Orange

This past Monday was Truth and Reconciliation Day. This is the first year it's been recognized as an official holiday in Manitoba.  It’s more popularly known as ‘orange shirt day’ in memory of a little Indigenous girl who was so proud of her orange shirt for the start of school and yet forced to give it up when she went to a church-administered residential school. The last such school closed in 1996. Reconciliation can't be limited to one day ... it's a process.

Germany has worked on this process through Vergangenheitsbewältigung.  The long words of the German language may look intimidating… but this compound word means ‘making sense of the past.’  Germany accepts responsibility for the crimes of its Nazi past and promotes healing through awareness and education. The past can't be changed but future atrocities might be prevented.  Is it enough? Of course not. But what are the alternatives? That's why we need to keep telling our stories, writing our books, sharing our secrets.

Secrets of a lurid past continue to haunt former Soviet zones who have not reconciled with their histories. In Russia, gulag museums once highlighting Soviet atrocities are now closed and history textbooks for their youth are being re-written to better fit Putin's agenda.

In Canada, orange helps us remember. Orange for the children. Orange for reconciliation. Orange for the future.  Every Child Matters!

The Hyphenated Canadian

Just finished reading Being German Canadian, which was released this past May by the University of Manitoba Press. This collection of essays by various academics contains writing styles that vary from hard-to-digest to accessible. Writing style aside, I recognized a fair bit about my own experiences as part of the immigrant community.

I already knew that Canada's prime minister, Lyon Mackenzie King, had been a Hitler supporter . . . but reading it in this book underlined it for me. I was also fascinated with how one of the contributors connected the German intergenerational guilt with the contemporary Canadian reconciliation with its own blemished past . . . the treatment of Indigenous Peoples who lived here before the European invasion. 

I love when a book sends me off to research in another direction. This time, I want to look at the 1968 student riots in West Germany which became the turning point for that country's efforts to educate its own about the atrocities of the Holocaust. It's something that the immigrants to Canada missed out on. 

In spite of some essays with challenging/off-turning (to me) academic prose, I recommend this book to those interested in the German-Canadian experience. If you read only a part, then read the Afterword by Roger Frie.

This book reaffirms for me the power of novels and my favourite Kipling quote (sub-heading on my blog). Dry facts are fascinating, but on their own they lack the power of engagement that an empathetic character can provide. Some folks see fiction as untruths, I see fiction as a way to illustrate truths. 

Okay, now on to explore those 1968 German student riots. I’m glad somebody’s writing nonfiction. I guess we do need all kinds of writers . . . researchers, historians and novelists. . . to figure out who we are, where we came from, and where we might be going.