Why is this important? Well, it is more important than being a national holiday for people to have a day off work or classes. My family, the Longpré clan, arrived from France in the late 1600s. The place wasn’t empty. People were already living here. My European ancestors from both paternal and maternal lines were not exactly friendly to the people already living here. The same was true for other European settlers. The competition for the land and its resources began almost immediately.

Somehow, being White and presumably Civilized made us feel entitled to what these people had. To be honest, we wanted everything and if possible to rid the planet of these “others.” We put them on reserves after creating a police force, an internal army first called the North-West Mounted Police. The name changed over the years, Royal North-West, then Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP, but the work stayed the same: to take care of these people. Taking care meant rounding them up and pushing them off the land where they lived and raised families for hundreds if not thousands of years. And taking care later meant taking their children, pulling them from their families and delivering them to residential schools.

While our paramilitary force did the work, we washed our hands of our complicity and now claim innocence. We even dare to say that this history is a lie. After all, if it were true then none of us can escape being culpable.

What do we do now, especially since this day exists? Admit the truth of the past. Admit that we as a society have profited and lived good lives because our society built our present country on persecution.