We sat, desks clustered together in fours, in a metal container temporarily erected years ago to accommodate the growing number of students. Although the weather was warm enough to have the portable door propped open, remnants of past snow castles and snowmen were still melting on the grass. Anxiously, I kept glancing at the clock mounted on the far wall, as I waited for the recess bell to ring, eager for a few more moments with the snow before its limited time came to an end.

My teacher, a young woman just out of teachers’ college but with an old-school authoritarian style, walked to the front of the room and cleared her throat. This signalled the end of our independent work time. Dutifully, we quietly put away our books, colouring pages, and pencil crayons before turning our attention to her. Miss Watt, in her signature monotone drawl, began to explain our new social study lesson: The Founding of Canada. Canada, we were informed, was founded by brave European explorers. Once they discovered this land, many people from Europe came over to live here. All people in Canada have ancestors from different countries. As Miss Watt began talking about her own Scottish grandparents, I sat in shocked silence. My family coming from another country was news to me. I mulled this new information over as I thought of my parents, uncles, aunts, grandparents, and cousins that all lived in Canada. I hadn’t even been to another country; how could my family be something other than Canadian?

When I snapped back from my internal monologue, Miss Watt was in the middle of describing our first project for this lesson. We were to make a poster about the country our family is from, and then present it in front of the class under a collage of world flags. A ripple of excitement vibrated through the class as students began whispering to each other; as young primary students, we were still at the age where homework invoked wonder and curiosity. My classmates started talking about their Nonnas from Italy, the perogies they ate at home, and their visits to see family in the UK. They talked with great importance of these other countries that they claimed as their own. When the bell rang, my classmates hurriedly put on their outdoor shoes still talking excitedly about the project, and having nothing to contribute, I stayed quiet. As soon as the door opened, the project was quickly forgotten by my classmates as we scattered to claim various piles of snow. Excited yells quickly drowned out Miss Watt’s pleas to not play in the mud. While my friends clamoured together in an attempt to organise a game of King of the Hill, I stood back, still preoccupied with the earlier discussion in class.

That evening, between mouthfuls of pasta, I asked my mom, “What are we?” My question was met by blank stares. I tried again “Where are we from?”

“Well, I was born in Toronto and your dad was born in Sarnia,” my mom offered.

“No, what country?” I asked.

“Canada. We’re Canadians.”

“No, like before that.” I whined, in the frustrated complaining tone children use so well. Anxiety about the project began to creep in. How was I to complete this project if I was only Canadian?

“Well, Grandma is from the States, from Port Huron,” My dad offered. I immediately perked up when I heard this. I hadn’t connected that this city I knew well, so close to my grandparents’ home was somehow in a different country. Relief flooded through me; I did belong to another country! I wouldn’t fail this project!

Later that night, I called my grandmother to ask her about her home country. She told me that there wasn’t much difference between the States and Canada. Other than the money, all she could think about was the large high school marching band that would travel all over the country, something that she doesn’t see in Canada. She talked about how Grandpa would walk all the way to the States, walking across a big bridge just so that he could take my grandmother out on a date. Back in the day, crossing the border was much easier. When she married, she moved 10 minutes away from her parents’ home to a completely different country. Grandma told me how her sister soon moved to Canada as well, for the same reason. In Canada, my grandmother worked before eventually raising four children and becoming a stereotypical Canadian hockey mom.

The next day at school, I went to the library to borrow a book on The United States of America. I selected a picture book before settling down onto one of the coveted bean bag chairs. I read about Washington, the presidents, Hollywood, apple pies, and cowboys. Balancing the book on my knees, I traced the outline of the country and coloured in the star-spangled, striped flag. On a piece of red cardboard paper, I carefully glued my pictures down before slowly printing sentences about The States below them. Despite my initial misgivings, I viewed my final project with pride.

After a particularly riveting presentation about Italy, complete with homemade snacks, it was my turn to present my posters. I got up in front of my class, awkwardly sticking my poster to the blackboard. I took a deep breath before telling my classmates about The United States of America. I listed off some important cities, sports teams, and Disneyland. I shared that they also had explorers and pioneers. Then, out of nowhere, with complete confidence, I told the class that my grandmother came from the US and that we were probably related to a president. I took the book, dog-eared a picture of a random former president, and held it to my face so that my classmates could see the familial resemblance.

