I have some big thoughts I want to share. This is a long one, but please stick with it.

As many of you know I took a Cree immersion class remotely over the last few weeks. It was my first time being fully immersed in the language and the first time the way it works really

resonated with me. I picked it up surprisingly quickly. And then something happened. I began to realize just how interconnected language and culture is. I now understand how language shapes people’s worldview, and how much of ourselves and our history is tied up within our

language. Little things - like the fact bread is considered animate or that the word for buffalo is prairie cow because before colonization and cows arrived they were just called mostos but after they were called paskwâw mostos to differentiate.

Big things - like how the entire language is gender neutral and only when you try to translate it into English does wiya become understood as him/her. Those binaries don’t exist in the language and English doesn’t have the words to comprehend that. Once I started thinking

about our language - and all others - this way, it really started to hit me just how destructive removing people from their language is. It’s definitely an act of genocide and I knew that before but I don’t think I comprehended the depth of that attack on our people.

We ended class with a sharing circle yesterday, and every single person in that class - myself included - had a family member who had been in residential schools. Some of us have had family members take their own lives because of the residual trauma. Some of us lost partners

to overdose, homelessness, and more. And at the end of class yesterday I was hit with immense grief. Grief for all of our people. Grief about the fact that so many of us don’t have access to our language - and those of us that do usually only do because we were able to pay

the exorbitant fees universities charge. It’s disturbing to me that allowing people access to their language has become another racket. Indigenous people should have access to their language and language resources for free. You can take French immersion throughout school if

you want to, but people who have had their culture and their languages all but destroyed at the hands of the Canadian government have to pay to get that knowledge back? It’s ludicrous. It’s violent. It’s colonial and it’s continuing to this day, no matter what settlers like

to believe.

I don’t know friends, you think you know the depth of the trauma and pain caused by colonization and genocide and then something new happens and it’s a whole new layer of pain you didn’t know existed. My heart hurts. I am in full blown grieving mode.

There’s so much more I want to say but I know twitter isn’t the place for such long streams of thought. I’ll end it by saying that my heart is with all of us - all of us Indigenous people who are healing those ties that have been severed by colonization. My heart is with

all of those relations who didn’t make it through. All of those people who are suffering in silence or denying their own history because of what they went through. I believe in us all and I believe that we are headed toward a brighter future. Indigenous Resilience is real.

We’ve made it this far and I see generations healing and strengthening and fighting against all the systems of oppression that held us down for so long. So as much as my heart hurts in this moment, it is temporary, because I know a brighter future is ahead.