A response to Man’s Search for Meaning.

Loss is a subject we’ve all been contemplating this last year. Panicked by loss, I clung to the devils I knew last March – my job, my home. In doing so, I think I lost some of my integrity, along with everything else.

And so I found my way to Victor Frankl’s essential book, “Man’s Search for Meaning.” If you’re unfamiliar, Frankl was a psychiatrist in Vienna before being sent to a series of concentration camps by the Nazis. As a survivor, he worked to come to terms with why anyone survived. Perhaps more accurately, why some chose each day to hope and struggle and suffer and defy the inevitable, when they could instead find relief at the barrel of a gun. His valuable insight is that some found meaning in the suffering, and chose to hope. He believed this insight could be used as a therapy for others who find themselves overcome with a hopeless situation. This “logotherapy,” and his book, are both his gift to the world, and his reason for surviving the camps.

I’ll admit it’s been a while since I seriously contemplated the horrors of genocide. Our culture tends to romanticize the glory of Victory, for obvious political purposes (Forever War, anyone?). The result is that each of us, seeing the story of Victory retold time and again without context, without suffering, sprinkled with the occasional hero’s death on the inevitable path to good triumphant over evil, imagines ourselves being the hero in a similar circumstance.

Certainly you have thought about it: if the Nazis rolled into town one day, you’d be the one on the barricade lobbing molotovs at them. Failing that, you’d certainly join the resistance and risk your life repeatedly to blow up a railway or assassinate a colonel or something like that. Those latter-day heroes were faced with a genocidal State, and they chose hope and suffering and made meaning out of their struggle. So would you.

Most assuredly, you tell yourself, when a genocide was being inflicted on your neighbours you would not be one of the ones who stood by and did nothing because that was safe. Alone against a genocidal State, you would never choose to negotiate a comfortable life as a collaborator.

But today is Red Dress Day: the National Day of Awareness for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Womxn, Girls, and Two-Spirit people. Dear reader I am writing to tell you that this year I have become aware that Canada is perpetrating a genocide against Indigenous Womxn, Girls, and Two-Spirit people. We must act.

I can already tell you’re tuning it out, because I did too. You might be telling yourself: “Adam is just a loony leftist and genocide is hyperbole,” or “what happened in the past is sad but can’t be changed, so stuff your white guilt in a sack,” or “sure, ‘cultural genocide’ – what does that even mean? Isn’t Canada Council for the Arts doing something about it?”

Please hear me when I tell you that no, this moment is different. This is not about the past crimes of colonization and the horrors of the residential school system. This isn’t about the findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, although I ask you: when was the last time you read their report and revisited the 94 calls to action? We need to address those things, urgently and for generations to come. And we also need to stop a genocide that is happening right now, in our midst.

In 2019, the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls found that “The violence the National Inquiry heard about amounts to a race-based genocide of Indigenous Peoples… [Further,] the information and testimonies collected by the National Inquiry provide serious reasons to believe that Canada’s past and current policies, omissions, and actions towards First Nations Peoples, Inuit and Métis amount to genocide, in breach of Canada’s international obligations, triggering its responsibility under international law.” They even wrote a supplemental report to justify their use of the term genocide, which you should read. 

Past and current, dear reader. Our government investigated itself, found that its policies have created a current genocide, and has done… what, exactly? Did you know this? Were you outraged? Did you band together with your comrades and find a railway to blow up or a colonel to assassinate? I didn’t. In the summer of 2019 when the Inquiry’s findings were released, I… went to work. I took a vacation. 

Worse still, the government called an election, and I was pleased as punch that my comrades and I fought tooth and nail to make that election all about the environment. We called 10,000 people on the phone and asked them what they thought about spending taxpayer money on a pipeline. We could have called 10,000 people and said “the government is perpetrating a genocide and they know it. What are you going to do about it?”

And so, I perpetuated it. I was the decoy. I was part of the cover-up. I didn’t even know about the Inquiry, or this report, and I should have. And instead, I used my considerable platform to distract public opinion from a genocide. 

In his book, Victor Frankel writes about returning home to Vienna, and coming face to face with the gentiles who used to be his neighbours. They’d say things like “we didn’t know” or “what could we have done?” He very generously noted that there would be no justice in retribution. But he used his anger as a crucible and forged his own determination, which he used to write his incredible book. 

I have seen that same righteousness and determination in many Indigenous leaders and activists I’ve been lucky enough to share time with. I can’t fathom how they see me. But I know I’m not the French Resistance in this story, nor am I even worthy of my great-uncle Hewson’s proud legacy. This self-inflicted shame is the suffering that I will endure to find hope and to make meaning in my life. I will find ways to resist and oppose the genocidal State we live in; comrade, will you join me?