IMAGINE CANADA

Our local church out here in Manitoba has an informal time set aside on Thursday mornings for “coffee and conversation” at a café on Stonewall’s Main Street. The conversations range from chit-chat to serious matters, from personal stuff to funny stuff, and all over the place. We seldom miss these weekly gatherings unless something more immediate needs our attention. A recent conversation raised an interesting perspective on reconciliation between indigenous and settler folks in Canada and I am using this month’s postcard to think through that perspective a little further.

The point someone around our table made during our far-ranging conversation that morning was that the word reconciliation implies restoring a good relationship that has somehow gone awry. Further to that point, this person commented that there was no relationship in the first place to try to recover; the relationship was askew from the start.

Being struck by that perspective, my first thought was that, rather than trying to restore a damaged relationship, we are trying to establish the kind of relationship that might have been. However, I am not sure it is fruitful to imagine ourselves going back to Columbus (and maybe to the Vikings even earlier) and all the subsequent explorers and empire builders and entrepreneurs and missionaries and settlers that followed in his wake and starting over in a different way. That moment was lost and there is too much toxic water under the bridge to simply ignore. Whether well-intentioned or intentionally calculating, too many mistakes have been made – too much evil perpetrated – leaving so much damage and pain and estrangement that needs to be dealt with in the process of reconciliation.

Rather than looking back to what might have been, we need to look forward to what could be and then figure out how to get there. Certainly the report and recommendations of the TRC give us a roadmap towards such a future relationship. Still, I wonder if we are doing enough to imagine together what kind of relationship we might be able to establish between descendants of settlers and original peoples, with other immigrant and refugee peoples that have and will come, and with the land itself. I doubt that we will all imagine the same thing – and hopefully the richness of the diversity of our imaginations has the potential to be creative rather than divisive – but I do know this: that anything and everything that has ever come into actual existence first needed someone to imagine it.

Among all the roles and skills needed in the process of reconciliation – wise elders and governors, sharp legal minds, compassionate healers, sensitive mediators, diligent historians, good neighbours, and so on – we also need persons of imagination to conjure a variety of models of the kind of relationship we want to

aspire to with this land and all its peoples. What kind of a nation might we yet become? This forum provides opportunities for comments and I would certainly invite and welcome anything your imagination might offer. Maybe from such collective and creative daydreaming – here among us and from others across Canada* – will come a unifying aha moment that will inspire and animate a new way for all of us together to be Kanata*.

This painting by the 19th Century Quaker artist, Edward Hicks, (no relation!) is one in a series of paintings he called “The Peaceable Kingdom” (cf. Isaiah 11:6-8). In this variation on a theme, he imagines early contact between indigenous people on this continent and visitors from another continent. What might have happened from that point on? What needs to be done now given what did happen? What could happen to establish a new quality of relationship in the (near) future?

*“Canada” is likely derived from an Iroquoian word, “Kanata”, meaning “village” or “settlement”.

Peace to you. Ted Hicks