ᐁᐧᐊᒄ ᐁᔨᐦᑎᔮᐦᒡ – This Is What We Are

We are over 1.6 million Indigenous people in Canada, living in 630 communities and speaking seventy languages grouped under twelve different linguistic families. We are the bearers of unique cultural, philosophical and scientific knowledge, from which the rest of humanity can learn.

Our philosophies challenge the very foundations of Western society: individualism, overconsumption, inequality. Shaped by the experience of millennia, they provide answers to many contemporary problems and are true models of sustainable development. An immeasurably rich resource.

Yet, they have been arrogantly excluded from the official history of humanity. Why must the encounter between two worlds necessarily result in the disappearance of one of them? The acceptance and celebration of difference would have resulted in the preservation of an entire facet of human heritage.

Our wounds are many and deep. Among them has been the loss of the right to transmit our culture to our children. Such dispossession results in a significant erosion of self-esteem and serious schisms of identity, sources of many illnesses affecting every aspect of our Being.

The first step toward healing is the reclaiming of a voice: it is necessary to speak and to be heard. In this exhibition, individuals of all ages speak for themselves in order to focus attention on their knowledge and ideas, but also on their pain.

Reconciliation depends on this genuine encounter. The goal is in fact to reconnect the fragments of our interrupted history, to soothe the open wound caused by the attempted cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples across the entire planet.

The exhibition you are about to see invites you to embrace this encounter, to understand the need for it, and henceforth to seize every opportunity to work together toward a better future for all.

Élisabeth Kaine, Huron-Wendat