The 301st Spartan

My mother is dead. She died in 2013.

She did not pass away. She was not surrounded by angels and light. The setting sun did not kiss her brow with the last of its rays as she peacefully joined with The Infinite. She died after a long and terrible battle with cancer. It was painful. It took from her: her time, her dignity, her mobility, and eventually even her reason. It took everything she had and everything she ever might have been. It had a smell. It sounded like drowning or choking. At one point her platelets crashed and she bled from her eyes. It was gory and horrific. To the very end, her body contorted and fought to breathe even in the face of no hope, terrible pain, and a quality of life that had descended into true horror. If it had not been my duty to be there to witness the fight, I would happily have fled. I have yet to transform the rawness of that memory into gratitude for the time we had together. I’m not sure that I ever will.

But she did not pass away. She died. She is dead. The mere suggestion that she gently shed her earthly husk to join her ancestors makes me angry. We live in an age where we’ve almost giving up talking about death, even though it waits for all of us. In popular culture, meaningful lethal stakes have been replaced by magic stones and time machines that can wind back the clock on any hero’s demise. But my mom didn’t pass through a ghostly portal or cross a Rainbow Bridge. Death dragged her from the world; her hands scrabbling wildly for any purchase that would delay the thing which had been inevitable since her initial diagnosis. She went down fighting, knowing she would lose.

The story of my mother’s last battle has taken on a mythic quality that, for our family, is not so far removed from tales of ancient heroes. In 480 BC, 300 Spartans fought the Persian army (of over 120,000 soldiers) to a standstill at the pass of Thermopylae in order to cover the escape of the main body of the Greek army. None survived. In 2011, my mother gave up what little leisure chemotherapy afforded her to take my children on adventures, fill them with chocolate, and shower them with attention. All 301 of them had a clear-eyed understanding of what awaited them. I am certain they were scared, but none flinched from what they saw as their duty. The manner of their deaths mattered. Maybe it mattered more than anything else about them. Excluding the uncomfortable or sad parts of the narrative turns a story of heroism into something about as dramatic as a greeting card. I hope I might have the courage to do the same when I face my own Thermopylae some day.

Honesty matters. Clarity matters. Facts matter. There are times in our lives where they mean everything. Who would want a doctor who danced around giving bad news? Or a climate scientist who preferred to focus on hope over accuracy? When we are confronted by serious problems, we need to articulate them as clearly as possible so that we can work on an appropriate solution. Sometimes we need to understand the urgency of a problem that has no solution – if only to push ourselves into getting our affairs in order or taking the steps necessary to adapt to whatever is coming for us. Resorting to euphemism or mealy-mouthed metaphors to avoid shocking people or hurting their feelings contributes nothing to understanding. Even worse, it can mask hard truths and be an excuse to defer necessary action. ?

It's with that in mind that I would ask you to consider a word that we hear often in discussions about the relationship between Indigenous peoples and those who arrived later; Settlers. There are some who take offence to the word Settler. They feel it smacks of so-called “woke-ism” and that it’s used to make those latecomers (mostly White People) feel bad about the policies and events that led to the political, social, and economic marginalization of Indigenous peoples and communities. “That stuff is in the past,” they’ll say. Or “Lots of bad things happened back in the day but eventually people have to move on.”

I fully agree. Settler is a lousy word. But I agree for different reasons. I think it’s a terrible term because it reeks of passivity. A Settler sounds like someone who happened to be in the neighbourhood and decided Canada might be a great place to settle. It carries only the barest hint of intentionality. It’s a polite word that takes Colonialism – which was bloody, protracted, and deadly - and makes it sound like Euro-Canadians were out for a hike and happened to find a nice campground as the sun was setting. It’s an image that is jarringly at odds with the Beaver Wars, epidemics, Indian Residential Schools, and the Sixties Scoop. It’s hard to trace a line between the term “Settler” and the pillaging of resources from Indigenous traditional and treaty territories. The term seems entirely disconnected from concepts like over-incarceration, multi-generational trauma, homelessness, food insecurity, and excess mortality. It has been sanitized.

It’s also an unnecessary word. We’ve long had a term at hand with the power to show the connections among all those problems in a clear, concise, and accurate manner: Colonizer. Colonizers came here. They took what they wanted (which was everything). They did their level best to destroy the Indigenous population. They made treaties and contracts that they did not honour. They raped and killed children. And they continue (by longstanding tradition) to profit from Indigenous misery. If we have any intention of healing the fractured relationship between Canadian society and the Indigenous peoples who have been its victims, its important that we have a clear-eyed understanding of what that relationship is.

Yes, history is bloody and messy. Yes, it is difficult to atone for the sins of the past. And no, no one is seriously asking for all non-Indigenous peoples to go back to wherever they came from. But the Colonial wound is an ongoing one. It is not an historical problem. It continues to marginalize and disadvantage First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples. If we want our Canada to be a place where everyone can feel free, safe, and celebrated, then we need to fix that. It falls to us because no one else has been willing to. And all of it starts with a clear articulation of the problem.

My mother is dead. My people came here as Colonizers. I can do something about one of those statements.?