Sandi L Boucher clarifies her previous video on immigrant envy, distinguishing between the challenges newcomers face in Canada and the struggles of Indigenous people preserving cultural identity in a colonized society.
Chapters
Humility teaching is acknowledging when you've done something wrong, owning it without excuse and fixing it, making amends or changing your behavior. Well, this is a disclaimer video because I released a video last week on immigrant envy, and boy, did I do a lousy job of explaining it. I have to clarify something, so let's talk about it. Foreign. Hi, everybody. My name is Sandy Boucher. I read Thunderbolt, woman of the Loon Clan, a proud member of Seine River first nation in Treaty 3 territory in Northern Ontario. And I am a human being. And I make mistakes on a regular basis because I'm always trying something new. And that's just this part for the course, but this one needs to be rectified. As mentioned, last week I did a video on immigrant envy. And I talked about how in my book the Path that I had shared, how I envied the newcomers that come to our country, that wherever they came from in their home countries, they had their religions, they had their teachings, even though in some cases they were persecuted for those teachings, which is why they're here now. But they know who they are. They have their core. But in that original video video, I talked about how they have the incredible challenge of trying to survive and thrive and exist in Canadian culture, that they have to learn a new language often, and they have to learn our customs, our laws and our traditions and how we operate here in mainstream society. But then when they go home, that's where the problem is, that when they go home, they can once again practice their traditions and cultures. What I wasn't clear about is the phrase when they go home. I was not referring to them returning to their home country because for many, they can't. And even if they could, there's a really good chance they still wouldn't be accepted for who they are. When I said return home, I meant to their apartment, to their townhouse, to their home at the end of a work day where they could cook their traditional meals, have their traditional celebrations, speak their languages, whatever the case may be, they could practice who they are. And that that is what Indigenous people don't have the luxury of doing. Because starting, like I mentioned, assimilation can start in at home, and then it happens again in school and it happens in mainstream. For Indigenous people, even us adults who are trying desperately to decolonize, we are decolonizing, colonizing in the middle of a colonized society. Now, I am super fortunate. I run my own business, I run my own home, so it is 110% decolonized space. But I also realize that Many people do not have that luxury. And it took me forever to be able to do this, to unpack the stereotypes and the shame and the guilt, to be proud of who I am and proud of my heritage and culture. So I did not mean that newcomers can go back home. And I do have to comment on the fact that if you focused on that, you were again, not focused on Indigenous, which is the purpose of this channel. The whole point of that video was not to discuss newcomers again. That was the metaphor, the example I was using. What I was talking about is the fact that Indigenous people in Canada in 2024 still do not have the luxury of being able to be raised Indigenous because even our reservations, our reserves, are so assimilated that our parents, our grandparents, the structures we have to operate under going to school and being educated by another culture or another culture's curriculum, and slowly these are changing. We do have first nations that now control their own educational curriculum, that have their own schools. We are seeing way more land based teachings. But we are not yet at the point where an Indigenous child is born and just gets to be Indigenous. Now we have some amazing young parents who have relearned and just living their teachings again. So it is happening, it needs to happen so much more because our youth are dying. We are losing our children. They need their core like everybody else. You need that core strength to be able to survive, to be able to manage. I work effectively and efficiently in mainstream because I know who I am. I know the difference between their system and who I am and how I do things. Even if I have to go into that system and operate that way to be able to work with them, it's not my system. Yeah, I'm not going to assimilate into it. I'm not going to adopt it. I'm going to do it for the course of this conversation and then I'm back to who I'm being trying. Cooking a new dish a new way because someone likes it that way is the exact same thing. It doesn't mean I'm not going to do that for the rest of my life. I'm doing it so we can communicate. But I did want to clarify that because I do have amazing friends that are newcomers and they go through a lot of. But I hope they smile when they realize. In so many ways I envy them. I envy them their core. And I wish so many of us Indigenous had the chance to develop that core even and being persecuted for it. Nothing new. We're being persecuted for a core that most of us don't even understand. And that has to change. I hope that made sense. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to do this disclaimer video to set that straight, to explain it to people more. I wasn't talking about them going back home. They. I'm all for welcoming them here. And feel free to be who you are because we all deserve that, right? Until tomorrow. I love you. Take care. Bye Bye.
