It was a piece of Cajun advice handed down from a Creole great-grandmother and translated for a distant Acadian-Mi’kmaq cousin -“Only children need white people to watch them cry.” The old Louisiana saying addressed a phenomenon which saw children of slavery focused entirely on the validation of the white gaze, to the exclusion of any other, even their own parents. This Creole wisdom has been on my mind as I watch indigenous people on the news, testifying, re-telling and invoking their pain before a largely white audience. There’s a need there, a deep desire to have white people see and feel these tears. I fear for any people who carry such a need.
It’s worth noting that the history of slavery in Canada is primarily indigenous. A whopping two thirds of slaves owned in Canada were young indigenous women and their enslavement pre-dates Columbus. It’s a slow-rolling North American genocide which has been largely overshadowed by the more recent history of African slavery. We’re seeing today a people, who have never recovered from centuries of apocalypse and hardship, pouring it all into fifteen minutes of tears over a single event. These tears cried for the witnessing of a primarily white audience won’t have a healing effect. If anything, this experience will further harm indigenous people. Healing can only anrrive after one’s oppressor is deemed irrelevant.
Turning to white people now, like a slave’s child and crying warm tears on the news in the hope of reaching some measure of justice in white people’s validation is a trap. We should loathe news outlets for this emotional exploitation. Next year they’ll throw lavish banquets and give each other awards for the story of your tears. When your tears stop selling commercial time, they’ll move on. And if your story truly presented a risk to any aspect of the status quo, it would be obliterated from the public eye. Power, held by any culture of any colour, does not acquiesce to dismantling itself, out of guilt or the goodness of its heart. Convincing indigenous people that justice and healing could only arrive in the arms of reconciliation effectively made white validation the only path. Creoles would tell you, there are better paths.
