Personal Disclaimer — Medicine Carrier — Rainbow Warrior — White Nation
Disclaimer: I share my own opinions as cultural commentary here on Substack and via other platforms — and speak in a way that will make…
Disclaimer: I share my own opinions as cultural commentary here on Substack and via other platforms — and speak in a way that will likely make some people feel uncomfortable and even angry. I expect, based on experience, that I will be mocked, attacked, and my stories will be derided. The other choice however is not to speak; to fail my oaths and fail my commitments to the person I aspire to be.
The views expressed are my own and as an initiated warrior, I accept full responsibility in my life for my choices and for every word and deed. This is part of the warrior’s code — as is to speak the Truth and to hold resolve in the face lies and when confronted with danger.
This shouldn’t be a necessary statement in a liberal democracy but I am a left-leaning Liberal and have voted Liberal (Canada) for thirty years — Americans would call me a Progressive Democrat.
I feel it is necessary however because I am regularly told I have White Privilege, Male Privilege, Unearned Social Benefits; I’m called, “Alt-Right,” a misogynist, a transphobe, a white supremacist or even a Fox News watcher. I’ve recently faced demands along with these accusations of privilege and unearned benefit, that I take personal responsible for reparations for slavery. When I responded that my family had nothing to do with slavery, I was told that I was a liar and was defending my stake in white privilege.
It’s a bit like meeting an evangelical who challenges you to submit to Jesus, and when you decline, they call you evil and tell you you’re going to hell.
The following story will make many people uncomfortable, and I share it on a factual basis. I share it because I believe that when you scratch the surface of most family histories in Canada and the US, you’ll find tragic and painful stories of how people from all nations came to the Americas and the price that their families paid to do so — and this is why I reject accusations of white privilege and reject the concept as a valid way of talking about the inequities that exist in the world.
The kinds of thing I share here still happen today. Wars, famines, sovereign internal strife in foreign countries, failed governments, revolutions, religious persecution, and lawlessness- are all conditions in regions of the world today. The world is a very ugly place, and we are fools to think it cannot happen here, and when societies collapse or are rotted out from within the outcomes tend to be very, very bad.
I believe that Canada (and the US) is many things. One of these things is that we are place the world looks to for being made up of people who are displaced by circumstances. Another of these things is that we are a country where there is opportunity to build a life that is safe and abundant. Some would like to center the conversation on the ugliness in our history, and I say there is ugliness we have to deal with, just like every other place in the world.
It is my belief after decades of examining the question of human history, that we live in the most prosperous, healthiest time ever. No human civilization has achieved what we have achieved.
Most people in the US lived on less than the equivalent of five dollars a day just more than a century ago. Our life expectancy has almost doubled in the last 150 years. We’ve moved from a 10–12 hour, six day work-week for most people, to a forty hour week and we have created a prosperous middle-class. We have cars, electricity, penicillin, insulin. The sum-total of human knowledge is at everyone’s fingertips.
Women’s healthcare, including birth control, almost eliminated infant mortality in the last 150 years. The liberation movement and changing economies mean women’s lives have opened to the world outside the home. The overwhelming number of people graduating from medical school today are women, and now women represent 61% of all university graduates.
We’ve had an evolving and mostly stable domestic social order since before the second world war, and the time since then has seen an unprecedented improvement in standards of living for everyone in our society, even the poorest and most vulnerable. It’s easy to think that the world we live in is full of corruption, tragedy and stratification; but only if we are without a sense of history of culture, of nation and empire and if we fail to look up to see what life is like in the rest of the world.
I am second-generation Canadian; the grandson of Russian/Ukrainian immigrants who fled Bolsheviks under Stalin. My grandparents as young teens survived the Ukrainian famine of the early 20’s where one in eight people (about 4 million people) died. As young adults, they escaped soldiers and a death warrant with a three-day-old infant. We learned many decades later that most of my grandparents’ relatives who couldn’t escape were either shot or died in the gulags. My grandfather’s death warrant was rescinded in 1993 after 66 years. This was negotiated to allow him to return to his place of birth when he was in his 80s. Credible accounts of the Stalinist purges tell us 40–60 million people died.
Following their escape, my grandparents lived in a refugee camp in Germany for almost four years waiting sponsorship to somewhere in the world — like one of the millions of Syrians displaced by the Arab Spring and the collapse of their society are waiting for today.
Then my grandfather and two uncles were indentured to CN rail for five years for the price of the family passage to Canada. People argue that debt-slavery is different than chattel slavery. A dehumanized person forced to work is treated the same no matter the name.
My grandparents and great-uncles worked as farmhands for another five years in the drought-stricken prairies in the 1930s before my grandfather was able to buy land for the family to farm. They raised seven children, one with disabilities.
When I was four we lived in a small town in Quebec during the FLQ Crisis. There was a cultural hatred of Anglophones by the Quebecers. A neighbors child, slightly older than me, led me into a pete-bog behind my house in the spring. He convinced me to go ahead of him on the frozen surface. It gave way and I went under. No-one knows how long I was frozen in the bog — one of those kids whose heart and breath just stopped in the cold water as their body temperature plummeted.
He went home and didn’t tell anyone. When confronted later, after the search party found me, he hissed, “Vous Etes Anglais!” He hospitalized a total of four times, once by striking me in the head with a hammer. “Vous Etes Anglais!” This is in-group/out-group hatred. This is what happens when children are taught to hate someone who is not like them.
