My Name is Truth by Truth Halcrow

My Name is Truth
by Truth Halcrow

 

My name is Truth. I’m holding the microphone, and my friend JJ is leaning over and we are taking part in the blanket exercise. I am the narrator and JJ is one of the Europeans. The kids standing on the blankets are the aboriginal people of Canada or what we know as “Turtle Island”.  About 15 people stand on the blankets to represent how it used to look before the Europeans came over and “found” North America.

Taking part in this blanket exercise as the narrator feels really amazing. When I read through the story, as I read a terrible event it makes me think for a quick second about how life used to be. It really drains me out to think about things like that – residential schools, loss of land, and the amount of people who died from diseases –  but people need to know what really happened and how the Europeans came across North America. 

I’ve done this exercise before in class, and I’ve learned some other knowledge about my heritage. I remember this one time my mushum, Tim, was lecturing me about how life should be treated with respect, because of what we’re doing to the earth. He always mentioned this world is bound to blow up or collapse. I knew this already before he told me, but this world is all we have and there’s not another kind like it.

Just like my mushum Tim, the blanket exercise really gets on point; it’s a good learning experience for everyone. For example, some people asked what was happening at the blanket exercise. I explained, but then they said they already know about that, but really, if you were there, then you’d understand, and you’d feel everything that those children had to go through, just to get there basic education at residential schools. Picture yourself as an aboriginal mother who has a child and police come out of nowhere and take your child to put them in a residential school and there’s nothing you can do about it. This is what the blanket exercise is trying to do, help people visualize what people went through.

My name is Truth. I’m holding the microphone, I’m reading the last part for the narrator and it says, “The violence of colonization has left a lot of pain. All across Canada, the relationship between indigenous people and newcomers is often broken. We don’t need more broken promises. We need to repair the relationship and to do this, we need real change” and that’s the Truth.