SooToday received the following letter from Winona Hutchinson after Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre visited Sault Ste. Marie on April 8.
I talked my self in and out of writing this but in the end my head and heart would not rest until this was all said and I am a lot more calmer.
Our community has always prided itself on the relationship we have with our First Nation neighbours, a relationship we told ourselves that was built on healing, listening, learning, and with the emphasis of truth and reconciliation, or so I thought . . .
Our community took strides to take our once shameful residential school and turned it into a place of education, love and understanding.
Words of partnership, education, support etc were spoken by three levels of government to our FN community, yet today I feel none of the emotions that those words are supposed to offer.
You see I am a proud First Nation person living in this community and right now I feel nothing but anger, and hurt, and pain that our governments, city and province and our local candidate of CPC would allow a person to come here and speak knowing that he supports a well known residential school denialist.
First, residential school denialism is NOT denying that residential schools existed, “it's an attempt to shake public confidence in something that we have consensus about” (Sean Carleton Historian and Indigenous studies scholar).
As Ry Moran, founding director of the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation states, “I currently define residential school denialism as the action or actions that seek to diminish the truths shared by residential school survivors”.
Our CPC candidate was the “top cop” here who swore an oath to protect our community yet somehow didn’t see the need to protect our community members here from this dangerous ideology coming back into our community.
Our city who spoke about truth and reconciliation through our ceremonies kept silent allowing this dangerous ideology to walk our streets again.
To me your silence only tells us how empty and hollow those words of support actually were.
CPC (I can’t even bring myself to write his name) promises us support by offering us money - “they will be rich” - as if that is what we only want while taking under his wing Aaron Gunn and stoking this hate by using Arthur Finkestein’s campaign strategies.
A strategy that offers no policies only simple slogans feeding on fear and emotions.
It takes only a few moments to look up Aaron Gunn and to see the coverage of his hate, and how Indigenous leaders in Vancouver
want him removed from the race knowing him personally and their experiences with him in the Wet'suwet'en community even national news agencies have spoken about him.
We removed other candidates making disparaging remarks about other cultures but not ones who attack our own first peoples? That in itself shows the value that the CPC puts on our people. Let me remind you it was in 2008 that the CPC leader called us lazy and in 2009 defended using the term “tar-baby” in the House of Commons. It was actually the CPC who took our veterans to court (look it up) and closed VA offices.
Let us also not forget he voted against every bill that would have helped the workers he now says he champions. One must question
what he means when he says he supports something when his very own voting record says the opposite, but I digress.
Aaron Gunn’s dangerous rhetoric has already filtered in our community as the sole protester at the event was told that the Indigenous communities across Canada “wanted the education”.
We did not want our children taken from us, our hair cut, our language and culture beaten and stolen from us, and sadly for some our lives to be taken.
We didn’t want our communities to be burdened with generational trauma that no amount of money can heal and constantly be fed empty words of apologies.
We didn’t want our children turn to substance abuse to cope seeing our elders broken of spirit or doubting their self worth or to see our community corrupted by colonialists practices via the Indian Act.
But here we are, still giving you all the benefit of the doubt thinking this guy is different, he really cares….… Ugh!
And before you start touting “whataboutisms” with the Liberal leader's father, note: there were no complaints brought against him and survivors of his school today have said he was not cruel and was nice.
So I will go based on the real life experience of our people in the here and now and I reject your attempt to make our experience a political pejorative.
I am not here to tell you who to vote for, but I do ask that this community before they put pen to paper and vote in this election to look inside yourself and determine not only if you are in fact an ally but to really look at what that actually means.
Those that know me know that I was very active in the Conservative community, EDAs, Provincial and Federal and know my way around how the CPC works . . . so much so alienating myself from my Indigenous family – but not any longer.
This Conservative has left the building.
Miskwi Zenibaanh (also known as Winona Hutchinson)
Sault Ste. Marie, status to Thessalon First Nation