Fuck Canada Day

 I'm never, as you might have guessed, big on Canada Day, or any performative act of patriotism. This year, I'll be spending it at a march to commemorate the children who died at residential schools and to honour the survivors of those schools.

Yesterday, the ʔaq̓am community of the Ktunaxa Nation found another 182 unmarked graves using ground-penetrating radar. As far as I know, it's the impoverished Indigenous communities themselves that are paying for these investigations—both the wealthy Canadian state and the wealthy churches that ran these death camps would be happy to let those kids lie buried and be forgotten altogether.

Anyway. Land Back. Decolonize. Tax the churches and make them pay. Put the surviving culprits on trial for their crimes against humanity. Bring the kids home. Truth first, then we can talk about reconciliation.

Tkaronto, today

Thousands of people marched, drummed, and danced in the Cancel Canada Day march to demand justice for Indigenous children and survivors of Canada's genocidal residential schools.

It was powerful and beautiful and amazing. It was also, on a personal level, the closest I've felt in a long time to a worthwhile existence.