***

With this newfound identity and connection to my ancestral roots in The United States of America, I began to piece together my family history. I read incessantly about pioneers. Enthralled by stories of brave men and women who tamed this vast wilderness of what is now called Canada; I got lost in books of early European Canadian life. Anne of Green Gables, and Little House on the Prairie were my favourites; I read each series multiple times. Through these stories, I began to build my own stories of how my family arrived here. Stories of their lives on farms, filled with fun and mischievous adventures like those Laura and Anne got up to. I played pioneers in the schoolyard, collecting twigs for fires, and harvesting leaves for food – just like the real pioneers did to survive. My made-up stories were reinforced with what we were taught in school. How people came to Canada for a better life. Leaving their old countries, journeying to Canada, settling down on farms or in the big city. They worked hard but were safe and fulfilled. They were able to ensure that they and their children could live happily ever after in this great country. This beautiful, sanitised, and inaccurate story is what I internalised and believed in.

It was in my second year of university, in an introduction to Canadian literature class held in the basement of an 80 s industrial-style building, that I first read Michael Ondaatje’s novel, In the Skin of a Lion. It was a striking, vivid description of the immigrant experience, one completely at odds with previous stories I knew. Home for Thanksgiving, I mentioned the book to my mother. Nonchalantly, she told me that Nicholas Temelcoff, the steelworker who saves the nun from a perilous death, was a relative of ours by marriage. My mom’s maternal uncle married his daughter. I clung to this sudden, tangible connection to a past, a history, and an explanation. I asked my mom again, where is our family from? “Oh, you know, probably Germany, England, Scotland, those kinds of countries. I think they mostly came over as orphans, decades ago,” she said dismissively before changing the topic. I’ve noticed this is a tactic she usually deploys when the topic of her family is brought up. For some, perhaps, forgetting the past seems to be the only way to a future. It seemed to be so for my mother.

I grew up on stories from my dad. Fun anecdotes of his small southern Ontario town, a middle-class childhood with my aunt, uncle, and grandparents, all of whom are often the main characters in my own stories. In quiet moments, while we stood elbow to elbow doing the dishes, my grandma corroborated these stories, along with sharing her own from childhood. These stories, as meaningless as they sometimes seemed, deepened my connection to the adults around me. When I remember my grandma, I don’t just remember the woman who would cheer for me at the side of the pool, but also the 17-year-old girl who drank too much at her best friend’s wedding. My dad is not only the person I call when I have car trouble, but the little boy who would only eat bread if it had been dunked in blue Kool-Aid.

Stories from my mom, however, were rare. Dropped sparsely throughout infinite conversations, the short tidbits acted as vague insubstantial clues to a larger picture I wasn’t privy to. As most children do, I learned quickly which topics were unapproachable with my mom, what unspoken rules that we lived by. Childhood and her family were two of them. So, the few times she did share those stories, I greedily gobbled them up. Hungry for a link to my mom and that secret part of her-our history that she guarded so well. Throughout the years, I haphazardly gathered that her childhood was punctuated by moves, revolving family members, and alcoholic parents. Although her sister, my aunt, loved to tell stories, they did little to help piece together my family history. As the old adage goes, my aunt never ruined a good story with the truth. My aunt’s stories were entertaining but even as a child, I could tell they were filled with exaggerations and steeped in idealizations. Towards the end of her life, they became fantastical in nature.

I often wondered why so much was missing, why so much was left unsaid when it came to my mother. It is possible that some people, like my father, grandmother, and aunt, are natural storytellers, inclined to share bits of themselves with others. Whereas others, like my mom, do not come by these skills easily. Or, perhaps she does, but chooses instead to focus on the present and the future as a way to bury the past. My aunt, ever the unreliable narrator, reinvented her history instead of pretending it did not exist. I wondered too, of the equally important aspect of storytelling: the audience. If there is no audience, who carries these stories onward? Estrangements, complicated relationships, inattentive audiences, and death-all these life events can spark the loss of important stories.

To make sense of my own family history, I turned to others. I read other people’s stories so I could learn my own. I got lost in the worlds of Michael Ondaatje, Margaret Atwood, Genevieve Graham, David Chariandy, Souvankham Thammavongsa, M.G. Vassanji, Kim Thuy, Hanna Spencer, Lawrence Hill, and Madeleine Thien. Although their stories were completely different from my own, they offered cherished insights. I learned about the traumatic ocean crossings made by early Canadian immigrants, of Home Children, the places of war and famine that people came from, the pain experienced in leaving, of would-be immigrants who got turned away, of the racism, of the xenophobia, of the hard labour of immigrants on whose backs Canadian cities were built. Old, worn stories that are still repeated today. Sadly, many of these are stories that are still not listened to.

The life I live, one of white privilege, safety, freedom and enjoyment, I now know I owe to the sacrifices made by family members whose names are long forgotten. I thought often of what it took for my ancestors to leave a place, leave everything they have ever known, to embark on a dangerous journey to a cold land they have never seen. Did they understand that they would probably never return, I wondered? Did they come alone? Was it worth it? Were their lives really that much better? Although I will never know the exact answers to these questions, I am able to fill in some of the gaps through the borrowed feelings and knowledge I pick up from the words of others.

