Page 129 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Dark Matter: Women Witnessing - December, 2015 Issue #3 - EXTINCTION / DEVOTION

Our Call to Indigenous Consciousness: Taiaiake Alfred’s
Wasáse
By Sharon English

“Make no mistake about it, Brothers and Sisters: the war is on. There is no post-colonial

situation; the invaders our ancestors fought against are still here, for they have not yet rooted

themselves and been transformed into real people of this homeland.” –

Taiaiake Alfred

In Toronto, in the woods at the end of the street where I live, there’s a standing stone mounted

in the ground. Beside it sits a smaller companion, halved and polished and engraved with a

story: it was here in 1615 that Étienne Brûlé, ‘an adventurous spirit,’ became the first ‘white

man’ to sight Lake Ontario and thus begin the founding of our nation. Oaks probably stood here

when Brûlé arrived; now the woods are brambly, too dense to see the lake. A sewage treatment

plant lies below this ridge. As I read these words, someone’s running a wet saw through

concrete.

Some years ago I started a journey. Like Brûlé I yearned to discover a new country, but the land

my heart ached for didn’t lie across an ocean. It was right here: the land we have yet to truly

see, let alone love.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the fish populations in Lake Ontario effectively collapsed.

Colonial industry had already extracted what the water could provide, and in Toronto today you

still cannot buy local fish. Living here on the shore of a great lake, few of us think about this

tragic absurdity. The lake’s story has been pushed underground.

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