unit, and it is not about the Canadian Armed Forces. It’s not even only about the volcanoes of traumatized and traumatizing violence of Canadian police departments and the RCMP. This is about Canada, and the way it is governed and structured as a society. Let’s not quarantine the plague of subordinating violence all on to soldiers or police. They are only members of the most purposefully and obviously violent institutions. Members of these professions, like those they might abuse, are overrepresented in trauma counselors’ scheduled appointments. But they do not possess the same traumas. As W.E.B. Du Bois put it over a century ago, a colonial line of inflicted violence profitably divides them.

There was no other solution for that institution, the Airborne, but abolition. Can police in a colonial society be abolished, or wouldn’t they just be replaced by settler paramilitaries? In fact, these paramilitaries already exist. As Adam Gaudry and Darryl Leroux have detailed, they are even composed of settlers play-acting as Métis in the woods, as innocently as settler children, in an act of cultural appropriation to hide their political expropriation and male fantasies.

What would rehabilitation look like here? For whom, and in whose interest?

In southern Alberta, I teach at the local university, high above the steep-valleyed coulees, looking down upon the commemorative site of Fort Whoop-Up. In Canada, we are never far from a fort, even high above in the Ivory Tower. Lethbridge does not have a reputation for being a reconciled or just society. It is nonetheless the truly happiest place I have ever lived, with some of the most gracious people I have ever met. I have healed here more than anywhere else in my life. There is debt to be paid on this land. But refuge is relative.

Universities are a refuge for me. Universities are institutions with rules of the game, in some ways like the police. And let’s be fair, your average Canadian history department across the country is more white supremacist, if we go by demographic composition, than your equivalent Canadian police department. It’s notable that academics and police were both professions over-represented among fascist parties in the interwar period. Many fell upward in that new, or not so new, order. More often than not, I have seen academics and police as variants of one another. Just variations of the same game, along the same line. They close ranks same enough. That isn’t an insult to either profession. They only have a distinct social privilege, and so for some with their acts of service, comes an opportunity to their distinct social preferences for subordination, predation, or humiliation. These professions look politically inverted, distorted, in the media, but the rules of the game seem strangely familiar. Scholars and police are the officially funded record-keepers of colonial reality, apologetically glamourized by our politely smiling Canadian press. All these institutions are sourced from colonial wealth wrung and reallocated from dispossessed land, and from Indigenous and Black people. These institutions, police, academia, media, are the source of so many of our distortions. For some lucky members of society, caught in its cracks, these institutions can be places of refuge and autonomy, if at others’ expense.

At the university here, through a liberal education project I joined this spring, students read Waubgeshig Rice’s timely novel Moon of the Crusted Snow. Predictably, I misspelled his name twice on slides. Together we read his Indigenous Futurisms account of an unspecified Canadian apocalypse, from the point-of-view of an Anishinaabe community set on a reserve in northern Ontario. Rice writes from the perspective of a community whose members had already faced the apocalypse of Canadian colonialism. They were then quarantined to new lands far north, seeking new paths for survival. And all this action in the novel takes place before the unspecified apocalypse, that moment of reckoning, by which the action of the novel begins.

Thanks to Rice’s generosity in providing the book for free to students, the class reflected on their own narrowing paths even as the university closed due to the pandemic. Rice writes with compassion. His novel offers a way forward, not looking back, taking what we will of us from the paths left behind. Students work together. They are mainly settler, but also Black and Indigenous. They work together on Kainai land that was stolen from Red Crow’s Many-Chief People. Is this a path to something unexpected, the beginning of a reckoning, or something much more well-worn, at least while allied under my silent gaze and profit?

Lethbridge is a city notorious for aggressive policing. Witness the recent “Stormtrooper incident.” This is the same police service that just threateningly spied on the local provincial cabinet minister’s meeting with her constituents. There have been a couple of police chiefs in as many years. When a local officer spoke out against the abuse and toxicity from within the service, as if satirically to affirm him, the only-immediately-former police chief cruelly dismissed him in front of the press after a police investigation, cryptically confirming a culture of hierarchy, humiliation and silence. And that’s within the ranks.

The silent awe that is held below flags only sounds like peace. It is interrupted by people who refuse indignity. A lack of courage can always be compensated for by collaboration. It’s easier, and as quiet as a New Glasgow cinema in 1946. Courage throws collaboration into white relief. It’s apparent in the exhausting work being done by Martin Heavy Head and Bashir Mohamed in Alberta. The abuse crashes only on some, under the banner of the still savage wars of colonial peace that define this country, and with its all-too-familiar community policing. Where is the justice for Radford James Good Dagger? I hope his memory lasts at least as long as the flags under which he died. He was a loved man.