My ancestors, for their unknown reasons, felt compelled to leave their homes, risk their lives on a voyage to an unknown land where they were allowed to settle. They were allowed to settle in an attempt to occupy and push out the original dwellers. My ancestors most likely came here for a better life, for new adventures, more opportunities, a fresh start maybe? Most immigrants do. Quick assimilation to Canada and cleaving from their own origins was, perhaps, a necessity of survival for my first ancestors. Maybe the stories of my family’s countries of origin stopped being told after a few decades, no longer relevant to people’s daily lives. After generations, to claim another country as my own seems awkward and insincere. Not knowing my history means my history is what I’m told. The sanitised version I learned in school, the version that allows me to remain ignorant of what my existence as a Canadian means, what harms it has caused, and the harms that it continues to enact.

My unknown history, the lost stories of my family members is a direct product of colonization. What a shiny proof that it works! Not having any other countries to identify with, I cling desperately to the (white) Canadian identity and culture. The concept of Canada and Canadian identity was built on the forced assimilation and genocide of Indigenous peoples whose names and stories are long forgotten, or stories that are devalued in the larger Canadian context. The very act of my family’s arrival to Canada was a way to further colonize the Indigenous peoples who had lived on this land since time immemorial. My identity exists only because of the attempted erasure of Indigenous identity. How do I understand my own successes through the oppression of others? How do I reconcile home, identity, and history when those concepts continue to cause harm to others.

When the bodies of Indigenous children were recovered in unmarked graves across the country, (white, settler) Canada vibrated with the news. On top of the daily COVID-19 death count, a daily Indigenous body count was added. It was sensational. Images of residential schools bombarded across screens. Governments, organisations, businesses, and individuals posted and shared sentiments of their sorrow, disbelief, and willingness to learn. This was all done with the goal to show their voters, customers, and social circle that they would never again allow such atrocities to occur – and shouldn’t they be praised for that? Everyone was shocked this happened in Canada, it was a sad, sordid, part of our history (although the last residential school only closed in the 90 s, around the same time that I was sitting in a portable dreaming of recess). How could these children go unaccounted for so long? How did their graves remain hidden? How were these poor children, taken from their homes and never to return? Why did it take so long for their stories to be unearthed?

But the stories of residential schools are not new, they were not recently unearthed or uncovered. They have been there, told and shared by Indigenous peoples and communities for decades. Parents missed their children, residential school survivors remembered their friends, protests were had, reports were written, it was taught in some schools, books were written, museums were erected, lawsuits were filed - the stories and knowledge was there, yet it continued to be met with callous and purposeful indifference. These atrocities and genocides committed by settlers, governments, and churches were not stories that were valued. We, my fellow settler Canadians and I, ignored Indigenous peoples because what they were telling us did not fit our narratives. It did not align with the stories we were taught and believed about ourselves, our families, and our country. The stories that positioned us, at best, as neutral actors in the colonization of Indigenous peoples. The realisation that our existence on this land, of what is now known as Canada, is a continued act of harm and cultural genocide was too unpleasant for most of us, settlers to accept. Our systems that we put in place and continue to uphold are the same ones that led to the deaths of Indigenous children at residential schools. Only when we were faced with physical proof, could we no longer turn away from what we did. We could no longer deny the stories of Indigenous peoples, just as we could no longer deny the harm that we caused. The knowledge and stories were only valued when (settler) Canada was ready to hear them. We took their languages, communities, and culture away from generations of Indigenous peoples to prevent them from sharing their stories. When that didn’t work, and the stories survived, we ignored them and deemed them unworthy, unimportant.

At the passing of the second national Truth and Reconciliation Day, the stories and voices of Indigenous peoples are still muted. Appearing to be regulated to only one day and one topic. Their stories are only being listened to when and where it is deemed appropriate by (settler) Canadians. After all, the recent discoveries were really hard on settler Canadians, it would be unfair to ask us to reckon with our continued privilege built on oppression of Indigenous people more than once a year! We are to ready condemn residential schools of the past, but what about current justice system and foster care of the present that continue to remove Indigenous people from their communities and alienate them from their culture? We are happy to wear orange shirts, but continue to avoid Land Back conversations. We’ll demand a holiday (nice, another long weekend!) but won’t demand culturally safe and accessible healthcare for Indigenous communities (they get enough as it is). We listen to stories and reflections about “past” cultural genocide, mistreatment, and intergenerational trauma - especially when presented by a white settler woman (like myself and this story) but rarely seek out stories of joy, resilience, and everyday life or oppressions that are written or produced by Indigenous peoples. Despite the fact that young, Indigenous people are the fastest growing demographic in Canada, I have heard more stories of dead Indigenous children (told by white TV anchors or columnists) than stories of Indigenous children that are alive. Are we, settlers on this land that is now known as Canada, simply more comfortable with stories of Indigenous suffering?

