We are not
Muslim. We do not face Islamophobia, the
specificity and intensity of that bigotry, just as we are not Indigenous and so
do not know that particular legacy of violence and survival. But the fact is that I require little
imagination to understand what it feels like to be considered dispensable by
the powerful within a country. To be
viewed as unconnected to the fabric of Canadian society.
Slavery was
conquered not by laws and grand strokes of pens but through the heroism of
Black people themselves, through the bravest acts of rebellion and demand,
through everyday tactics of care and creativity.
If there is anything
to learn from the story of our ancestry, it is that you should respect and
protect yourself; that you should demand not only justice but joy; that you
should see, truly see, the vulnerability and the creativity and the enduring
beauty of others.
Railway enterprises
functioned like weapons against Indigenous peoples, cutting through ancestral
lands, violating treaties, and decimating the ecosystems that Indigenous
peoples relied upon.
