No one is shouting

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I have been sitting with these treaty headlines for four days now, which is honestly about my limit for sitting with anything. I am a mixed Indigenous woman, and I am also running for council this fall. So you can imagine I have a few thoughts.

Let me start with a small one. In grade one we did a family tree. I worked so hard on mine, and I was proud of it. I stood up in front of my class ready to tell them exactly who I came from.

Some kids called me a half breed. But that is not really the part that stuck. The part that stuck is that the room agreed with them, and my teacher did not say a word. I sat down understanding, at six, that there was nothing in my family worth being proud of, and that I had brought in the wrong thing.

I went home crying to my dad. He crouched down and said, oh sweetie, you pass. Don't ever tell anyone you're native.

He was not being cruel. He was giving me the only shield he had, the same one that had been used on him.

That was Saanich. And nobody was shouting. That is the thing people here get wrong about racism. It is almost never loud. Sometimes it is just a six year old deciding the safest thing to do with her own family tree is fold it up and put it away.

I am a long way from grade one now. Born in Cordova Bay, grew up at the top of Haliburton Hill back when it was still farmland, raising my own two kids over in Strawberry Vale. My roots here go all the way down. So when I read the treaty comments in this group this week, I did not read them as a stranger. I read them as someone who grew up here, and I recognized the tone right away. It never actually left. It just waits for a headline to give it permission.

So here is what is really going on, and I promise it is more boring than what you have been reading.

The Te'mexw treaty talks started back in 1995. Five nations, five separate treaties. The agreement in principle was signed in 2015. The maps went public in June, and there were open houses all over, Sooke, Victoria, Shawnigan Lake, East Sooke, Lantzville. No private land is in it. Every nation still has to vote, and so do BC and Canada. And treaty lands are not under municipal zoning, the same way we already accept for every other order of government.

Hatley Park is surplus federal military land. Royal Roads and the Songhees have been working on it together for years, and both of them want the campus to keep running. That is not a giveaway. That is thirty years of careful, boring, documented work by people who have to answer to each other.

Nothing about any of it changed this week. Somebody just found a photo of a castle.

Somebody here said we should be done with land acknowledgments. If its the card-reading kind, me too. But I know where I am. I drink from the Sooke Lake watershed, same as you, twenty thousand hectares we keep forested and closed on purpose, because that is the only way the water stays clean. That is not a ceremony. That is just where we live.

I was lucky enough to be at a salmon festival with the W̱SÁNEĆ this week, and I heard something put into words I have not been able to articulatemyself. "A treaty is not just for Indigenous people. It is for the settlers too." It is a covenant. An agreement that we are all heading the same direction. That is what the word actually means. A partnership.

And that is why I care about economic reconciliation a whole lot more than I care about wording. A treaty is not charity. It is certainty. It sorts out who decides what, so nations can borrow and build and hire and plan for the long haul, the same way any of us would if we knew the ground under us was ours.

Thirty years of leaving that unfinished has cost this whole region real jobs and real projects. We did not save anything by dragging our feet. We just paid for the waiting.

Here is what actually gets me, though. I am tired of watching us do this to each other. Because it is the same move every time, just pointed somewhere new.

We want housing for our kids, as long as it goes on somebody else's street. We want the doctor shortage fixed, but not a clinic on that corner. We want the rec centre, just not there. We want the tree canopy and we want the suite over the garage. Somewhere along the line, no became the easiest thing to say in this town. We have talked ourselves into believing that protecting Saanich means saying no to it.

And now that same old reflex is pointed at people whose families have been here for thousands of years.

Let me be transparent about what I get out of writing this, because it is nothing. I am not a developer. There is no contract, no raise, no view waiting for me at the end of it. I have a husband who fixes people's homes, two kids in Strawberry Vale, and twenty years of being the voice for people who needed one so they could stay safe and keep their jobs. That is the whole resume. I just love this place, and I want a council that can sit in a room, disagree, and still walk out neighbours.

You do not have to agree with me. I am still learning too, and there is plenty here I do not have the answer to. But I would rather learn it out loud with my neighbours than have us shouting past each other again.

What I am not going to do is pretend I did not grow up here hearing all of this. And I am not about to fold it up now, just because I am the one asking for your vote.

Let's move past division. Let's get things done.