The Kitchi Sipi (Ottawa River) with the Gatineau shores - from my desk.

Acknowledgement of a Guest.

It is hard to sit at my desk looking at the Ottawa River or Kitchi Sipi – the great river, with the Gatineau hills to the north, forests to the south along the 416 Hiway, and fertile farm fields to the east – without thinking of the thousands or millions of years these lands and waters have witnessed birth, life, and death in the evolution of Creation.

In the fulness of time, people arrived – the human beings the Creator called to live in relationship with these Great Lakes parts of Turtle Island on planet Earth. The Algonquin people have lived here and still do – one of a family of first nations: Nipissing, Mississauga, Potawatomi, Odawa, Chippewa/Odawa, Ojibwe-Cree, Chippewa Saulteaux. 

This larger family of nations is called Anishinaabe. Sometimes the word is translated as “people from whence lowered” [is that “lowered” to Earth from the Creator?]. It’s also translated “the good humans” – people of the right way taught by the Creator.

These blessed people lived and still live in caring and grateful relationship with the land and waters, the birds, fish, and four-legged creatures. For me, “people of the right way” echoes the “people of the Way” – the label given to early Christians in the Bible’s Acts of the Apostles (19:23).

Explorers, Traders, Settlers

In the 16^th and 17^th centuries, European guests came with royal mandates in their pockets.   Thinking they had arrived in India, they called the people they met “Indians”. The label stuck. Their indigenous nation names were judged too much trouble for settlers to learn and use, so the great diversity of Indigenous nations who occupied Turtle Island was swallowed up in  the easier “Indian” hopper. Not a label indigenous peoples chose for themselves - they knew the names by which they called each other.

The Algonquin people and other Indigenous nations used the rivers as travel & transport highways, reaping the abundance of the land for other necessities of life, and for trade.  The guests learned from the hosts how to live, move, and have their being in this fair land.  Gradually, but steadily, these guests made themselves at home as if they had both a divine and royal right to settle and harvest – some say, plunder - without let. 

In reality, the Algonquin territories were never ceded to the settlers’ Crown or other authorities – the Crown simply asserted sovereignty as if it were legal – and still does.  The settlers carried on with little thought about trespass or theft – in fact they even built their Parliament Buildings and the national seat of government on these territories. 

The National Dream

By the Indian Act of 1876 (much amended), the Crown – in the form of the nascent national government created by the Confederation of 1867 – codified Canada as an apartheid nation with settlers in charge, while the Indigenous nations, their lands and citizens became wards of the Crown. The national dream legislated the assimilation of the “Indians” into the Euro-Canadians population. Genocide. Blessedly, a costly nightmarish failure.

Today we have evidence of how frighteningly costly this assertion and dispossession was for these Algonquin and other indigenous peoples across Canada and how much the settler state and church diminished the humanity of these “good humans”. 

Today, also, we cannot neglect to remember their generous sharing, their spiritual wisdom, their patience.  We can also marvel at their indefatigable, peaceful perseverance to have these settlers, including me, behave like respectful faith-based guests committed, at least, to justice.

Their many grueling and tiresome trips to local, provincial, and federal courts – especially the Supreme Court – have been remarkably successful in having land claims and human rights adjudicated in their favour.  Self-determination and nation-to-nation relations are becoming well-rooted seedling in the legislative framework of Canada.    "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice," as Martin Luther King Jr. experienced and observed so personally.

Intentional Action for Justice - Collective and Personal

In acknowledging the Algonquin First Nation of this geographic region, I want to express both my gratitude and also my pledge to continue to find ways of restoring justice – toward ending a long history of injustice and failed “law and order.” 

I join the quest for healthy treaty relationships with the Algonquin First Nation and with all indigenous peoples – Métis, Inuit, and First Nations - of Turtle Island. I acknowledge that more progress has been made in the last half century than in the previous four-and one-half centuries since “contact” or “invasion”.  I worry that at the rate this relationship is being improved, it could well take another century before justice can be deemed to have been well served.

This is unsatisfactory and unacceptable.  Gradualism must stop.   I believe that communities of faith – including my own - and other groups and individuals of goodwill must respond to the call of the Spirit demanding more dedicated and swifter action on the part of settler society and the Crown in energizing that “arc of justice.”  The historic social order has been too costly for both Indigenous and settler people.  A new covenant relationship could open the door to well-being for all who dwell in this fair land.

I will lift up the Creator's goodness and open myself to the living breath of the Spirit, who endows us - each and all - with the gifts needed for us all to become good humans on the way together and better neighbours respecting and sharing the lands and water in friendship and peace as long as the sun rises and sets, and as the rivers continue to flow. May it be so!

February 11, 2024

Ottawa

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