The residential-school system and the Japanese displacement and internment are other examples.
We look back and we ask: How could such things happen in Canada?
Because that’s what the people wanted. Maybe not all of them, but the governments’ actions were only a reflection of the will of the people. It starts on a personal level, often out of ignorance.
If only we had known …
When I started school, the flow of immigrants from post-war Europe had begun.
I remember the arrival in our class of a boy wearing lederhosen, which we snickered at (although he was much more neatly dressed than those of us wearing hand-me-down bib overalls). He sat in the front row, miserable and alone, unable to understand what was being said, unable to communicate with the rest of us.
When the teacher wrote an arithmetic problem on the blackboard, he brightened. This was something he understood. Pointing to the board, he chattered enthusiastically in German. We laughed. He put his head down and cried. The scolding we got from the teacher was magnificently blistering, and the class was instantly quiet.
Within a few weeks, he was at ease speaking English and was just another cheerful kid in the class.
But we learned, in bits and pieces, that his early years had not been the same as ours. He was born after the war, but lived with its effects — his playgrounds were bombed-out buildings and wrecked tanks. His toys included spent artillery shells and live rifle bullets found lying about.
If only we had known …
Other students arrived from Europe: Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland. They and their families were called DPs, among other things. It was a derogatory term, a label attached to those who were different. The differences faded over the years; “they” became part of the “we,” not by surrendering their ethnic identities, but by blending their customs into the whole. Cabbage rolls and perogies happily joined potato salad and baked beans at potluck events.
They found a better life in Canada; Canada was better for having them.
But if only we had known when they arrived, what “DP” really meant: displaced persons. People whose homes had been destroyed, whose relatives had been killed, whose lives had been turned upside by a war not of their making; people who had lost their countries in the shifting of borders and spheres of power.
Perhaps we could have been more welcoming, more compassionate, less inclined to snicker or sneer at superficial differences.
The postwar refugees had been preceded by an ethnic group that came a little less willingly, Japanese-Canadians who chose to work on prairie farms rather than being confined to B.C. internment camps. They were euphemistically called evacuees, and in fact, an all-Japanese baseball team in my town called itself the Evacs.
By the time I came along, they were no longer aliens, no longer evacuees. Names like Kadonaga, Yamamoto and Nishimura were as familiar to me as any other surname on our street. We knew only a little of their forced displacement; our parents casually and briefly explained it as a wartime measure for reasons of national security. Their parents said nothing of the loss, of the pain, of the utter unfairness.
If only we had known …
We were all immigrants, except, of course, those whose ancestors had been here for thousands of years, but to whom we gave little thought. I wonder now what my shy First Nations classmates thought as we were taught the history of white settlement, and almost nothing of imported diseases that decimated aboriginal populations, of stolen lands, of the starvation that followed the extinction of the great bison herds, of the attempted destruction of a culture by the residential-school system.
If only we had known. If only we had taken the time and the trouble to know.
