Books: Heather Menzies reconciles stolen land and unconscious racism

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Meeting with my contract relatives

Heather Menzies | OnPointPress

29,95 € | 254 pages.

Like many others in Canada, award-winning author, activist and member of the Order of Canada Heather Menzies is uncomfortable with the fact that she lives on stolen Indigenous land. In her case, the connection between her family and the dispossession and cultural genocide on which the Canadian state was built is deeply personal.

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Her own Scottish ancestors had been forced from their upland farms by the enclosures of the 19th century and came to Canada, where they bought land in southern Ontario from the Canadian Land Company, land stolen from the indigenous peoples who lived and still live near the area known in settler cartography as Lake Huron.

The theft was accomplished through a hypocritical treaty, one of many agreements that the Native Americans viewed as generous arrangements to share the land with the new arrivals from Europe. The settlers preferred to view these treaties as a complete surrender of the land and its resources, and aggressively pushed the land’s original inhabitants into postage stamp-sized “reservations.”

Even these tiny spaces of freedom were often disrespected and far too often even violated.

One of these interventions was the seizure of land from the Nishnaabe people at Aazhoodena – Stony Point – on the shores of Lake Huron. The federal government expropriated the land during World War II to build a military base, Camp Ipperwash. The expropriation was linked to the promise that the land would be returned to the people.

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In 1993, with that promise still unfulfilled, some Nishnaabe, led by Clifford George, a World War II veteran, returned to the stolen reserve and refused to leave. A long and public standoff ensued until a botched raid by Ontario Provincial Police in 1995 killed one of the unarmed occupiers, Dudley George.

Menzies came to Aazhoodena to build a healing relationship with the descendants of the people her family had dispossessed, eventually providing support and assistance when a group of the descendants wrote a book called Our Long Struggle for Home: The Story of Ipperwash.

But the creation of this book was a difficult learning process for Menzies. Despite her years of experience, Menzies still had much to learn about her own unconscious racism and the structural racism that permeates the world of writing and publishing books. Meeting My Treaty Kin is her account of that learning process. It is a book with important lessons for anyone living on stolen land who wants to move forward with the difficult work of reconciliation.

Some readers may take issue with Menzies’ tone, finding it a touch too serious, even kitschy, but many other readers, including this reviewer, will be touched by the author’s honesty and eloquence.

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Highly recommended.

Tom Sandborn lives and writes in Vancouver. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at [email protected]

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