I grew up in an abusive household. My father viewed me as a farmhand and since he had been abused into farm-work at six-years-old, he treated me the same. His weapons of choice were studded belts, but he would use whatever was handy, electrical cords, heeled dress shoes, once a 2x4. He was a psychological abuser, an emotional manipulator and a fundamentalist religious authoritarian. Like many abusers he played his children against one another and controlled our relationships so that all power centered in him.
We moved a lot when I was growing up. Fourteen times by the time I was fourteen. It was the nature of my fathers job, but it had collateral benefits to him. We weren’t anywhere long enough for anyone to really realize what was going on.
He was on the front-end of the baby-boom generation and everything he touched turned to money but he begrudged every penny he had to spend on me and laced every cost with shame and guilt.
I paid my way from the time I could work, at eleven, and I was on my own at eighteen.
What I have, I earned by my own efforts.
Why is this important? It shouldn’t be. I find the discussion of my childhood to be vulgar and not in alignment with how I view the world. I grappled for years trying to sort myself out — and eventually I chose to focus on the things I could control and the things that were important to me instead of embodying the grief and shame and anger I had at him and instead of centering my own personal narrative on my victim story.
The content of my commentary should stand on its own — however in this climate, unfortunately, the identity assigned to me in society, which is based on my biological sex and the color of my skin is often used as an excuse to dismiss me and anything I have to say. The postmodernists say everything is socially constructed, and my “social construction” is white privilege and male privilege — which is pretty much the worst intersectional poker hand.
There are many millions of people like me with stories of escaping to the Americas, or who survived abuse, poverty and intergenerational trauma — who are accused of being beneficiaries of Patriarchy and Privilege based on our biological sex and the color of our skin. Just look: One generation ago? Two? Maybe three? most people have had something that happened in their family past that would absolutely horrify you. That is the nature of the world.
Yet today, in the identity politics game, like the Aglo-Franco hatred that peaked in the seventies, quite literally, white males, the current target group, are being censored by an ideological mobs online, at school and at work. The excuse is “White Privilege. And these ideologues claim that they can’t be racist or sexist against men because of white men’s historical oppressions of women and minorities.
But hate is hate. Every group that ever focused it’s hate on another group in human history has a way to legitimize it. “they deserve it because… we don’t like them because…” Every genocide in history uses the same structural rhetoric to dehumanize and invalidate the target.
“Vous Etes Anglias!”
The very act of pointing out any of the many inconsistencies in these claims generates accusations of being alt-right, misogynistic, fascist, transphobic and even white-supremacist. No charity or humanity is extended.
“Shut up! White men have oppressed long enough!”
In the 1990’s, as a writing student escaping from the religious and psychological abuse in my home, I began to search for the stories of the Indigenous people of the land I lived on. I met a young traditional medicine man, a carver and storyteller who was raised in a residential school in the interior of British Columbia.
I followed a path of healing offered to me and travelled through western Canada and the US learning stories and the history of the Turtle Island People.
Along the way I heard the direct accounts of dozens of residential school survivors, and shared milestones of healing and spiritual reclamation with dozens of others who were also abuse survivors. In the fall of 1997, I was gifted an Eagle Feather that was one of seven carried on the staff of Elijah Harper when he campaigned against the Meech Lake Accord. Harper fought the legislation, in which the Province of Quebec sought Distinct Society Status from the rest of Canada, and he demanded that if Quebec should receive this recognition, so should the indigenous nations of this land.
The eagle feather was gifted to me during a ceremony with the head of the Canadian Native Veterans association and it was explained to me that the rainbow markings added to the spotted eagle feather represented the colors of the nations of the earth. I was told the story of the Rainbow Warriors — about a belief shared among the Turtle Island people, that warriors from the four nations of the earth (Red, White, Black and Yellow) would come together in the time of great change and bring teachings needed to steer the world back onto a path of harmony with the Earth Mother.
This feather was given to me, from Elder to warrior, because I wept for the children of the Red Nations.
I have only spoken of this in exchanges of prayer before this. I have never written it down.
I do so now because I feel compelled to share my ideas and stories in a way that my Red Nation brothers and sisters understand as Sacred Medicine.
Medicine is earned through hardship and trial, and through the work it takes to become whole again afterwards. If you’ve been bitten by a snake, seek the Medicine of the man who suffered and survived the same snake. If you want to know how to get beyond abuse and trauma to what you deserve in life, seek someone who has done that and learn from them.
In Sanskrit there is an expression: “Tat Tvam Asi.” It’s a sacred teaching that means, “Though art That.” It communicates that we are all deeply connected to everything and everyone.
I learned the same concept from Grandfather William Commanda, Kitigan-zibi Anishinabeg, Band Chief, Elder and Keeper of Wampum Prophecy when I met him in 1998.
He said shared the words in his language and then translated:
“I am You and You are Me”
The prayer greeting, “Namaste” conveys the same meaning, as does “Shalom”
We are all the same, no matter our history, no matter our nation, if we arrive today with an open heart in respect of all our brothers and sisters we can heal the wounds of the past together. We don’t know the suffering of others that is hidden from us, and suffering is a universal human experience. This is the teaching of the Rainbow Warriors.
All my Relations,
I am You. You are Me.