Thread by @BearheadWally

It's been a trying weekend. This will be a whole thread. Sorry for people who like bite-sized consumption.

When the news broke about the babies in the grave in Kamloops, my family wasn't surprised. We know this happened. Our Elders lived this. It didn't make it less upsetting, especially for my grandparents...

I held my grandmother as she wept. Usually a strong, stoic matriarch, this brought to the surface the grief for two of her siblings that did not return. One from a gruesome accident, and one from food poisoning.

She wept not only as a sister, but as a daughter remembering her own mother crying in anguish over losing her children, having tried to hide them when the RCMP showed up and ending up in cuffs herself.

My grandfather also cried. Quiet tears, head bowed. He spoke about his own experiences for the first time to us. They were not good. One of his brothers tried to run away and had a leg broken when he was caught, limping for the rest of his years.

My other grandfather has been very open about why he and his wife only had one child. It's because they didn't want any because they didn't want to lose their child to the schools. My mother was their happy accident but she too ended up at the school.

My mother still has scars from the "discipline" she endured for daring to try to see her younger cousins when they were sick. One died.

When people say things like "This isn't my Alberta", then, quite frankly, they're blind to the reality. This is ongoing. It didn't stop with the schools. The foster system, the prison system, rules in the Indian Act - they have continued this.

When you have a premier more concerned about flipping pancakes than ensuring all the people in his territory are cared for and safe, this is everyone's Alberta.

He can put up his post about the Kamloops discovery but it doesn't take away from the fact he had a racist speechwriter and the writers of the social studies curriculum are the whitest men from the east they could find.

One of the writers (and his name makes me ill at this point) has actually suggested in response to Kamloops that TB was to blame, that everyone had to deal with it, and that parents actually wanted their kids at the schools.

My own family would definitely argue that. The other writer (the oldest, whitest man in Canada by my estimates), supports this position just by being associated with this racist curriculum. You don't sign on to something that you have moral issue with.

And it goes beyond Kamloops. It's Ethan Bear, and Mikmaw fishers, Joyce Echquan, and the missing and murder Indigenous women, girls, and 2spirited. This is your Alberta. This is your Canada.

I spent the better part of my teens and twenties trying to pretend I was anything but native. Natives are the losers and drunks in the media, they get watched all the time, judged, asked to represent not only their own nation but those who are also Indigenous across the continent

I ended up drinking, not knowing who I was, where I belonged. The Elders brought me back. Comforted me. Replaced the drink with our natural medicines. This is what I am supposed to be. So I'll fight for it.

But the unfortunate reality is that the premier, the prime minister, anyone with power, won't be listening to me. They listen to their own friends, their own people, so, if you've gotten through this rambling...

Please advocate and fight on behalf of children everywhere. Don't excuse people in the past for doing "what they thought was right". No one, in any time, can excuse what happened to kids, to families, to humans in this way.