Elbows Up!, page 6
We become just by doing just acts, brave by doing brave acts. When we are kind, kindness grows. When we seek unity, unity grows. When we are Canadian, Canada grows. And united, [in] our history, we have done hard, seemingly impossible things. United, we have built one nation in harsh conditions, despite a sometimes hostile neighbour. Yes, they have form on this, the Americans. United, we have confronted our own past with Indigenous peoples. United, we have created universal public health care. And now, in the face of this crisis, united, we are buying Canadian. We are exploring everything this country has to offer.
Canada’s imperfect and “practical foundation” based in “kindness as a virtue, not as a weakness” is living proof that this country’s central core principles are, and always have been, Indigenous. This unity is forged through “impossible things” that begin with love, respect, honesty, bravery, truth, humility, and wisdom; kind acts demonstrated by introducing newcomers to this place, teaching them where the medicine and the food can be found, and bringing settlers into our lodges, longhouses, and ᐃᒡᓗᐃᑦ (igluit) so they can join with us to build a place where we all can live safely, securely, and collectively.
Canadians eternally struggle with the existential questions of what does this country mean, where is it going, and why is it here? The anxiety surrounding the answers to these questions becomes polarized in the face of Trump. This uncertainty is in large part because Indigenous contributions are misunderstood, bastardized, or simply absent in most areas of the country. With due respect to Carney, Canada hasn’t completely “confronted” the fact this country declared war upon the very people who gave Canadians every single thing that makes them who they are. During a long nation-building project obsessed with Wiindigos—encouraging Canadians to dominate the land, stop at nothing to build the economy, and centralize competitiveness, capitalism, and individuality—Canada left behind Indigenous communities, and it continues to do so today. So, it is ironic that, when a country is confronted with a larger, more threatening Wiindigo, it turns away from selfishness and toward collectivity as an antidote. It’s as if everyone in this country suddenly put on the same coloured shirt that said “Every One Matters” and marched. I wonder who came up with that?
The problem, of course, is that simply building pipelines and houses, cutting taxes, and “buying Canadian” will not be enough to battle Trump’s threats of American imperialism. Simply put, one cannot “build, baby, build” without “reconcile, baby, reconcile.” We must turn to what makes us believe that the person beside each of us matters—a principle that must find its way into how we vote, build an economy, and help and heal one another. Stating empty territorial acknowledgements is never going to cut it; Canadian sovereignty relies on relationships with Indigenous peoples via treaties, Indigenous rights, and a complicated array of laws that include Indigenous and treaty rights at their centre. Simply put, Canada must learn its own history and follow its own laws, putting Indigenous peoples at the centre of any and all conversations surrounding Canada’s future. The good news is that, as in every single step of this country, Indigenous peoples will continue to be willing partners for Canadians to help this process, as our cultures, teachings, and futures demand us to be.
An immense part of this process emerged during the 2025 federal election campaign, when a record twelve Indigenous mps were elected by Canadians. Primarily elected on the prairies—where a cognizance of Indigenous-Canadian relationships comes from proportional populations and everyday interactions—this led to a record three Indigenous peoples in cabinet. Two of these appointments were Mandy Gull-Masty (Cree) as Indigenous Services minister, and Rebecca Chartrand (Anishinaabe, Ininew, Métis) as Northern and Arctic Affairs minister and minister responsible for the Canadian Northern Economic Development Agency. Indigenous women—historically Canada’s most mistreated group—are now in charge of arguably two of the most critical segments of Carney’s plan to build infrastructure, develop critical minerals and resources, and fortify Canadian sovereignty. Imagine this now: if business leaders want to develop the land or initiate oil and gas projects, or if Vladimir Putin or Trump want to come knocking on Canada’s North—they will have to talk to an Indigenous woman.
That’s a little more than elbows up.
