For some of us, Canada has been a relatively safe place, free from war on the ground, with space and convenience available to those that can afford them. We’re also a society with deep legacies of injustice, economic division, threatening law and property enforcement, and a frustrating lack of access to public support. As a colonial nation Canada has attracted refugees, regular folk, and cunning capitalists since Britain and France planted their unwelcome flags on Indigenous land. Today, media, partisan politics, global war and internet algorithms amplify seismic fault lines between our identities, religions, and politics. Our comfortable national narrative as ‘multi-cultural peacekeepers’ has become a tattered fantasy. Beneath modulated exteriors and everyday lives, we can be grief-stricken, angry, dizzy from division, confused by the contradiction of too much uncertainty paired with too much information. Canadians stand on wobbling legs, in search of who we are, and what could possibly unite us.

In the late of autumn of 2023, we gathered at the Confederation Centre of the Arts next to the site of the 1864 Charlottetown Conference, for the inaugural Charlottetown Forum. The event brought artists, leaders, and the public together to discuss the evolving identity of Canadians. This year’s event featured three panels and post-panel discussions on the topics of immigration, Indigenous economic reconciliation, and finding shared national narratives in a fractured time.

My partner and I attended the Forum on Friday, November 10th as white settler artists and east coast newcomers, driving at sunrise across the flat marshlands of New Brunswick, over the long sea bridge that connects to the Mi’kmaq Confederacy of PEI. To set the cultural context of the event though the lens of racial representation, I will describe the room. The majority of Friday’s attendants were of white British or European descent, reflecting the aging demographic of Charlottetown, and many rural settled communities across Canada. Visibly racialized Canadians attended too, in smaller numbers. We were all there that morning to listen to three Indigenous leaders: the passionate community land-host Kateri Coade (Mi’kmaq Confederacy of PEI, Executive Director), young lawyer/banker/military firebrand Jonathan Davey (Haudenosaunee, Lower Cayuga First Nation, VP, Indigenous Financial Services, Scotiabank), and elder economic strategist and activist for financial independence, Keith Martell (Cree, Waterhen Lake First Nation, former CEO, First Nations Bank). The panel was moderated by the wryly insightful Harvey McCue/Waubageshig (Anishinabe, Georgina Island First Nation), a consultant specializing in Indigenous issues.

As McCue opened the floor to the question of Economic Reconciliation, all three speakers wove a strong theme centering a lack of Indigenous control over their lands and resources as their main obstacle to economic equality. Coade noted the injurious omission of public and governmental acknowledgment for the displacement and impoverishment Canada has perpetuated on Indigenous peoples, while Davey carefully explained the oppressive structures of the 150-yr old Indian Act, which continues to undermine and impose impossibly complex regulations and legislation on Indigenous life, economies and land ownership today. Martell laid a passionate, experienced case for the necessity of Indigenous financial independence, with a demand for clear economic benefit of any corporate/government business contract to each person and family on treaty land, not just the enrichment of the individual/s who signs the contract. All agreed on the fundamental necessity of solid childhood education for healthy, successful lives and futures. 

The morning’s speakers focussed a shared Indigenous lens on treaty and United Nations (UNDRIP) rights to control decisions over land for their own revenue and use. Canadians were called to examine the root causes and contexts of inequity, and the need for supportive infrastructure to build capacity and talent within Indigenous communities. They cited clean water, adequate housing, education and medical care as the base foundation to thrive.

Everyone sharing this land is united by these requirements to thrive. The panel of Indigenous financial experts chose to work for change within the very colonial, institutional banking systems designed to oppress and exclude them. That strategy takes resilience and extreme willpower. As most Indigenous cultures understand the non-human earth and creatures as kin, they also claim the unquestionable right to make decisions on how to use their land for economic benefit, regardless of environmental impact. In contemporary life, with our world’s continued heavy reliance on natural resource extraction, environmental and economic survival can become maddeningly contradictory.

The afternoon panel was well attended, with a broader mix of public. Devyani Saltzman (Canadian writer, curator, P.I.N. member, and arts leader) moderated a conversation called Shared Narratives in a Fractured Time, with speakers Jesse Wente (Ojibwe, Serpent River First Nation, journalist, board chair of Canada Council for the Arts); Tanya Talaga (Anishinaabe writer, journalist, former Atkinson Fellow of Public Policy); and Naheed Nenshi (political commentator, former mayor of Calgary). Over the course of the afternoon the speakers engaged ideas of belonging, storytelling, service, and identity. Writers from oral and poetry traditions, public speakers and political figures; each was skilled in crafting narrative. Storytelling has become a keystone idea of our time, as corporations, media and big tech companies co-opt the human susceptibility to narrative as a powerful means of influence. The potency of storytelling has become a big business buzzword. In the wrong hands it can create hugely negative societal outcomes, as witnessed in Covid misinformation campaigns that impact health, or political interference that steers outcomes for entire countries. As societal tension builds between authorship and intention, it’s a good moment to examine our complicated narratives. 

