Saskatchewan-based Indigenous Country Artist, Jarrid Lee Shares What Truth & Reconciliation Day Means To Him
Written by: Jarrid Lee
If you ask me what Truth & Reconciliation Day means to me, I’ve got a simple answer for you:
I wouldn’t be here.
Simple as that. If my mom didn’t survive residential school, I wouldn’t be here. So that’s what it means to me.
Imagine going to school. It’s your first day of school, you’re excited. You got your brand new shoes on, new clothes, new threads, new backpack, new shirt. Nice bright orange shirt. And when you get to school, you’re so excited to see your friends. You go say hi to your friends.
But when you get into the doors of the school, you feel this energy shift. You feel this change, this eeriness that sort of comes over you. And they strip you down to your underwear.
They take your nice bright orange shirt. They rip it up, burn it, throw it in the garbage, or discard it. Imagine that happening to a kid.
The last school closed in about 1996. That’s in our lifetime.
My mom was a residential school survivor. Her sisters were. Brothers were. And some of the stories that I’ve heard are, to say the least, atrocious.
There’s so much about what happened that we’re going to hear the stories after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) gathered all the survivor stories and decided to release them.
You take a group of people and you try to get rid of them. What do you call that? Genocide.
That’s what happened. So on a day like September 30th, what that means to me is that I’m still here. My mom survived. Her brothers and sisters survived. Not only did they survive, but they fought back.
Beginning in the 70’s, my grandparents thought,
“If these priests and our nuns are abusing our Children, we need to do something. We need to take some sort of action to take our fate and our children’s fate back into our own hands.”
So they decided to take over the school.
Now, there are two ways you can take something. You can do it with violence or you can sit and do it in peace. My grandparents and the elders from surrounding communities decided to do it in a peaceful way.
So around ‘71, ‘72, they sat in at this residential school and they took it over. And in order for the government to approve that it’s being run by Indigenous people, they would have to turn it into a high school.
So they did.
They turned it into a high school and they started teaching. There were still priests and nuns lurking around, but at least my people were running it.
Then the government said there were too many high schools in the district. Something about the number of them within a certain radius. They told our community, “You’re going to have to turn it into a college.“
So they did.
They turned it into one of the first native-run schools in all of Canada, Blue Quills First Nation College.
You want to talk about resilience? About having faith and being strong? Let me tell you this story about my mom’s mom, my kôkom! I never knew this story until recently when my aunties and my mom told me. So in order for this college to go forward, my kôkom! had to meet with the prime minister of Canada. In order for her to get to Ottawa, she had to pawn off her wedding ring to afford the plane ticket.
That’s how much she believed in what she was doing. She was willing to give up her own wedding ring, for future generations.
Now we have doctors in our family. We’ve got lawyers. You may know of Dr. Leona Makokis. Dr. Pat Makokis. Janice Makokis. Dr. James Makokis, who won the Amazing Race with his husband, Anthony, a few years ago; he’s my first cousin. So imagine all the great things that came out of that, including me.
That’s where we got our start. That’s why I’m here today.
That’s why September 30th means the world to me and the music that I make.
It’s supposed to be for that day. So what doesn’t that day mean to me? It’s almost offensive to me if you don’t acknowledge it or won’t have something to do with it. It’s not meant to make anybody feel bad. It’s supposed to be a learning lesson for people that we can learn from our mistakes. And Indigenous people, much like the grass you walk on, are very forgiving.
You can walk on us until we’re flat. You can walk on us until there’s nothing left. But we’ll always come back. We’re like the grass that grows. We’re very, very forgiving people. And we just want people to learn to hear our stories. That’s what that day means to me.
I’ve been asked, “You represented our country, and yet our country has never tried to represent you or your people, and yet there you are proud to wear your team’s jersey. How do you do it?”
And here’s my answer: with a grain of salt, my friend. With a grain of salt.
I’ll share one last story. There was this priest that was trying to discourage my grandparents from taking over the school. At the time my grandpa was just a janitor, cleaning toilets, changing light bulbs, fixing the heat, that kind of stuff.
And one of the priests came up to my grandpa and he went, “So you think you Indians are going to take over the school, hey? What’s your highest level of education? What the hell do you know? You’re just a janitor.”
My grandpa smiled, and said, “You may be right. I am just a janitor. I only have a grade two education. I can barely read and I can barely write. But I’ll tell you what. “When we take over the school, my kids will be doctors, their kids will be lawyers, their kids will be doctors, their kids will be lawyers. So I may just be a janitor, but that doesn’t mean my kids or grandkids won’t be.”
To me, it’s the same thing with Canada. We’ve had so many broken promises in the last 150 years. Where do you even begin to reconcile?
That’s not up to us. It’s not always up to the Indigenous people to be steering somebody else’s ship. We see it in economics, we see it in the way the country is being run, we see it with our resources being extracted and not being shared properly.
Imagine this: we had political systems already in place prior to colonization, prior to our ‘visitors.’ We had free healthcare. We didn’t have a welfare system because we shared everything. There was no homelessness because people didn’t go without it. We learned how to live in harmony with the land, with each other, with other tribes.
There’s misinformation about that statement. It’s like a virus to people, spreading lies and using half truths saying before any settlers got here, we were killing each other off for thousands of years, which is a lie.
Yes, we did have our fights and our disagreements. It was mostly over things like land or hunting, small things we would fight over. But we would never, ever try to get rid of another tribe entirely. That’s inhumane.
There were millions of Indigenous people in North America prior to anybody showing up here. What happened here in North America, in Canada, those are crimes against humanity.
Who’s responsible for that? How do we learn from that?
So when I put on a jersey, if it has a Canadian flag on it, or if I have to represent my country, I think of my grandpas, the codetalkers who used their own language to win the war they fought. That language that won wars, is like me: unbroken.
That’s how I’m able to put on that Canadian jersey: because underneath, I’m still here.
Narrative and dialogue need to happen – click here to learn more about the progress on the Truth & Reconciliation Commission’s (TRC) ‘94 Calls to Action.’
Jarrid Lee is set to release his single, “I Don’t Back Down” on October 10, 2023. Pre-save the track here.