CATHERINE LEROUX
TRANSLATION BY MÉLISSA BULL
Will: A Short Story
Don Will was a retired philosopher—if anyone ever really retires from philosophy. From his terrace in Tegucigalpa, he could see my country far more clearly than I, still in my twenties, could. “French,” he said one evening, “is what prevents Canada from dissolving into the United States.” I’d wondered whether this was wisdom or the fancies of a Franco-Caribbean man bearing an Irish name. Twenty-five years later, I understood the possibilities his sentence carried.
The day after the annexation, the president banned the use of French. Indigenous and immigrant languages soon followed. We weren’t surprised—he had, after all, homed in on Spanish and inclusive language from the first days of his endless second reign, long before his takeover of Canada. Schools, the media, and the courts were now conducted exclusively in English—if you could call this twisted language, stripped of every possibility of truth, English. Everything that was said and written in the public sphere rang as if trapped within a hollow, plasticized shell, suffocating reality. The anglophile in me was sorry. The francophone woman was up in arms. I wasn’t the only one.
Over whispered conversations, drowned out by Sinatra hits we blasted at top volume, we began to organize. There were only seven of us at first, then, quickly, there were twenty, one hundred. We named our group “Will.” A syllable embodying future and volition in English, and which contains the sound of the French “yes,” oui. That’s what we repeated, oui, at every meeting. Our resistance was acquiescence—to risk, to fear, to imagination.
From our first meeting in the basement of a derelict library, Tom reminded us that his mother tongue had once helped relay military secrets. During the First World War, Cree code talkers had outsmarted the most seasoned German cryptologists. From there grew the idea of communicating via dissident languages. Tremblay’s Joual mixed with Daigle’s Chiac, crossed with Bacon’s Innu-aimun, coupled with Patsauq’s Inuktitut. The mixtures of French, Creole, and Arabic that sprouted from the linguistic incubators of Montreal and Laval schoolyards. The dialects of the old Italians of Petite-Patrie and the Vietic accents of the third-generation Vietnamese communities. As our networks branched out, the amalgamation spread, from Ukrainian and Prairie Michif to Hakka and the Salish languages of the West Coast. Our actions were discussed from coast to coast to coast, thanks to not one, but dozens of covert codes.
We planted bombs, destroyed symbols. We hacked platforms, published manifestos. We sabotaged facilities, paralyzed systems. We plastered our cities’ walls with messages of resistance in every language. The grey shadow of the occupation continued to expand. Arbitrary closures, layoffs, and internments intensified. Several of us were wiretapped. We were many; we contained millions of words, but it wasn’t enough. We didn’t have the right weapons.
One night, Sarah showed up brandishing a half-decomposed science fiction novel. The relic from her distant cegep studies had slipped behind her bookcase. In the novel, the characters’ language was so precise and synthetic that it became a weapon—a power capable of transmogrifying matter. “This is what we have to do,” she said. I didn’t see how it could work. But the others did. They were word people. Nurses who’d saved lives with a kind remark, elders who’d saved kindred with a legend. They were teachers, saleswomen, sweet talkers, telephone operators, inventors, travellers. They were all poets. They knew that a word could shake the earth. “This is possible,” they said.
We got to work, searching for ways to reduce language to its most simple, most extreme expression. We had Dune in mind: “My name is a killing word.” Since we were living in a dystopia, we had to use science fiction to reason. We tried syncretisms, neologisms, magical incantations. We isolated radicals, we agglutinated performative morphemes. I thought of nothing else, carrying our impossible syllables with me everywhere I went—in the streets, on the subways patrolled by soldiers, at home with the lights out. I mumbled words overcrowded with consonants under my employers’ scrutinizing eyes. Sometimes I’d catch one of them shiver for no reason. I smiled inwardly.
Mobilized by this project, Will slowed its operations. The explosions ceased, as did the ransacking of the occupiers’ computer networks. They thought they’d succeeded in crushing us. The unilingual president and his horde of unilingual sycophants couldn’t imagine what was at work in a mind where syntaxes and lexicons imbricated, rending universes. It wasn’t the bombs that threatened their monomaniacal regime, but the ebullience of languages that had survived, proliferating like underground mycelia.
