It is a book with important lessons for anyone living on stolen native land and wanting to advance the difficult work of reconciliation
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Meeting My Treaty Kin
Heather Menzies | On Point Press
$29.95 | 254pp.
Like many in Canada, the award-winning author, activist, and member of the Order of Canada Heather Menzies is uneasily aware she lives on stolen Indigenous land. In her case, the connection between her family and the dispossession and cultural genocide that built the Canadian state is very personal.
Her own Scots ancestors, driven off their Highland farms by 19th century enclosures, came to Canada and bought land in southern Ontario from the Canadian Land Company, land that had been stolen from the Indigenous nations that lived, and still live close to what settler cartography labels Lake Huron.
Even these tiny allotments were often not respected. Too often they were further infringed upon.
One of these infringements saw land allotted to the Nishnaabe peoples at Aazhoodena — Stony Point — along the shores of Lake Huron, taken by the federal government to create a military base, Camp Ipperwash, during WWII. The appropriation came with a promise that the land would be returned to the people.
But the creation of that book entailed a difficult learning process for Menzies. Despite her years of experience, Menzies had a lot to learn about her own unconscious racism and about the structural racism that pervades the world of book writing and publishing. Meeting My Treaty Kin is her account of that learning process. It is a book with important lessons for anyone living on stolen native land and wanting to advance the difficult work of reconciliation.
While some readers may object to Menzies tone, finding it a shade too earnest, even bordering on twee, many other readers, including this reviewer, will be moved by the author’s honesty and eloquence.
Highly recommended.