What does it take to call a place home?
On moving to Alberta and the responsibilities of living on Treaty territory.
What does it take to call a place home?
Arrival in Alberta
Maple leaf flags were flying at half-mast when we arrived in Edmonton a day late. The confluence of a COVID infection spike and overwhelmed testing centers had stranded at the Amsterdam Schiphol airport for 24 hours. Finally in Canada, our then 10 and 12-year-old fully vaccinated kiddos sat out two weeks of AirBnB quarantine. Around ten days into their sentence, the Canadian government lifted quarantine requirement for minors.
On our first morning living in Alberta, my husband and I downloaded the Uber app and went to see a house to rent. A confused elementary school boy opened the door. He called his mom and as we stood on the front step, she informed us that the house had already been rented and said she’s updated the online listing.
“Sorry,” she said.
Two hours later, we saw a second potential rental in the same neighborhood next to the university hospital. It was at least four times the size of the home we’d moved out of in the Netherlands and had a trash compactor that looked like the one my neighbors had in the 1980s.
Eventually, we found an unfurnished house to live in and agreed to a monthly rent I’m still embarrassed about. We opened bank accounts and enrolled kids into schools and arranged for insurances and registered for health cards and paid for translations of our Dutch drivers licenses to English and then traded them in for Canadian licenses. We ordered mattresses. On the second weekend in August, less than four weeks after arriving, we went backcountry camping with friends in Jasper National Park. I remember a lone deer standing on the shore of Celestine Lake the morning we packed up.
“We live here now,” we said to each other, over and over again that weekend.
Back in Edmonton, I volunteered for the Fringe Festival, and my husband started work. A day later, as I walked from our AirBnB to the festival site for my shift, the moving company called to tell me our goods had been released from customs. Could I come pick up the car that day and could I receive our shipment in our new rental the next day? Moments later, my husband called to tell me the bicycle he’d borrowed had been stolen. The same friends loaned us their son’s Honda Element and soon after telling them about the bicycle, we discovered their catalytic converter had been stolen while the car stood parked on the street.
At the end of September 2021, Canada celebrated National Day for Truth and Reconciliation for the first time with orange t-shirts and a day off school. We understood why the flags were still at half-mast.
We live here now
Since then, the kids have gone to four different schools (two for one and three for the other), we’ve bought and moved into the home we hope to stay in, gotten a dog, purchased numerous winter coats, boots, and gloves, and come to love calling Canada home.
Before we came out here, I worked as a storytelling consultant and diversity specialist in The Netherlands. I served on the Diversity Committee of the Dutch chapter of SIETAR, the Society for Intercultural Education, Training and Research. In 2020, Radboud University interviewed me for a special edition of their magazine around the same time they introduced the university’s first-ever Chief Diversity Officer. As a country, the Netherlands was talking openly about racism for the first time, despite the UN calling for them to stop using the black-face of “Black Peter” character in 2015.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion work in Canada is different. Post-COVID Edmonton struggles with historic levels of homelessness, which they call houselessness, and an opoid epidemic, both of which disproportionately impact indigenous people. Land acknowledgements are de rigeur, but reflection on their efficacy is in its infancy. There are so many immigrants here that even living in the “Texas of Alberta,” it was nearly three years before I experienced the kind of “where are you really from” interaction that was a normal occurrence for me for 17 years in the Netherlands.
While I continued to write about diversity and allyship for a client in the Netherlands, I didn’t do the work to learn more about the people who were on this land long, long before I arrived, and that has felt uncomfortable.
Embracing my ignorance
Then on Sunday morning, author Jessica Johns gave a keynote speech at the Writers Guild of Alberta conference, and something shifted. Johns is a queer indigenous author of an award-winning debut novel Bad Cree. She spoke to us about Writing as Treaty People. She introduced herself in a manner I’ve come to recognize as indigenous, giving her name in English, her name in Cree, and the meaning of her name in English. She told us where her mother and father were from. She told us which treaty lands she’s lived on and where she lives now.
She gave exactly the kind of introduction I’ve avoided using since I went to university in the American South and it felt like every aspect of my personal history emphasized my outsiderness. She stood in front of us and introduced herself with humble pride. I was deeply moved.
As she spoke about writing in treaty, she referred to our responsibility to learn about the land we live on, both the history of the people who have been on that land and the land itself. We must learn about the plants and the trees and the animals we share the land with. We cannot call a land home until we’ve learned about it.
Her talk filled me with emotion. I felt shame at not having done my work, but also connection and permission. I recognized for the first time that one of the reasons I haven’t done this work is because I have done it so many times. Canada is the seventh country I’ve called home. Each country has brought with it a history and a land to learn about. Each move has been more complicated than the last and, as I age and my responsibilities increase, also more exhausting.
But the signs have been there for a while that it is time for me to do this work now. I recently learned about a free online Indigenous Canada course the University of Alberta offers. My home library is one copy of Bad Cree (heavily annotated in the first chapters, the writing is excellent) richer. Plus my community league recently approached me about become a diversity coordinator, which I am not ready for. As I sat listening to Jessica on a Sunday morning in a hotel meeting room, though, I realized I could put together a plan to spend the year learning doing this work and perhaps even find community to do the work with me.
So, that’s my plan. You are hereby invited to reflect on your own journey towards learning about the land you live on, to hold me accountable, and, if you’re interested, join me. I’m not sure what shape my education will take. The only thing I can be sure of is that I will make mistakes along the way and discover that there is no such things as a “little” indigenous learning project.
It’s time for me to embrace my ignorance again, to tip the balance towards learning, and to do my little tiny part in working for change in the place I want to call home.
21 November 2024: Edited to remove an event announcement for “just say no to AI” at the beginning.