Our community needs to change its name.  

Personally, this relates to early deaths of my brother, my dad, and my grandfather. Indigenous friends’ examples showed me my family also carries inherited trauma, though unrecognized, subconscious.   Men in my family dulled pain with alcohol.  It led to early deaths.    I am a survivor.  

Early on I knew something wasn’t right in me.  It was buried under a lot that is good.  I was raised in a loving family.   Eventually, I worked with other men similarly curious.   Answers appeared slowly.  

Like many in our community my parents and grandparents migrated here.  A common story in our culture is that they came for better opportunity.   I painfully discovered some of them buried dark backgrounds to start anew here, but what actually happened is that it got buried in their own subconscious.  It is still here and still having destructive effect, and mostly still isn’t seen.    All we have left is beliefs in the good stuff, heritage we can justly be proud of.    We are choking on any suggestion our heritage has a dark side; that collectively it is directly connected to residential schools.  Confused by only seeing the good, we cling to a name that ironically now clouds that good heritage. Only we can reconcile this.   How?   

Residential schools’ stories are an invitation for us.   How could they have happened? Surely it isn’t our fault.  Surely, we are better than that.   We are, only if we can reconcile ourselves to our collective past by facing and accepting it.   My dad buried his horrific WW2 frontlines service.   He hid it from his family, which then passed on the effects subconsciously without us knowing.    But I dug it up.   It won’t kill me and my son and hopefully my nephews and others will not die for those reasons.   The buck can stop here.   The future can be better if evils of the past are accepted and confronted.  And we can move on.   How?

We have a big opportunity to change our name for our reason, this reason, by simply accepting that by doing it we humbly accept that our heritage contains what it took to create residential schools.    A hard pill to swallow.   Then what?  More opportunity.    The mill created this town.   Its future could be our collective prosperity IF we can work with Tla’amin Nation.  

It is time to face both what we can rightly be proud of and rightly be ashamed of, own them both, and do something monumental for ourselves; change our name.    Reconciliation is for us to do with our own selves first.    And then to work with our indigenous neighbours, cooperate in any way we can for mutual prosperity.    

Pride goes before a fall it is said.   Will we cling to selfish pride, separate from our neighbours or face our past, grieve it, change it, and move forward into the future together?