While looking at yourself in the mirror, have you ever wondered who was staring back at you? Your appearance, your very countenance, is your own yet it is a conglomeration of features handed down to you from your parents, grandparents, and your great-grandparents. Your eyes, nose, height, hands, the colour of your hair. Your physical features are a museum. Your ancestors may be long dead as individuals, but they are still very much alive as fragments in you. Even other complex behaviours such as your intelligence, your ingenuity, your adventurous spirit, your happiness, your susceptibility to sadness are all qualities that have been passed down to you from your forebears. Even your fear of crowds or extroversion are linked to the distant past. These lives have been lived before and they are being lived again. We carry the past with us whether we know it or not. We stand upon the shoulders of our ancestors whether we look down to acknowledge them or not. Our lineage, our past is present in the languages that we speak as well as the very customs we hold dear.[1]
Canada was built by people that looked just like you, who think and feel as you do now. Whether your ancestors hailed from England, France, Scotland, Ireland, Wales or from other nation-states across mother Europe, they have bequeathed this land to you. It is yours by right. It is well past time to make the old arguments new again. The argument that White Canadians, those of…