Like soldiers lost in an endless war, maybe in the meantime we can rehabilitate police out of a war for which they are armed to the teeth in fighting. It is a massive war fought in plain sight against those subordinated and submerged under what W.E.B. Du Bois called “the Color Line.” Over a century ago, Du Bois wrote that a color line of profitable racial division divided the world, ushering future apocalypses if it was left unmet in silence.

Can we transition police into a public service function for violent emergencies, which in a municipality that does not use infractions for revenue and dispossession, would only be a handful even in a relatively violent city? Can we rehabilitate police who kill for wellness checks, in a society where trauma is rampant, with the mentally ill sometimes traumatized by their own treatment? Police arrive, they crash, like traumatizing waves, Black lives still left in the wake.

Can we let these traumatized officers return to some form of a society, rehabilitate them from this endless war on Indigenous and Black people, under our dubious banner of public care? Maybe they don’t need to be demonized. They do need to be brought back from the path. But that would be towards a society that is not composed by endless traumatizing wars, profitably unleashed on to so many for so very few, every evening highlighted and reconciled through the whitened teeth of Canada’s smiling media.

Maple Leafs and Indigenous nations’ flags reconcile high above us in many public spaces now. But I remember military protocol from cadets. They’re still ranked, and they’re still on the same land. If we have flags, let’s not be silent under them. On the prairies, Indigenous men tell of being dropped off by police in the middle of the night in arctic conditions, a horizon from shelter. But they are the “bad Indians.” Not the good ones. Maybe traumatized like the police, but on the other side of the line. Police announce measures like surveillance cameras, even though these tools of surveillance can conceal, rather than reveal, police criminality. Surveillance, like refuge, depends on your position, and who and what goes seen and unseen. There are some institutions that cannot be rehabilitated.

There is so much to abolish and rehabilitate. The figures are astronomical. Almost one in ten Canadians will experience PTSD sometime in their lives. This is the highest reported rate among comparable countries. We are people who require compassion. We require rehabilitation. But we do not possess the same traumas. They are so often divided by that line of lived experience, and the subordinating direction the pain was delivered. And all that was before what has become intensified by the Covid plague. Just the latest plague trailing along the steel rails laid out by the architects of Confederation.

About Nostalgia and Care

Nostalgia is colonial. It’s an expression of maldevelopment.

Dionne Brand states:

“I have felt tremendous irritation at the innocence of those people (mostly, but not only, white) finally up against their historic and present culpability in a set of dreadful politics and dreadful economics — ecocidal and genocidal. Their innocence is politically, economically and psychically lucrative.…You wonder what additional things might have been done that they previously said could not be done. For we have seen how quickly these hitherto impossible changes were ramped up. And, so, why did they drag us through thirty years of dispossessing, dismantling, and disenfranchising? Well. Capital. I guess. Each day when the government trots out what it will do next is an opportunity to witness its intrinsic crisis and failure, its quotidian failures and its hypocrisies.

I don’t think that capital is in crisis, the neo-liberal state it created is in crisis.”

Brand calls for a reckoning of many things, including innocence.

It is time for a reckoning. Reckoning is a resilient word. It is a sign. But it is more than a sticker, and more than a flag. A reckoning is not just a sign about the present crisis, however eternal that flicker might feel in the seeming eternity of an incendiary settler society. A reckoning, like the present as it is actually experienced, stretches back to the past and forwards in time. It is the time before and after judgment. And it is right now. In Kanesatake, clan elders make present decisions, with generations in the future in mind. Matriarchs of the clans, they contest time differently. A reckoning requires greater attention, as some of us continue to edge back along boyhood paths to the monstrous nostalgia of a supposedly innocent past. This past, a cataclysm, remains laid out in oblivious, genteel general textbooks as the history of the development of this country. A reckoning also means understanding the different ways forward, and who should trace those paths. I do not nor should not know where these paths might lead, but I am beginning to dream of them leading away from the well-worn ones behind.

Nostalgia in our present moment always calls for a reckoning. One moment for reckoning, or one that still demands reckoning, occurred at Kanesatake in 1990. I watched military helicopters fly over the edge of our development. Military pilots in those helicopters were well-disciplined, and instrumental in the surveillance against the Mohawk blockade for land and dignity. But they flew right over the path into the woods at the edge of the runway. At its end were the silent ruins of a fort to where my monstrous childhood memories return. The pilots continued westward, and on to protect the public development of the Oka golf course on Mohawk sacred land, all under military and media spotlights.

The violence that occurred that summer included a Canadian soldier bayonetting a teenage girl. She would survive the ghosts of her PTSD to become one of Canada’s greatest athletes, Waneek Horn-Miller. Violence and trauma were dealt at the hands of members of the Canadian military, yes, but not just the military. To name just one notorious example, ranks of everyday settlers launched a fury of rocks at a caravan of peaceful Kahnawake Mohawk people seeking refuge, injuring many — including the elderly and children. This happened all in plain sight. It was all caught on camera, just as were later televised national rehabilitations and reconciliations. Under spotlights, Waneek Horn-Miller’s decades-later interview was hosted through the smiling teeth, and under the publicly polite gaze, of the N-word-wielding Wendy Mesley and her silent, off-camera CBC producers.