It took months. We read and reread Sarah’s novel, as well as other books that had escaped the shredders. We grew discouraged; we persisted. Oui. Will. And then, one night, Tom whispered the word, a hybrid of all known language families, and we felt the air vibrate around us. We knew at once that we shouldn’t speak it aloud, not until the appointed time. We caught it, hid it between our teeth, inscribed it within us. I mouth it several times a day, like an explosive diction exercise. I sleep between its phonemes, protected by its roots.
Tomorrow, when I start my service at the governor’s office, when the president arrives with his skittish and bloated lackeys, when I test the microphone before his speech, I won’t say, “One, two.” I will speak with a strong, multifaceted voice that holds entire nations. I will pronounce our word—a single, ballistic word—and the earth will tremble.
JILLIAN HORTON
Who We Really Are
There are some patterns you see over and over when you’re a doctor, and here is one that endures: when a person is facing an unexpected crisis, they land very quickly on what matters most.
Sometimes people do splinter into fragments, at least at first. The betrayal of something they took for granted—a heart that always pumped, a perfectly agreeable limb that followed commands, an organ they barely even knew was there because it was such a good citizen—goes off like a little bomb. And there they are, cowering in the middle of what’s left, scarcely able to believe their eyes, their ears, their new reality. But that doesn’t usually last long, because for all our faults and blind spots as a species, we are phenomenally adaptive. We reconfigure—goals, plans, relationships. Things fall away, like shedding skin. And underneath that skin is something a little bit extraordinary: who we really are.
* * *
—
Ask a Canadian who they think they are and you will get 40 million different answers. Mine weaves in geography, history, and hand puppets. I was born in 1974, about sixty miles from the U.S. border between Manitoba and North Dakota. My dad spent time in the air force; my mom once worked for the cbc. I was chaperoned through early childhood by Mr. Dressup, Casey, and Finnegan. I loved Gordon Lightfoot and Anne Murray. I thought Barbara Frum was an icon, Terry Fox a legend. I sang “God Save the Queen” and “O Canada” at every school assembly, belting out the words as if I were on stage at Roy Thomson Hall. I had a grandfather who fought in the First World War, and even though he died before I was born, every Remembrance Day when we chanted “In Flanders Fields” in our sombre, childish voices, I felt proud of his sacrifice.
Over the ensuing years, my understanding of Canadian identity became messier, more complex. Sometimes questions outnumbered answers. I grew up with two profoundly disabled siblings, and for them, this country was not a land of much opportunity. I was never taught the truth about residential schools; it wasn’t until I was a practising physician that I realized I didn’t know anything meaningful about the experiences of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Then, during the covid-19 crisis, I watched as a convoy of massive trucks—subsidized heavily by a certain southern neighbour—occupied and paralyzed our nation’s capital; crowds screamed that we were living under a dictatorship, their actions supported enthusiastically by the leader of an opposition party who hailed them as heroes. Heroes. I couldn’t equate that word with any crowd of men and women shouting expletives, swearing and soaking in hot tubs on the streets of Ottawa, defiling the National War Memorial and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
I thought of my grandfather…his lungs ruined by mustard gas, the invisible injuries he came home with that were even worse. I thought of hundred-year-old letters my dad had shown me throughout the years—one from his great-uncle, Chris, pleading to be allowed to enlist at the age of sixteen “like all the rest”; another a response to my great-grandfather, gently informing him that despite his request for special consideration, he could not be assigned active duty because he was older than the cut-off age of forty-eight.
Sometimes it felt like those letters came from more than another time—like they were from another country.
My dad once told me that my grandfather only ever spoke about the war on a single occasion. They were watching All Quiet on the Western Front—the 1930 Oscar-winning movie that portrays the physical and psychological cost of war for a group of young soldiers. About forty minutes into the movie, the men are stationed in the trenches. The enemy advances, and both sides kill each other by the thousands—screaming, stabbing, bayonetting, shooting, slaughtering en masse.
