Sometimes taking the long way is the best way to get to your destination. Taking a short cut, using an abbreviation or in this case a jumbled bunch of letters known better as an acronym can be confusing and even get you lost. This short story is a long way to tell you why BIPOC should not be used in Canada.
My name is Guy Freedman. I am a Half-Breed from northern Manitoba. My dad was a Jew as were all the men before him in his family. My mom was Cree/Metis. She did not convert and I was raised Catholic. That and the fact that there were only five Jewish families in my hometown led us to be raised as Metis by a strong and colourful family. Being half Jewish and half native in a small mining town was tough. My brother says we used to walk down Main Street backwards so we didn’t get our asses kicked. I couldn’t tell you if people didn’t like me because of my last name or because of my skin and who or what my mom was.
My little grandma lived with us. She was a Cree speaker who was born near Batoche, Saskatchewan at Duck Lake in 1887 and her birth was registered at Fort Carleton. Her dad, a Half-Breed Scrip Taker from the Northwest Half-Breed Scrip Commission was born in Grande Prairie in 1848 in the then Northwest Territories and his dad was born in Red River (now called Winnipeg) in 1812.
As a very young child, I often sat with my mom while she listened to US President John F. Kennedy on the radio about how to make a better world, particularly for black people. There was one black man who lived in Flin Flon. His name was Bill Cantrell and he loaded luggage and freight for CN Rail. As a very young man I got to know Bill and that took me on a path to better understand the struggles he had because of his colour. I might have been 12 or 13; he would have been in his seventies.
Perhaps because of my mom’s tough time growing up in The Pas, I became a student of the civil rights movement. Cassius Clay became my idol. My Auntie Molly even brought me back an autographed picture of him from her trip to Las Vegas. You see, I wanted to make this country a better world for my peoples and there just weren’t any of my people I knew that were doing what folks like Cassius and others like Martin Luther King were doing.
In my early 20’s I moved to Ottawa and worked alongside one of Canada’s greatest civil rights leaders, Dr. Howard McCurdy. Howard was born in London, Ontario and descended from folks who were a part of the underground railway. While working for Howard I met my good friend George Elliot Clarke from Africville, Nova Scotia. George was an emerging writer who was working on finishing his first play based on his second book of poetry, Whylah Falls. He later became Canada’s first black poet laureate and I was his best man at his wedding. I guess you could say some of my best friends are black.
I have been one of Maria Campbell’s helpers for about 25 years. When my mom passed away fifteen years ago Maria adopted me in the Metis way and she refers to me as her son. For those that know, Maria Campbell forever changed the way people would think about Metis and First Nations women with her ground-breaking novel, Half-Breed.
Maria always says this about peoples who came to Canada – if they had it good from where they left they would have stayed. Everyone who came here is an immigrant, even the black people in search of freedom. Everyone who came here has an old country but Canada is our old country.
To paraphrase my good friend and colleague Brenda Macdougall – ‘the term BIPOC implies that original peoples and others have the same issues and concerns. But the most dangerous outcome of this term is that it has the potential to make First Nations, Metis and Inuit – all of us Nations – an ‘equity’ group and I reject that. While we may all share things in common like a system that is colonial and oppressive, the power of oppression is fundamentally different as is the issue of our rights, particularly our Section 35 rights’.
These rights were hard fought for and include what we had to give up like land and experience great suffering including residential schools, half-breed scrip commissions and the subsequent reign of terror on the Metis as well as forced Inuit relocation.
One last thing Maria taught me during our chat this past week is an ancestral Cree medicine wheel teaching. Most people think there are four colours of the medicine wheel that represent the four races, white, yellow, black and red. But Maria says the teaching describes five. The fifth is brown. She also says and embraces that us Metis come from all five races.
The term BIPOC blindly creates an equity group of peoples. It wrongly includes peoples who come from nations with strong medicine societies who created great civilizations that still exist and leaves out people who descend from Asian and Latin societies.
Sometimes taking the shortcut is the wrong thing to do. It is in this case. Don’t be lazy. Take the time to tell the whole story. Stop using BIPOC. Please.