Hands up to Jully Black and thank you to Tatush Peters for sharing this.

“Toronto artist, Jully Black sings “Oh Canada at the NBA All-Star game. Changes lyrics to “Our home on native land”.

I’m grateful to live here and to be able to call myself Canadian.

My people were displaced at some point – at least 10 of my ancestors were part of a huge wave of colonizing immigration, in the 1840s and 1850s, as ship upon ship sailed from the lands of the United Kingdom and spilled hundreds of immigrants onto the shores of Australia, which, just 60 years earlier, had not known any white-bodied folk, had not known any empires or kings or queens.

(Google: who was the king in 1788 when the First Fleet dropped a load of convicts on the shores of Indigenous land and claimed it as a penal colony and part of his empire. Oh, some dude who was famous for going mad. Okay then.)

I’m grateful for my ancestors, and I’m proud to be an Australian, too, AND I can hold both those things, as well as a sense of being part of a bigger more complicated story and timeline, in which a lot of what brought me here, to this place, and this life I’m living, impacted other people painfully. Once you know better, you get to do better. Failing to acknowledge the history and the ongoing impacts of the history, isn’t doing better. Wanting to contribute, with your words, thoughts and deeds, to being in right relation with the land, and the people of the land, is. There doesn’t have to be a clear path or a handbook. You just have to do the next right thing.

At the NBA Allstars basketball game on the weekend, singer Jully Black opened with the anthem, and she made a small and perfect edit, to honour “our home on native land.” I can do that. In fact, I feel as though making that change in the lyrics will make it easier for me to lend my voice to the anthem.