A Poem for Truth and Reconciliation

A Poem for Truth and Reconciliation

Today we share a poem written by Thamer Linklater, friend and partner of the Sisters of St. Joseph.

We are the granddaughters of survivors.

We are the nieces of people who never came home.

This entire year has been excruciating for us.

Not like a punch to the stomach,

One you don't see coming,

Taking your breath all at once.

But like an avalanche.

The slow collection of snow on a mountaintop.

Until, one day, a sound sets off a cascade,

Wrecking everything in its path.

We all saw the building snow.

Our bodies knew the horrors untold.

You see, we live near the mountains.

Towns, however, that are crushed by snow,

Are shielded by walls and roads.

Existing so far away from mountaintops.

A sea of orange now floods the landscape.

T-shirts, signs, banners, handprints

Take up the space cleared by snow.

Some wear the colour to commemorate

Grandparents, Aunts, Uncles, Cousins.

Some wear the colour to honour

The childhood that was stolen from them.

Some wear the colour as a sign of atonement.

Refusing to let history be buried.

Some wear the colour to blend in.

Using apologies, holidays, and shirts

To cover the gap.

Meanwhile pipelines, legal action, and police raids

Tear the rift further and further apart.

We are the granddaughters of survivors.

We are the nieces of those who never came home.

We are apart of the avalanche.

We had our hearts unburied with every child found.

Where do you fit in this story unfolding?

Thamer Linklater is a member of Nisichawayasihk Cree Nation and a survivor of the Child Welfare system in Manitoba. She recently graduated from the University of Winnipeg with a B.A. in English and is now working on her Master’s in Indigenous Studies at Trent University. She has worked in various teams for the Six Seasons Project. She has been involved with Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak and is an active First Nations advocate. Thamer has recently started work on her collection of poems and hopes to publish them soon.

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Celebrating the Fall Equinox - the Indigenous way.

Tracey Whiteye

On September 21, we and about 50 others had the distinct pleasure and privilege to celebrate the Fall Equinox by walking a spiritual journey around Victoria Park in London, ON, led by Tracey Whiteye, a local Indigenous Woman helper and a second-generation survivor of a mother who had been in a residential school.

Tracey's infectious way of engaging us with Creator in expressing gratitude for all of creation was both respectful and so down to earth.

We gathered in a circle around Tracey's Indigenous bundle representing the ancestors.   A Metis helper woman placed four strawberries, the "heart" berry, in the four directions on the bundle.  A woman residential school survivor was there and was so gratefully and gracefully acknowledged by Tracey.

Tracey went on to thank Creator for the Water which was carried by another Metis helper woman.

Water is life for us, she went on to say and stressed its importance when we are firstborn.  It was especially meaningful when she and others of us who knew it, sang the water song together.

What struck me was how she prayed the ceremony, honoring the four directions, the stages of growth through which we all travel, all the while, walking us through those four directions.

May WE, settler folk continue to be gifted by women like Tracey who invite us into their sacred spaces.  This truly was a sacred encounter of Creator through the experience of being together in a circle in the beginning and ending with the circle formation.  We are all equal by being invited into the Circle.

Let's live that belief in our lives, as Tracey shows us.

 - Sister Kathleen Lichti, CSJ

https://getinvolved.london.ca/climate

https://www.climateactionlondon.ca/

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The Who/What/Why of our Walk:

A spiritual journey around Victoria Park led by Tracey Whiteye

WHY

• to connect us all and future generations to the land that belongs to the Creator;

• to launch Greening Sacred Spaces (London); and

• to support and advance the City of London’s Climate Emergency Action Plan.

WHO

• led M. Tracey Whiteye, Oshkaabewis Kwe, which means a woman helper or

  messenger in Objibwe language. Tracey is a wholistic practitioner, researcher

  and educator.

WHAT

• honour mother earth and future generations with story telling, songs and

  prayers

• share the water ceremony

• to honour the four directions around the sacred fire;

• engage the sacred bundles and other indigenous women who are Berry Fasters;

• announce the new Greening Sacred Spaces initiative

and to announce the call for submissions for two x $500 Climate Action London grants, which address London’s Climate Emergency Action Plan and aligns with the Global Sustainable Development Goals.

““It’s education that got

us into this mess.

It’s education that

will get us out of it.””

— (Ret.) Senator Murray Sinclair, Chair of the TRC, 2015

No News but Bad News

This has been a summer like none other. The world is full of doom, destruction, and agony given to us in living color, compliments of the media.  Most evenings, as I tiptoe to the tv and gingerly tune in to CBC’s The National, I ask myself, “Why am I doing this”?  As much as I want to learn what’s happening in our world, usually, I shield my eyes from the plethora of horrors unfolding on the screen.  By now, we know the routine by heart.  Hundreds of forest fires are blazing across Canada, the United States, and parts of Europe.  Floods rampage through cities and towns. Haiti is torn apart by earthquakes. Tornados blitz the Florida coast.  The fourth wave of the global pandemic is rearing its destructive head.  To add insult to injury, Prime Minister Trudeau has called a federal election for September 20th, seemingly oblivious to the fact that neither disgruntled Canadians nor screaming opposition parties want to go to the polls.

Lately, to save my sanity, I’ve been turning off the nightly litany of a world falling apart at its seams.  I hear myself sighing, “Where are you, God”?  In the silence, the answer appears.  “I’m right here beside you; I am with you always”. Always?  Yes, God always is living in us, beside us, and among us, even amidst the devastation we humans have created.  My faith tells me that this is true, and I believe it, but the road ahead looks ominous.

“God always is living in us, beside us, and among us, even amidst the devastation we humans have created”

We don’t need to spend our time looking back to why the world has arrived at this juncture.  What we need is for the governments of the world and rich countries to lay down their arms and stop the proliferation of weapons. Furthermore, we need people to live simply in harmony with Mother Nature to counteract climate change.  Until then, we’ll muddle along until we learn to subdue our great big egos which urge us to be something, to know something, and to have everything.

-Sister Jean Moylan, csj