A First Nations-led initiative in Manitoba will receive $19 million from the federal government to set up much-needed diabetes-related foot care services in the communities. The initiative is vital considering numbers showing that First Nations experience diabetes at a rate 4.2 times higher than the general population, but 34 of the 63 nations in the province had no diabetes service.

For our special 50th anniversary issue, Canada’s brightest, boldest, and most rebellious thinkers, doers, and creators share their best big ideas. Through ideas macro and micro, radical and everyday, we present 50 essays, think pieces, and calls to action. Picture: plans for sustainable food systems, radical legislation, revolutionary health care, a greener planet, Indigenous self-government, vibrant cities, safe spaces, peaceful collaboration, and more—we encouraged our writers to dream big, to hope, and to courageously share their ideas and wish lists for our collective better future. Here’s to another 50 years!

The theme of remembering runs through the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It is behind the suggestion that Indigenous curricula be mandatory and in Justice Murray Sinclair’s insistence that non-Indigenous Canadians learn about residential schools and Indigenous history. In the context of reconciliation, how do we do this? How do we respond to the harrowing disclosures of survivors if not with equal candour?

This means personalizing the non-Indigenous part. It means doing something more than acknowledging horrific things happened and identifying them as cultural genocide. The idea of acculturating a generation of Indigenous children by removing them from their families and forcing them to live in the language and culture of the invading settlers happened by design. It required institutions, memos, and individuals to pull off. Remembering means putting names, faces, and language to the non-Indigenous side of the narrative. D.C. Scott, the bureaucrat behind the residential school scheme, and Deputy Superintendent General of Indian Affairs for 19 years, is well known. There are many others, though, there to be found in the records, as well as in living memory.

Candid remembering also requires re-remembering at times. Take Trutch Street in Vancouver. I walked it many times before I wondered why Joseph Trutch—who was instrumental in the imposition of a reserve system—was memorialized in a Kitsalano neighbourhood where all the other streets are named after trees or British naval battles. In Victoria, Trutch had successfully campaigned for the removal of the Songhee people in 1911. He was a man who noted for the record that he was “not about to allow a few red vagrants to prevent industrious settlers from settling unoccupied land.” In 1913, the Kitsilano living on the south shore of the Burrard Inlet were similarly removed, herded from their homes (later burned to the ground), loaded onto barges and relocated to North Vancouver.

History gives us villains, but it’s also worth remembering dissenters. Louis Riel was double-damned for betraying his non-Indigenous ancestry as well as the state. Emily Carr understood artistry and a powerful spirituality informed the carvings of the Coast Salish and Haida, yet helped bring about the notion they were “a dying race.” Arthur O’Meara, on the other hand, was vilified in his day. A lawyer and Anglican lay-minister who ardently supported land claims and the inherent rights of Aboriginal peoples, he appeared as counsel to the Allied Indian Tribes of B.C before the 1927 Joint Parliamentary Commission. In the end, the committee declared there was no such thing as Aboriginal title, laying blame for the fruitless appeal on “designing white men” by whom “the Indians are deceived and led to expect benefits from claims more or less fictitious.” By fall, the Indian Act was amended to prohibit the raising of monies to pursue Aboriginal land claims.

Remembering actively means keeping track of promises, especially government ones—like the infamous clause of the Indian Act that stripped women of their status when they married non-status men. Mulroney’s Conservatives removed it in 1985 after years of protest, but replaced it with a two-tiered system that has since denied status to 40,000 children whose fathers are unidentified or unknown. Let this act, and others, remind us that remembering lies at the heart of reconciliation. We all need to do it. Learn our history, and say these things out loud, in person and in the present tense.

Unfortunately, far too many horror movies seem to revisit the U.S. slave era or North American colonization—a.k.a. the genocide of Indigenous peoples. Though a historical context in a horror film can be beneficial—and intelligent—in a lot of ways, I find these two backdrops lazy at best and racist at worst.

