Write Now — Imperfect Advocacy
A few days ago I found a letter I’d written to a friend, and never sent.
It was August of 1990. I was 21, and waiting tables for the summer. A white Canadian girl in a white, white Canadian town.
And the army had just been sent to confront the Mohawk of Kanesatake.
In the letter I tell my friend that I don’t know her phone number where she’s staying for the summer, but that I wish she was with me, so we could talk. I felt horrified and angry. Responsible for the injustice, and helpless to correct it.
I’m thinking of the person I was at back in 1990, because today I’m writing another letter. This one to the politicians who attribute resources and make policies. People who have the power to acknowledge our genocidal history, and to change the way that overwhelming injustice is perpetrated still.
People who would like to have my vote.
Writing the letter will be the easy part.
I’ll go to this interactive map to see whose territory I live on.
I’ll write about myself and insist that these politicians take action. Today, I don’t have to do graduate-level reading on the subject. I can choose just one issue from priorities identified by Indigenous leaders, such as:
I’ll send it by email. Click once or twice to find the address for my Member of Parliament. Or the Prime Minister’s office or the Minister for Crown-Indigenous Relations. Or the Leader of the Opposition.
If I decide instead to print a hard copy, I’ll mail it to the MP’s office, without even putting on a stamp.
It will cost me nothing but time.
But it’s something I can do that makes a difference.
Letters—personal ones, not ripped from a template—are powerful. It’s a well-documented fact, but one I can support with my own flimsy experience: as someone who used to be employed to answer some of those letters to ministers in the Ontario government.
Think of a letter as a tack on a chair. You might pick one off, and ignore it. But next time, you’ll look twice before you sit down.
Will I make mistakes in my letter? Leave something out? Write something clumsy?
Undoubtedly.
You know that handy map I told you about? In the last letter to my MP, I’m pretty sure that I read it wrong. Claimed to be living on land that I’m not.
Does that bother me? Of course! I was educated in the school of “a misspelled word makes the whole argument moot.” Maybe you were too.
But I know that the fear of getting it wrong can be something that keeps me from doing what I can. From doing what’s right.
So I tell myself, Hey, a mistake is a good reason to write with an amendment. I’m sure Filomena Tassi would like to hear from me on this issue again!
On this “Canada Day”, I want to tell that 21 year-old that she’ll never know what to do, but that there are people she can ask. That her advocacy will always be imperfect because (I am so sorry to say) she will never be perfect. That her advocacy will never be completely informed, because she’ll always have more to learn. That 31 years later, she’ll still be trying to figure most things out.
But that she won’t always feel helpless. That there’s always something she can do.
She can write a letter.
No, it’s not enough. But it’s a start.
From the Indian Residential School Survivors Society: Survivors can access crisis support 24/7 at 1-800-721-0066