I am astounded. The people here are so nice and helpful. The food is amazing. The coffee is unmatched. My co-workers are all brilliant. My mornings are filled with sun rises, literary epiphanies, and culinary expeditions. The main streets are lined with poor and disabled people begging for change or selling collected wares. The earnest desperation of those so improvised they have lost hope. In the eyes of these strangers I am struck with my own powerlessness. These are the real faces of affluence. The honest exhibition of what it can mean to be human, and forgotten, can be heard in the rhythm of shaking coins clasped between trembling palms.
What CUI is doing here is genuinely good. The task presented to those of us with access however maybe too vast for any one human mind or organization to truly fathom. It is a terrifying feeling to be relatively thankful that the Canadian Government forced my family on to reserves and abducted their children (my grandmother) and sent her to residential “school. “ To be the inheritor of direct, explicit, admitted genocide, and to think, “It could’ve been worse. That could be me.” Sometimes it makes it hard to breathe.
Something else I have found very interesting is the alternative projection of race. In Ethiopia I am viewed as white, where as in Canada I am not. As the legal frame work of apartheid is still alive and well in Canada, and this legal frame work explicitly defines my identity as “aboriginal” or non-white, it brings to my attention the idea of race as a social construction and as a projection on to people either socially, as in the Ethiopian context I am currently experiencing, or in the legal context, such as Canada, where my racial identity is legally defined by a governing authority.
I’ve been asked in the past by hilarious Canadians, “How is Canada racist?” I respond with the question, “What is the Indian Register?” I understand it must be personally and intellectually challenging for us as Canadians to publicly admit that we identify with, and pay taxes to, a racially extremist patriarchal institution; specifically due to the fear of retribution by state agents and other racist, patriarchal, or extremist institutions, or persons/groups there in.
It was very hard for me to accept that I, along with most of my male friends, have been, and in some ways still are, unconscious male chauvinists. It was very hard to accept that I had been taught to conform to socially constructed gender norms. I did not want to accept that for most of my life I had been responsible for unknowingly perpetuating patriarchy; but I was. And in the same way many Canadians are responsible for complacently perpetuating socially and legally constructed racial norms.
Two months from now I will be visiting Auschwitz, a few weeks later ill be visiting my reserve. Even though conceptually they have absolutely no relationship, I think it may be eye opening to observe such unrelated environments constructed to ultimately achieve radically opposite ends.
Racially Yours
Polar Bear Mizel