Sunday Adeyemo, popularly known as Sunday Igboho
By
Tue Jul 06 2021
Last Thursday, Canada could have celebrated its 153rd anniversary as a nation state. Instead, it went low-key on festivities; shunning parades and loud music and patriots decked in the red maple leaf embossed on a white background. The national anthem was not sung and only youths broke the solemn night with feisty fireworks; not the Canadian State.
The country now called Canada belonged to a cluster of indigenous people who spoke 70 languages before settlers arrived. The settlers scorned the indigenous way of life, and its first Prime Minister, John Macdonald, wrote a blueprint for residential schools to “save” indigenous children. They were snatched from their parents and taken to schools so far away they could not trace their bearings. Most were sexually abused, forbidden to speak their own languages or observe their cultures. The settlers embarked on various pogroms to wipe out the indigenous population. The new nation being built on native land hardly had scant space for their reintegration. For years, national politics carried on as if the indigenous did not exist.