My grandfather said quietly, “That’s exactly what it was like.”
Somewhere, years ago, I read an interview with a historian. They said fascism will often resurface in societies only when the last people who fought or lived under a previous fascist regime have died. That’s because memory is vivid, pulsatile, communicable. The living hold us accountable. “In Flanders Fields” and All Quiet on the Western Front can only do so much heavy lifting when the people who can tell us that’s exactly what it was like are no longer here to warn us.
I felt privately that things might be hopeless. I wondered if my grandfather ever worried that his sacrifice would turn out to be for nothing, that it would only buy us time until the memories ran out.
* * *
—
But then came the unexpected, miraculous turn—acts of verbal and economic aggression from the United States rousing the sleeping emotions of millions of Canadians, an old, wartime brand of patriotism suddenly coming back to life. Flags on lawns and in windows, reclaimed from the convoy. A meme of Casey and Finnegan as the new Fentanyl Czars. Crowds at hockey games tearing up and going wild as the national anthem was performed at centre ice. An election with a near-record turnout. A cri de cœur in two official languages that reminded us we are part of something bigger than ourselves, and that something is not “O Canada.”
It is our Canada.
We are a nation like almost every other—built on violence, cruelty, oppression, as well as ingenuity, hard work, tenacity, community, faith, hope, and the sacrifices of those who came before us. But that is only one truth about us…a puzzle piece, not the whole story. That story has taken a turn at just the right moment. Sometimes saying what you will never become—whether that is a fascist state or the 51st—is the thing that brings the most clarity.
My own father will be ninety this fall. He remembers what it was like to watch men go away to war. He remembers the terrible price men and women paid to subsidize our way of life. He talks about these stories. In February, we watched one of Justin Trudeau’s press conferences together, sitting in front of the television just the way he once sat with his own father watching All Quiet on the Western Front. We listened to our prime minister remind us that we are not Americans, that the times ahead will be difficult, that our identity—whatever it is, whoever we are—is precious and worth fighting for.
We aren’t facing the same kind of choices or sacrifices as my grandfather did. Not yet, anyway. But it was clear to us then, and it is every bit as true as I write this now—we are in a moment of alchemy, of transformation.
My dad, always a purveyor of wisdom, observed that there was one good thing in all of it.
“I think it woke us up a little,” he said.
That is the essential truth—and it’s exactly what this moment is like. Shedding a skin, bridging two worlds, awakening to the sacrifices of ancestors who made our way of life possible. Relearning lessons we once knew but had almost forgotten. Remembering, before our collective memory can fail us—maybe even just in the nick of time—who we really are.
MARGARET LAURENCE
THE NEW ROMANS (1968)
Open Letter to the Mother of Joe Bass
I don’t know what you look like. We will not meet. I don’t know how old you are. About my age, I would guess, which is forty-one. I don’t know how many kids you have. I have two. My daughter is fifteen, and my son is twelve. You have a twelve-year-old son also.
My son was born in Ghana, and there was no doctor present. The doctor was overworked, and I was okay and normal, so there was only a midwife in attendance. She was a Ghanaian, a matriarch, four kids of her own, and no male doctor could have known what she knew. “It will be a boy,” she promised to me as the hours passed by. “Only a man could be so stubborn.” When I was in pain, she put out her hands to me and let me clench them, and I held to those hands as though they were my hope of life. “It will soon be over,” she said. “Would I lie to you? Look, I know. I have borne.” She did know. l had no anaesthetic, and when she delivered him, she laid him, damp and thin and blood-smeared, across my belly. “There,” she said. “What did I tell you? Your boy, he is here.” She was the only other person present when l looked over God’s shoulder at the birth of my son. She had had her children too, and she knew what it was that was happening. She knew that it had to be felt in the flesh to be really known.
