I was so fortunate to have attended the sold-out luncheon hosted by the Pemberton & District Chamber of Commerce on Thursday. I sat at the back with a few people who had begged for last-minute access – just to hear the speeches, because the lunch itself was at capacity. I was also fortunate to be sitting beside a friend who sat calmly through my blubbering debrief, after Skalúlmecw Chief Dean Nelson and Rosemary Stager had shared their words.

I haven’t interrogated him on this front, but I assume Skalúlmecw Chief Dean and I are around the same age. He was a physical ed teacher before he became Chief, and after this, his third term, he would like to go back to teaching. That is his passion. Politics is also about working hard to create better futures, but it strikes me that you have to take a lot more personal hits.

He shared with attendees that his mother, who was a 20 year councillor for the Nation, gave him a book when he was young. A photocopied fat document. He held it up for us. It was a copy of the Indian Act.

He didn’t understand why.

It still exists. Why does the Indian Act still exist? He doesn’t understand that either.

He said, he didn’t know he was anything other than himself, a community member, until he went to school in Pemberton. And there, he was informed by the other kids who and what he was. “An Indian” who lives “on the reserve.”

It breaks my heart to think about those moments – when a person is moving through the world with the assumption of their dignity and full humanity, (as we all should), and “the world” starts attacking, chipping away at your humanity, degrading you. It breaks my heart to think of the way that many of us have been fed such racist information from our culture, governing bodies, media, legislatures, authorities, that we, as kids, become the weapons that enforce a racist agenda. “You are different. You are Other. You are lesser-than.”

Chief Dean said he never had an ambition to get into politics. His ambition was to get a job as a labourer and be the best labourer he could be. That was the highest bar that he could imagine reaching for.

That is what he is working so hard to change.

He shared that “We are still under the Indian Act and that is wrong.”

Read the Indian Act, he encouraged us.

My two cents being injected here: You will be horrified that it ever existed, and that it still exists. Compare it with the Charter of Canadian Rights and Freedoms, which is the legislation that governs your life, if you are a non-indigenous Canadian citizen. The space between the two is galactic. And unjustifiable.

“Moving forward,” said Skalúlmecw, “our relationship has to be better. We can’t have good relationships when one group has power over the other.”

I was so heartened to be in that room, amongst the people who were there that day – shapers and influencers and community leaders… who now have the privilege of shaping the culture that our kids are growing up in, of changing an old story of “better than/lesser than” to the one that Orange Shirt Day first seeded: “Every Child Matters.”

Rosemary Stager’s speech was also moving. I’m grateful for her willingness to have it posted here and will share soon.