Again, I turned to other people’s stories. To face those darker chapters, to understand the pain that was caused and the pain that is still being caused, I read the stories of Indigenous peoples. I read about resilience, ways of life, and of alternative ways of knowing, through works like: Seven Fallen Feathers, From the Ashes, Son of a Trickster, Moon of the Crusted Snow, The Strangers, Braiding Sweetgrass, Permanent Astonishment, and Medicine River. Moving past dominant ways of storytelling, I am working on looking at music, art, instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. To Indigenous storytellers that reach their audience in creative ways, multidimensional ways. Through these Indigenous storytellers, I learnt that there were stories, multiple ones, entangled in, yet completely different from the white-washed versions that permeate Canadian society. These stories are funny, sad, meaningful, and worthy. I read the histories that were kept out of school curricula. I learned the stories of those whose voices were barred from speaking. For the Indigenous communities, their stories were suppressed through sinister and calculated acts. The act of telling their stories becomes an act of resistance against colonization.

***

The stark cold February wind whipped my face and I fumbled with frozen fingers to unlock the door. Careful, so as not to wake the rest of the house, I slipped my boots off and hung my snow-covered coat on the hallway hook. A voice called out, startling me. I walked to the living room and saw grandma sitting on the couch, watching a repeat of Blue Bloods on mute. She never passed up an opportunity to see Tom Selleck. In mock anger, I scolded her for being up so late, but she insisted she was just making sure I got home safe.

I joined her on the couch and laid my head on her lap, allowing her to trace my face with her fingers as she did when I was younger, as she did with all her grandkids and kids. The T.V. flickered through episodes as we sat chatting late into the night. We spoke of my job, my hobbies, and my friends, all of whose names she made it a point to remember even in her sunset years. She told me about the hockey games she’d been to, and all the neighbours’ baby showers she had attended. She began speaking of her nieces, women I have never met.

“You know they’re related to that actress, Reese Witherspoon,” she confided. “And just as beautiful.”

And eventually, as it often did, her stories turned to her beloved older brother, Tom. I’ve heard this story before; a young man who joined the war, tasked with picking up the dead bodies on Juno beach, returned home, and then died in a house fire. One of the many unaccounted-for war casualties that occurred long after the fighting ended. Whether it was the late hour, the calming presence of Tom Selleck, or the swirling snow enveloping us in our own little universe of two, or maybe she already knew the time left for her was meagre, but she spoke more than usual that night. She went on to share with me things that I didn’t know. My grandma loved to tell stories, but to my surprise, there were some stories that she kept to herself up until now.

She spoke of how her brother married a girl in San Francisco when he returned from overseas. Once he found out that his new wife didn’t want to leave the Golden City, grandma’s parents sent him money so that he could divorce her before returning to Port Huron, Michigan. Tom then married a single mom and raised her daughter as his own before they had two more. Grandma spoke about all the time they spent at her parent’s home; how happy she was to spend time with her nieces. The reason why the girls were so often at her house growing up was unclear. Grandma then spoke of the fire, as I knew she would. I knew about her brother’s death-and I knew she thought of it often, as she would mention it each time that I would fight with my brother growing up. But this time, her voice caught when she spoke of him. Startled, I looked up. Her eyes were red. Rimmed with tears. She talked about visiting Tom in the hospital, a shock for me, as I always thought he had died in the fire. She described in detail his skin clinging to his body. The cries of pain. Waiting for him to die.

“The smell… the smell. I can still…,” and her voice faltered. I reached out for her hand, letting the rest of the story pass between us unspoken. So desperately I wanted to take away her sadness, that I squeezed her hand in a desperate attempt to wring out the decades of pain that she carried. It suddenly made sense, sometimes stories remain unspoken because they’re too hard to tell.

Shortly after, my grandmother passed away suddenly. In grieving her life, I also grieve the stories that she took with her. Not only stories of her, but of her parents, grandparents, and siblings. I wish I could ask her one more time to recount the time when she almost drowned in the St. Claire River, only to be rescued by a handsome stranger. Or of her time working for a medium-sized company as a receptionist in London in the 1950s, of her amicably divorced grandparents, or how her dad always forgot his lunch, or how her mom never used measuring cups. I wish I could hear her one more time and commit the little details to memory. Like a game of telephone, her stories are already getting distorted with time and distance.

No longer can she correct a mistake or fill in forgotten gaps. Her stories are now the responsibility of those she told them to. Their fate lies not only in our ability to remember, but our choices to pass them forward and share them with others. I feel a sense of duty to share them, a responsibility to make sure they aren’t lost to time like all the other stories, to make sure my grandma is remembered with each retelling.