Author’s Note: This may seem preachy. I don’t mean it to be so. If that is how you read it, I’ve missed the mark. But I get it; I own the words, you own your thoughts. Thank you for slogging through it.

Racism is the blight of humanity, existing as it does in all of us individually and in our sovereign gatherings worldwide. It is part of the human condition. I expect tens of thousands of years ago it was a simple risk calculus to protect oneself or family or village from unknown threat. Fear what you don’t know. Reject who you don’t know. It is all unsafe.

We don’t own all racism but we do own our own. The Canada young Tony emigrated to in 1958 has made strides. Centuries of racism and the widespread damage we imposed on the Indigenous population of this land we call Canada calls for a national reckoning. We took their land, their culture, their language, their music, their way of life, we even took their children for God’s Sake! And placed them into residential schools. A true reconciliation is due.

It was not uncommon on the streets of Kelowna in 1958 to see ‘drunk Indians’, as they would be described, lying on downtown sidewalks. Of course there were other drunks hanging around but no one ever said ‘drunk White man’. Still don’t. Now, just sixty four years later as I write, the Westbank First Nation is home to thousands of residential properties and the Band is one of Kelowna’s largest employers. It is an immensely successful self governing authority which runs its own health authority and has powers of taxation, licensing and policing. None of that was an accident, all of it stands proof of the oppression that racism visits upon all who are victimized. All of it stands as a sharp contradiction to those who spoke of Indigenous Canadians in racist terms. They were wrong then and they still are. It is what is so sinister about racism, it is nothing less than an intentional suppression of people, always purposeful and always unjustified, wherever it occurs in the world.

The key to the door of economic opportunity and social political freedom was the same for our First Nations as it has always been for the rest of us: Education. Stripped of everything you hold dear there are few among us who would not end up hopeless and destitute. But given opportunity, most of us will seize it. In 1970 I was in my first year at UBC Law School. That is where I met Jim Wilson, a man who became an Indigenous leader in Canada and the father of Jody Raybould-Wilson, Canada’s first Indigenous Justice Minister. Together with a thousand other stories just like that, we have witnessed extraordinary change and it began with education. It is a good beginning but there is a long and as yet untravelled road ahead.

In Kelowna, racism remains an everyday fact of life, a statement that will no doubt be rejected with loud derision. We are born to our racism and we will die racist and no single action or achievement will change that about us. Show of hands, who has said that Chinese are terrible drivers, or you can’t trust ‘The Browns’, the Dutch are stubborn, or “I never know what Indians want to be called!”? I’m sure you can think of others.

When I first arrived in a Kelowna as a young boy there was a billboard on Bridge Hill leading down to the Okanagan Lake Bridge. It had a big beautiful BC grown apple with these words emblazoned across it, ‘Coast Japs not welcome!’. Scratch any sixty year old and he or she will reveal what lies beneath, for that is where we hide most of our core values. Hell, scratch any thirty year old. Racist jokes, racist assumptions, racist slurs lurk just beneath the surface in most of us. I would be a rich man had I been paid a dollar for every time I’ve heard otherwise good, decent people, parents of children, say, “I’m not racist but …”. The answer of course is, “Yes you are.”, but it is a rare occasion when we say that out loud, social graces trumping a normal instinct to push back. I know as well that my view of racism in Canada is skewed. Kelowna is a prosperous town saved from most of the social confrontation that comes with the squalid poverty found in many Canadian cities. In Winnipeg and Vancouver for example, the images are more jagged and the social upheaval more pressing. I don’t have any wisdom about the larger issues, all I do know is that it is upon us to press forward, insisting that our country reckon with its racist history and reconcile with its future. Alone, we can make no difference. Together we can change anything.

Kelowna is instructive though. The town had been settled in the early 1900’s by a mixture of immigrant populations: British, German, Italian and East Indian making up the majority. The indigenous population was already here of course but not ‘visible’ to the settler population. As in their countries of origin these immigrants created safe cantonments where the culture, religion and language of the old country could thrive. That is as it is with all first generation immigrants around the world. The natural cross cultural enmities followed them to Kelowna. Assimilation over the next few generations has changed much and by 2000 the city had found a comfortable balance, recognizing and celebrating the multi cultural heritage of the residents. Into that mix, the Westbank First Nation has injected itself and become an influential business and cultural leader.

