Authenticity & Activism (The Lessons of the Titan)

Authenticity and activism. I think it's essential that those two go together. Otherwise way too many people end up being hypocrites. Hello, everybody. My name is Sandy Boucher. I'm Red Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon clan, a proud member of Seine River First Nation in Treaty 3 Territory in Northern Ontario. And today we are talking about authenticity in activism. And seriously, my mom would be the first to say we teach other people how to treat us. But you know what? If you're throwing out ugly, don't be shocked when you get ugly. And I believe as Anishinaabe Kwe, if, as an indigenous woman, if I want other people to respect me and to respect indigenous people, I have to respect them. If I want people to value Indigenous lives, I have to value non indigenous lives. I have to show them how to treat me. And why this blog post? Well, I don't think anyone would be surprised. I actually spoke about it in my podcast last week. And if you didn't catch that, you can catch it on Spotify, the Path podcast, or you can catch it on my YouTube channel. Just look for the image of my face and the words the Path podcast. And you can catch the last episode, the last two episodes actually. But oh my God, when the Titan submersible was lost and those five lives were lost, the judgment was so ugly, so many people felt the need to jump on social media and comment about their age or how much money they made or whether they should have been there or not, or what a waste of manpower or whatever. No empathy, no compassion, no imagine I saw one TikTok video. The man was as shocked as me and he was saying, imagine that was your loved one that was lost and you had to endure seeing this on social media. If you treat other people like that, in my mind, you have absolutely no right to complain about them treating you ugly. And I say this often, especially every single time. Different scenario here. Every single time I see an indigenous person being racist to another group, it makes me nauseous because we know how ugly racism is and we know how devastating it is and how it physically feels like a physical gut punch. And we're going to go do that to someone else. That makes no sense. And that's why in my blog post I shared the poem, a very well known poem that's shared at the Holocaust memorials. There's a shorter version in the US and a longer version in the uk and I use the UK version in the blog post and it's posted below this video. But come on, just imagine you are teaching other people how to treat you every single time you speak. So if you criticize someone else, you're teaching them to criticize you. If you're being racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, you are teaching them to exclude you. But if you're showing kindness, you're encouraging people to be kind to you, and if you're respecting other people and yourself, you're teaching them that, too. We got to do better. We're going to do so much better. Because you know what? Think of an amazing, like, Christmas or Thanksgiving dinner, one of those big, huge dinners, whatever your celebration is. And it's made up of all these different dishes, and each one is amazing in itself, but together it's phenomenal. You're one of those dishes, and so am I. So are you going to add to this amazing meal that the country is, or are you the dish that everyone passes up on that kind of leaves a bad taste in your mouth? We got to do better. And it starts with us, not at pointing fingers. I work hard every single day to be better. But that was disgusting, and I had to comment because social media turned ugly. And we can do better because everyone loves to condemn Facebook and Twitter. It's made up of what we put out. So if you want to know about ownership, look in the mirror. What are you contributing? Food for thought. One more video to do. I'll see you tomorrow. I love you. Bye. Bye.