Amityville Horror is one of the most recognized horror movies that uses the suffering of Indigenous people as an origin story for its hauntings. The house is haunted, apparently, because it was built on stolen land—more specifically an “Indian burial ground.” The term alone is problematic, relying on the mistake of the original ignorant dudebro Christopher Columbus—yes, let’s name a people based on someone’s inability to read a map! Worse, though, is the common storyline: “We’re white people on stolen land, but please don’t haunt us because that’s so mean!” When you watch these movies, you don’t like these spirits tormenting the protagonists, usually a wholesome American family. In one of the Amityville films (there are a lot, by the way), the story behind the haunting is that a white man used the house to torture Indigenous peoples. So, therefore, a negative presence manifested.

But here’s the thing, films like Amityville Horror or The Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia, which is based around the ghosts of the underground railroad from America’s slavery era, forget a key thing: you don’t have to add ghosts or ghouls to make slavery or colonization scary. They already are scary. They are the most terrifying parts of our history, especially because their remnants are still ever present today via the entrenched systemic inequality in our society and government institutions.

By adding monsters and demonic presences into the mix, we trivialize the injustices of the past and assert the misconception that it’s just that, the past. The ghosts of slavery and colonization are not rattling cupboards and ghouls in the basement. We have real horrors of inequality today: police brutality (think of what’s happening in Ferguson); racialized poverty; the legacy of residential schools; discrimination within social services, and on and on.

Take Skeleton Key —the ghosts are a malevolent black couple, who, to avoid being lynched, used voodoo to swap their spirits with two white children. So when the lynching occurs, it’s still happening to black bodies, only two white children are inside;  the “evil” black couple gets away with it. I’m astonished  this movie was even produced. The lynching of black people is, needless to say, a horrific and disgusting practice; these were innocent people brutalized by white supremacist mobs. Who wouldn’t want to escape that? The entire film also pushes the stereotype of the African voodoo queen who uses black magic to inflict terror upon others. These are exactly the kind of stereotypes that contribute to the dehumanization of black people, Indigenous people, and other racialized folks, and therefore act as justifications to the disproportionate violence they face in their lives.

It reminds me of an episode from Buffy The Vampire Slayer where spirits of Indigenous men rise from the grave and begin attacking Buffy and her friends. And as you watch this episode, you cheer for Buffy, Xander, and Willow to save the day and vanquish the evil spirits, without realizing that these are the spirits of people who had their land stolen, their people murdered, and who underwent forcible assimilation. So who’s really the bad guy here?

Next week I look at heteronormativity and horror. Where all the gay people in scary movies?

Here is what we celebrate on Canada Day: On June 30 1867, midnight struck and church bells in Nova Scotia, Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick rang; Manitoba was added three years later. And, here are just a few founding facts we tend to skip over: Canadian explorers found the land to have great potential for farming, so out went the original tenants, the Metis, and in came our nation. What is now Canada’s Maritimes was previously occupied by Mi’kmaq. Lieutenant General Edward Cornwallis founded Halifax, and put a bounty on the scalps of Mi’kmaq’s people, children included. Until two years ago, a Halifax school was named after him.

Canadians with privilege don’t like to think about aboriginal issues. The refrain usually goes something like this: it isn’t our fault about what happened back then. However, it is our responsibility to acknowledge what happened instead of continuing to ignore the  challenges aboriginal communities still face because of the devastation they were forced to endure, all in the name of Canada’s quest to become a great nation. We need especially care because our federal government keeps locking this issue away—inside of residential schools and the prison system (apparently, it is no longer civilized to murder, rape, and scalp).

The people of Attawapiskat still need homes and the Mathias Colomb Cree Nation’s right to go on their own land is being revoked. Instead of acknowledging these human rights issues, the federal government discredits them in the public’s eye. And the mainstream media stops paying attention when the issue is no longer hot, when Idle No More isn’t hip any longer.

National Aboriginal History Month (started in 1999) goes unnoticed the same way as Celery Month. June 21 is National Aboriginal Day. Though it started in 1996, I’ve rarely heard of celebrations for it—at least ones that are as widespread and on the same scale as Canada Day. According to the Canadian Charity, Evergreen, “1.3 million people self-identify as having First Nations, Metis or Inuit heritage or, Aboriginal ancestry.” That is a big demographic to simply ignore, on Canada Day, or any other.

Read: White people, here’s your one-time Canada Day special: Native people apologize back!