I witnessed a white riot at Caledonia on Victoria Day, 2006, directed at the Six Nations peaceful protest against another creeping suburban development in southern Ontario. The flags and signs that flew together among the settlers that day reminded me of the ones that flew in a childhood Valois, and in a fort, on a base in Somalia, on far other shores. These are just the wild, crashing moments of national and international development. Care can be just as silently cruel.

This is not just about police. Violence and child abuse tore through Valois, from home to home, like a secret network of intergenerational settler wounds. It found its way, or rather we found a way, literally into the crawlspaces of homes. It was a culture of silent surveillance. The surveillance of non-white neighborhood kids was constant in public. There was little refuge. Community surveillance and care were the culprit, not just silently hidden abuse. The local corner store was dangerous to enter if you were a Mohawk boy not wanting a criminal record. This was community policing. Is rehabilitation even possible with these societal forms of “rescue?”

Can we rehabilitate settler societies that provide the community care that has led to the deadly humiliations dealt by social workers and police and citizens, all in public view?  These are supposed to be acts of service, but acts serving to whose ends? What about the cruelties of state care suffered upon Tina Fontaine, Coulton Boushie, Cindy Gladue, and so many others deemed, at a whim, to be a “bad Indian?” How did care actually protect them from a settler going “wild” within the community’s ranks? Combating colonial distortion, Alicia Elliott insists in her book, A Mind Spread on the Ground, that it was the state‘s care on the day of her death that led Tina Fontaine to her murderer. What about we settlers who more broadly compose Canada? There must be other paths besides distorted fantasies of care and rescue. More recently, some settler kids in Pictou learn the language and traditions of the Mi’kmaq as they play for and integrate with the Mi’kmaq Warriors hockey team. They learn together, also through discipline, another way of practicing on and off the ice, here on this land. Is this another path to rehabilitation, a reconciliation, or the beginning of a reckoning? It’s not for me to say.

About Rehabilitation or Reckoning

Even I hear, however faintly, Brand’s call for a reckoning that reaches out beyond this moment. The history of Canada, played backwards, would be, to put it simply, a collective unwielding of trauma to a recently-unwelded railway. That path led to dazzling development alongside immiseration. It led to moments of grace in the midst of vastly exploitative concentrations of wealth. The history of this country has been carved by deeply-developed paths of brutality and inhumanity, wrapped in the lyricism of tourist innocence, or childish nostalgia.

There are many courageous and humanizing journeys across these lands. Red Crow led the Kainai from the path of death and famine that colonial maldevelopment brought in the 1880s, otherwise known as John A. MacDonald’s national policy. Red Crow led his people to adapt to new conditions. They found new ways to survive, and to survive with their traditions. I learned more about Red Crow from a Blackfoot student’s recent project examining Red Crow’s visions for his people. Each was Kainai, generations apart, connected. Each, according to the resiliency at their disposal, resists colonialism.

My personal traumas and rehabilitation are traced across still well-worn paths of wasted suburbs, rails, highways, airports, and other developments, and the developed wild that lies between them. These paths are carved into the lands and experiences of the Siksikaitsitapi, the Mi’kmaq, the Anishinaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, and the true and proud Métis. I see traces of other paths forward under the flags of these nations and confederations. They fight to save the land we live on.  Guardians of the land, Indigenous people resist only by surviving as peoples. Many do so living in each other’s inter-generational traumas, blossoms from the sins of residential schools and so many other genocidal institutions all around us that make up this society.

Traumas are not the same. A color line, as Du Bois wrote, divides them, right across the globe. It divides, but only for some it pays dividends. On either side of the line, choices can be made, if distortions are put aside.

But more than anything, let’s not confuse the way things are lined up. Personal rehabilitation for abusive journeys into the woods is not the same as a reckoning for slavery and genocide on Indigenous land. This is land upon which so many silenced crimes were organized on a vast industrial scale, at the edges of development, at the end of trails, railways, but so often in plain white sight.

In the fistful of generations that compose the entire history of this country, an unsettling history has emerged. It is carved through this society’s ranks. Canada’s recently rooted history was accomplished by routing its nation’s recent settlers through colonial forts and schoolhouses, and through sports, universities, and the modern media. Some have been disciplined; and some discipline. We are disciplined to belong and subordinate. We do so by ordered routine. We follow lifetime paths into the silent but surveying ranks and rows of churchgoers, moviegoers, schoolchildren, athletes, cadets, guides and scouts, and police officers and professors too.

