10/01/2025
I’ll be honest, I haven’t worn an orange shirt for Orange Shirt Day in a couple years since listening to some Indigenous friends express that it can feel like a hollow gesture after now, 10 years since 94 Calls to Action published by . It’s not perfect, nor am I, but I try to do other things. Read a book, have a moment of silence, pray, smudge, participate in ceremony, deliver wood for sacred fires when I have the chance. I try to know my place. Yesterday, I went to the Canadian Museum for Human Rights—somewhere I haven’t been since I was in the middle of my social work degree. I didn’t get far in the exhibit, as my attending pal is fearful of heights, so moving up through the museum via ramps or the elevator wasn’t feasible past a certain point. There was a part of me that was relieved. Like last time, I felt a deep heaviness moving through the museum, but I noticed that I am a different person, in an entirely new body, made up of mostly new cells that weren’t there last time. I felt dissociated, a testament, maybe, to how much I’ve awakened and experienced living at an intersection I couldn’t quite see when I was in my early 20s, before I experienced and witnessed so much state violence resulting in the murders of family and members in my community. I maintain hope, because to not have any is an indicator of unchecked privilege and a belief that we can continue living and acting in harmful ways towards Earth and her people.
