The Canadian project isn't finished: What an Indigenous dad wants his daughter to know

This is a First Person column by Joshua Fleming, a father living in St. John's.

I present this opinion acknowledging I am not a residential school survivor, but I am Mi'kmaw and father to my Mi'kmaw daughter.

Today, Canada Day, has given me more pause than any other to think about what it means to be both Mi'kmaw and Canadian and I'd like to share with you my thinking.

I see the residential school genocide as both separate from and related to this Canada Day. Each year, Canada Day is a time of celebration, and it's an opportunity to see how far we've come. This is not to say we shouldn't use the time this year to reflect, and to deliberate where we're going as a nation.

Canada Day is a time for us to come together to celebrate our shared values as a nation: compassion, peace, multiculturalism and humanity, among others. The last century has been a slog of reprehensible human behaviour, and I applaud those who acknowledge the residential school genocide, but the Canada of yesterday is not the Canada of today, and the Canada of today is not the Canada of tomorrow.

The values held when Canada was formed are starkly different. The pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus said, "You can't step in the same river twice" because like moving water, everything is in flux and everything changes. Canada is changing too, and we're all a part of it Indigenous and non-Indigenous alike.

I find it somewhat problematic when well-intentioned non-Indigenous people pick and choose what Indigenous voices they choose to listen to, because we're not a homogeneous group.

Pan-Indigenous thinking is as harmful as it is unrepresentative, and more often reflects the loudest voice as opposed to the majority.

It's not my role to be the gatekeeper of your Canada Day. All I ask is that you take a moment to acknowledge residential school survivors and give thought to reconciliation.

Let's focus on children

I do appreciate that the Canada Day discourse has highlighted the challenges facing Indigenous children in care. Indigenous children are 2 times more likely to have a "substantiated" report of maltreatment in care compared with non-Indigenous children. Indigenous children are twice as likely than their non-Indigenous counterparts to enter the child welfare system due to neglect and are over-represented in all aspects of the criminal justice system. Indigenous youth compose almost half of all youth in custody in Canada, but are only eight per cent of the youth population.

Evidently there is something going wrong because these outcomes don't align with our Canadian values.

As a father, I'm using this Canada Day to teach my daughter about her Indigenous identity and how we as Mi'kmaq fit into the Canadian mosaic. I want her, at four months old, to grow up being confident in who she is and her place in Canada.

She will know her oral tradition, the history of the Indigenous-colonial encounter, and traditional practices.

I'll take good parenting advice when I hear it

Some will say I'm starting too early, but I believe identity, particularly Indigenous identity, requires continuity of experience. I've spoken at length with residential school survivors about disrupted culture and they've reinforced the importance of Indigenous early childhood education I'll take good parenting advice when I hear it.

Her experience of Canada will be different from mine, and it's important for her to give thought towhat she wants her Canada to look like.

What I will do is teach her Canadian values because I believe these values constitute a path to reconciliation that we all need to walk.

Indigenous values are Canadian values, and Indigenous identity is Canadian identity.

Let Canada Day be a celebration of how far we've come in reconciliation, while acknowledging how much further we need to go.

We haven't achieved reconciliation, not even close, but the Canadian project isn't finished.

What we can do is use July 1 for a dialogue to ensure the past stays in the past, and to teach the next generation to be better than us.

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