My own family is also instructive. History invites us all to dance as fast as we can and we have been no exception. We have had our inherent racist colonial heritage challenged by ‘life stuff’. I have been married twice and have four children Jono, ‘Niffer, Toby and Sophie (all of them fabulous BTW). Faith Graham, Jono and Niffer’s mother can link their bloodlines back to England. My wife Mac’s mother and father were both tenth generations Canadian an exceptionally unusual heritage in Canada, her father Ray a United Empire Loyalist. The UEL emblem on Ray’s gravesite in New Westminster signifies that his family supported Great Britain during the US War of Independence in 1763 – 1776. My own family heritage describes 250 years of Peyton’s proudly serving the British Empire in far flung corners of the world as line officers in service of God, King, Queen and Country.

The historical backdrop for our families is white and imperial. Jono married Emma Bonnemaisson, a spectacular Bohemian activist woman whose own family has had to deal with the cruel cutting edge of racism. Emma’s sisters are mixed race, born of a white mother and a black father. Sophie’s husband Jon is born of a black mother and a white father. For all of them racism is more real and more punishing than anything others in our family have experienced. It is good that we are asked to let go of any historic baggage we may have and see them and all others not as people of colour but simply as people, who will over time inject their own rich cultural history into our family. We are imperfect of course and always will be but we are open to challenge and open to change and of that I am proud.

What I am also proud of is to be Canadian, living in a country on a path of reconciliation. That path ahead opened by decades of important Supreme Court of Canada decisions in which the court has said time and again it is time to recognize the disregarded treaty rights of First Nations. It has forced governments to the negotiation table to redress claims stripped from their hands by our forefathers. It meets with some political resistance of course but for the most part Canadians are supportive of redress. The federal government is finally addressing the post colonial and repressive Indian Act, a legislative platform that echoes a time gone past. Powerful legislative and corporate forces are at play but it is in our hands where the most powerful force resides. It will not be easy and will involve a huge transfer of sovereign wealth back to First Nations, particularly in BC where the Courts have now recognized claims to Crown land that will force governments to the negotiation table, for an accounting of what is due.

And of course the full story remains unwritten perhaps because the full story remains unknown. As I write, we have learned of horrifying discoveries of unmarked graves of Indigenous children taken from their homes and forced into residential schools. At least one hundred and thirty of these schools across Canada implemented official federal government policy designed to assimilate Indigenous, Metis and Inuit children, to “take the Indian out of them.”. It was despicable then and it is despicable now and it has surely brought upon us a full reckoning with this dark chapter in our country’s history. The truth is we knew about these residential schools for decades and we did nothing. We sat mute. This happened on our watch. It is on us.

For me this all stands as raw testament to the destructive hold racism can have on us all. Each and every one of us.

It will get noisy as those who resist change will ironically proclaim the injustice and unfairness to the settlers. Those howls of anger and protest will be met by the echoes of protest and anger voiced by Indigenous people, echoes from so long ago when their forebearers were stripped of land and all they held dear. It is a reckoning come due and it is upon us to continue to influence the change that is afoot. Don’t sit mute, as we did. Add your voice. And be loud about it. Yours is a voice your country needs to hear.

Learn the truth. Teach the truth. Reconcile the Wrongs.

Another Author’s Note: As I did my final edit on this I literally said out loud, “Good Lord Man, what a sanctimonious prick!”. I suspect others of you will have used more exciting language. I have no defence and of course I am as guilty of racism as anybody I know. I am born of British parents, as I have described already, and that means I was born into an assumption that every drawn breath is to be used to express a firmly held opinion. That is a delightful awareness for a bloviating blowhard such as myself but no doubt a wee bit tedious for unsuspecting readers such as yourself. My apologies if you find yourself ill tempered and ‘frowny’ after reading my bit. That is an unfair price to pay.