The previous day’s panel on Newcomers, Immigration, and the Needs of a Rapidly Changing National Community was referenced in commentary by Nenshi and Saltzman, examining Canada’s ‘bait and switch’ immigration policies that result in skilled newcomers unable to access housing, or practice in their fields. When asked to comment on what unites Canadians, Wente asked us to forget nationalism in favour of our shared lives on shared land. “Look out the window” he said, “if you want to know what we have in common”. On the topic of systems collapse, Wente mused that Canada can’t be broken from an Indigenous point of view, as it was already built on the flawed foundation of relentless growth: which nature understands as impossible. Tanya Talaga reminded us that treaties built Canada, and that we remain in relationship with them. Talaga expressed hope in her observation of an Indigenous artistic revival led by a groundswell of activist youth, and that somewhere in the uncertainty of our current political chaos an unprecedented creativity was emerging. Nenshi, who in 2014 won the prize for ‘World’s Best Mayor’, charmed us all with his warm humour and inclusivity. Speaking on the value of civic engagement, he shared the Sikh/Hindu concept of Seva, which translated from Sanskrit means ‘selfless service’. By volunteering acts of help or kindness, people learn social connection and empathy for the other. 

Equity, justice and the health of our environment were proposed as three uniting principles and narratives we could build on together as Canadians. As this conference took place in the East, I wondered about the notably absent Francophone and wider Atlantic perspectives from the Forum’s panels. How to include every voice in three brief exchanges? The Forum set three Canadian rivers of identity coursing through the conversational space: Indigenous, immigrant and white settler. One of which underpinned all discourse- but was silent in the room. 

One river was Indigenous, sharing the stage with a second river of racialized Canadian voices who self-identified with immigrant origins. Navigating white supremacy with humour and self-respect, the speaker’s distinct narratives united in a broad waterway, marginalized from the dominant white European-Canadian story. In that waterway was a uniting sympathy in cultural connections to tradition and community, distinct from the fractured identity of colonial white Canada. This was directly voiced by journalist and author Elamin Abdelmahmoud, as he gestured to the irony of holding these conversations in the halls of Confederation, under the cement-etched names of the European ‘Fathers who created the nation’. 

The silent tributary at the Charlottetown Forum was the multiplicity of perspectives that make up white European settler Canada, though we were the majority of bodies in the room. There is no innocent, or unified, white Canadian identity. Unable to speak outside of a perceived single identity, many white people stay silent. The trust between a truly diverse population has been broken.

Uniting the Forum’s participants was the untended grief from harm that has been done between us all. Our hearts are battered by global and national political leaders and systems that champion self-interest, dishonesty and cronyism, unable or unwilling to support the changes necessary for everyday people to thrive. The ongoing control of Indigenous land and lives by the Canadian government is the heart defect of our national story.

Yet, until we can start holding the contradictions, nuances and complexity of individuals that make up any given identity, we are in great danger of turning prejudice into hostile tribalism. Unhealed racism, misogyny and colonialism can create cycles of generational trauma, a loop of fear, poverty and violence that can push some victims to become oppressors. When we confront unjust systems, we do so because we hold the belief they can, and must, be better. Do we want to step out from our shadow-selves and move forward towards an enlightened equality? Challenging a better collective future calls for continued trying, listening, and keeping open-hearted. It begs compassion, and forgiveness for our stumbles, our shared-human flaws. Imagine a new kind of conditional trust; one dependent on humility, acknowledgment, and action.

No one’s going back to where we came from. We’re all here, in the same room, on the same autumn day. And our life-giving planet is on fire. Will we be able, as Indigenous, immigrant and European settlers, to soften our guard? Can we openly address the root harms, and begin the true work of reparations, to risk building the relationships we require to share the future?

Naheed Nenshi spoke of the world collectively pausing for Covid as a ‘wet clay moment’. As a ceramic artist, I live this metaphor. In a global moment of ethical fracture, environmental uncertainty, and world political chaos: we can’t, and shouldn’t, go back to before. Clay has a window where it’s malleable: when we can shape it with our imaginations, our common humanity, our inspired courage. If we wait too long, it will harden; the time for us to centre our vision for change is always now.

Call in your artists, poets, spirit and water keepers. Untended grief hardens the heart, and a hardened heart leads to bitterness and anger. People are much more complex than their visible identity alone. Forums like this show we are listening to each other, and sooner than later, we will have to sit and dream at the same table. This time one that is built by and for us all.