I am also convinced that many of us have been disciplined into the ranks of this distorted society by the hidden horrific acts of child predation within the borders of this settler bastion. All this violent subordination has had profound and broad effects, however much they are individualized and exhaustingly pathologized, like in the case of my nearly life-long Complex PTSD. Everyday acts of service to this system, violent or caring, by police or professor, are individual threads woven into a fabric of a smothering colonial state. Obviously, these everyday forms of settler violence and racialized paramilitarism began long before a children’s fort was built. But these were the necessary conditions for a boy’s path there.

Over a century ago, disciplined colonial troops from this land, and other overseas British dominions, massacred Dutch settler civilians during the Second Boer War. As part of the drill, children were led to British concentration camps. Observers from other colonies took note. A French colonial officer named Hubert Lyautey, who would later become a colonial governor as well as a figurehead for an anti-Semitic fascist riot outside the parliament in Paris, was inspired by what he saw in the seeming inherent paramilitarism and closed ranks of the Dutch settlers. He explained that in the settler colony, the line drawn between the supposed peace of the domestic household and the violence of the battlefield was blurred: “of those who have been submitted to this harsh school, some turn back immediately, but in others there results a special being who is no longer military, nor civilian, but who is, simply enough, the settler.”[1] He drew his inspiration from a racialized settler state in southern Africa, another settler society defined by systems of racial surveillance and exclusion.

The violence within white settler ranks—ask Doukhobors about the “English” here out West—was the proving ground in which Canadian settlers from Ireland, France, Ukraine, Italy, and elsewhere would become white, or white enough in time for the line that divides. This was accomplished both by law and in everyday acts. White boys learned the drill. Migrants to these shores learned to accept the distortions of history books’ whitened pages and their place in them. Many learned, if they hadn’t already, to subordinate Black and Indigenous peoples. It was a meagre price for the ephemeral reward of belonging to the more profitable side of the color line.

As only one side-effect, the dividends earned from this racialized status quo, however meagre, and so even more desperate at the bottom end of this society, mean endorsing a nation that has been ordered in an endless subjugating night of intergenerational child abuse and trauma from which there is no simple rehabilitation, whether from residential schools or child’s play. For some, depending on which side of the line we stand, this trauma is everywhere. It is here now, at this moment. It emerges from the exploitatively violent care of white glare, rather than just emerging in its wooded shadows.

Maybe some roles are not to lead on the path forward, like the protagonists of Rice’s Moon of the Crusted Snow. The novel itself is a sign of hope out of these times of trauma, isolation, and repression. Maybe for we traumatized flotsam, the sign of a reckoning might be recognized only by understanding and acting against the circumstances of our own position. In embodied rehabilitation, we might instead begin to walk rearguard against ourselves, disciplined to recognize the danger that tracks us, if only ever as fragments from our own hollow past. Our awareness has to remain back on the path behind us, and on ourselves, rather than leading forward. We have responsibilities to tend to, like the colonial ghosts that erupt out from the woods of the nostalgic peace behind us, on that path we hope to leave more distant.

Nostalgic ghosts haunt me, and maybe you. Their distortions remind me of the monstrous Wendigo Justin in Waubgeshig Rice’s novel, a novel that calls for a reckoning. The Wendigo I read, a monster of Anishinaabe pasts and present, remains a part of me, along with other monstrous signs that keep me on guard. In Rice’s novel, what’s bred in the bone does not inevitably out in the flesh, like in a Canadian settler fantasy. Instead, choices are made, and lines are crossed, and across color lines. The erupting, wild Wendigo is embodied in the antagonist Justin, another Canadian Justin with a familiar charming smile and threatening handshake. What haunts and hinders a true reckoning is the fluttering illusion of white care through subordination, in whatever form, through whatever institution. There has to be a path beyond rehabilitation. Can there even be something like rehabilitation in the meantime? I have to believe that is true: even for me, and especially my abuser.

You are a Canadian police officer and children’s hockey coach. From my position, until there’s a reckoning for us all, I have to pray for paths to rehabilitation for each of us. This is my letter to you.

    …

“First we must study how colonization works to decivilize the colonizer, to brutalize him in the true sense of the word, to degrade him, to awaken him to buried instincts, to covetousness, violence, race hatred, and moral relativism…

…they hide the truth from themselves… that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples; that they have cultivated that Nazism, that they are responsible for it, and that before engulfing the whole of Western, Christian civilization in its reddened waters, it oozes, seeps, and trickles from every crack.”[2]

-Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (1950)

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[1] Lieutenant-colonel Lyautey, “Du rôle colonial de l’armée,” in Revue des deux mondes, Vol. 157, January 15 1900, pp. 309-310.

[2] Aimé Césaire; Robin D.G Kelley, Discourse on colonialism, translated by Joan Pinkham; A Poetics of Anticolonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000).

My name is Christopher Churchill. I am a survivor and settler historian. Content warning: childhood sexual abuse and violence.