Sandi L Boucher (Red Thunderbolt, Loon clan, Seine River First Nation) explains why many Indigenous people are re-evaluating calendar holidays as part of unpacking/decolonizing. She defines unpacking as Indigenous peoples reclaiming pre-contact identities and contrasts annual calendar celebrations (Mother's Day, Thanksgiving, Canada Day) with Anishinaabe daily practices of gratitude and family appreciation. Using a personal anecdote about differing family responses on Mother’s Day, she argues some holidays feel colonial or hurtful (Thanksgiving, Canada Day) and invites viewers to reflect on whether they can list reasons they’re proud of Canada. She frames her work as actively working toward reconciliation but not yet feeling able to celebrate Canada Day.
Chapters
Foreign. Hello, everybody, and Sandy Boucher here once again. 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 I am here with the first of the why videos. So this one is for. I gotta make sure I get the dates right. Got my notes right here is for Monday, May 22. The blog post was called Calendar Celebration. So in case you're new to the reconciliation journey, I'm just going to give you a little bit of a backstory here. One of the terms you might hear me use on a regular basis is the word unpacking. And what I mean by that is for Indigenous people growing up in Canada, for the longest time, we didn't have a choice. Assimilation was the thing Canada's focus was into making us into Canadians. To forget our Indigenous cultures, to forget our Indigenous teachings, to forget our Indigenous worldviews. And before I say anything else, well over 600 First Nation communities in Canada, lots of different cultures, lots of different teachings, lots of different languages. The word Indigenous kind of implies we're all the same. That is so not the case. So now you know what unpacking means. Now you know how many of us there are. Unpacking, or decolonizing is another term you may hear is just the process of Indigenous people, in the words of my elder, trying to remember who we were before the others came. Now, for non Indigenous people watching this, if you want to be part of reconciliation, you got to get comfy with the fact. And this is going to sound incredibly blunt, but you got to get comfy with the fact that we don't want to be like you. And that's not because there's something wrong with you. It's because we want to be like us. And I think you would say the same thing. So understand that this is our empowerment and going back and finding our core again. It's not a shot against you. It's just us trying to be centered in our own lives, which is most of my work. So in that decolonizing process, that unpacking, we have to look at the things we've always done, the. The things that we've never thought about before and ask ourselves, does this work for me? And this blog post talks about calendar holidays, you know, those holidays that are holidays, just because it's some date on a calendar. And why this blog post? Well, Mother's Day just passed, and it invoked a really interesting thought process for me because in Anishinaabe culture, I'm Ojibwe Or Anishinaabe. We don't do Mother's Day or Father's Day. We practice gratitude. It is, you know, one of our base teachings. And so we appreciate our parents every single day. We appreciate our children every single day. We appreciate the air and the water and the opportunities that come our way. It's not something we do annually, so it's not something like, honestly, I didn't notice it was Monday or Mother's Day until I saw a post on social media. So that's how not into Mother's Day I am. And my daughter wished me happy Mother's Day early in the day. But then I noticed I hadn't heard anything from my son and invoked this really amazing conversation with my daughter about how we don't even hear care about this holiday. And I was getting caught up in that colonial trap of actually feeling bad because my son had a busy day. For the record, he did end up reaching out. But that wasn't even the point anymore, that this isn't our holiday. Now, for many indigenous people, the first one that got trashed was Thanksgiving because for a lot of people, that's celebrating the arrival of the settlers. And that didn't turn out well for us. So I hope you would understand what we wouldn't celebrate that one. And in the last couple of years, Canada Day is a day that is no longer celebrated by many indigenous people and many non indigenous people. I get asked about that one this just this past week and for people who want to celebrate it, I mean, is it just the party? Because you can party any day. And if you do want to celebrate Canada Day, all the power to you. But I challenge you by asking you, what are you proud of? Because I know I'm proud of my kids. But I could list off a million reasons why I'm proud of my kids. If you're going to celebrate Canada Day, make sure you have reasons that you can list off as to why you're proud of Canada. I cannot wait until the day that I'm proud of Canada because that's all the work I do every single day. I don't just talk the talk. I'm walking the walk. I'm working towards that day. Not there yet. Canada is still making some decisions that truly hurt indigenous people. And as long as they do that, Canada Day is not on my list. So that's what the blog post calendar celebrations was all about. I hope that makes sense to you and I can't wait to see you in the next why video. I love you. Take care. Bye Bye.
