I was recently invited to participate in an op-ed campaign, which took my writing to a different editor who had never read any of my columns. She was impressed (for lack of a better word, in context) with what she called the suppressed fury in my writing.
This is not the first time that my anger has been brought up, and as I was out walking my little dog this morning, I had a good, long think about that.
Although I don’t have to explain myself, I thought that the subject would make good fodder for a column.
The intense fire that burns deep in my heart and soul began when I was a little girl. That flame has been nurtured, lovingly tended by traumatic events that not only stole my happiness at a very young age but taught me that being a “Canadian Indian” meant that I was inherently flawed, not a human being.
When I first began to learn the truth instead of the whitewashed lies (there’s that suppressed fury again, I can’t help it), my tender heart was overwhelmed with a sorrow and despair so deep that I have never been able to shake it.
I am nearly 60 years old and that sorrow is still there. The unimaginable things I have witnessed and experienced in my life would bring the most seasoned war veteran to their knees, I kid you not. And the one common denominator in all of the things I have seen is that human beings are the cause.
Human beings cause so much harm to Creation, to each other. For power, for glory, for money. But they don’t seem to care too much about each other.
Christians preach the Ten Commandments, but they often fail to practice what they preach. With the Bible in one hand and a gun in the other, they say ‘Christ died for our sins, so we have free reign to blow your brains out if you disagree with us’ and get forgiven on Sunday at church.
The Doctrine of Discovery reflected a worldview of European cultural and religious superiority over other peoples, providing a religious justification for dispossessing Indigenous Nations.
Regardless of who is right or wrong regarding religion, politics and race theory, the notion that the Caucasian race is somehow superior to all others directly contradicts their own Bible.
Genesis 1:27 states that “God created man in his own image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them,” emphasizing inherent dignity and worth for all humanity.
So, yes, my anger started with the hypocrisy at my adopted mother’s hands, in the name of her beloved church, my anger grew as grown men in my life decided that it was okay to sexualize a little Indian girl because we were not human, but sexual toys here for their pleasure. Nobody has ever been held accountable.
My suppressed fury began when I was kidnapped and gang raped by neighbours for the fun of taking a little Indian girl’s virginity, because we have been dehumanized for so long it’s no longer even considered rape. Nobody has been held accountable.
My anger grows every time some unthinking person opens their mouth to tell me how much they hate my people because someone stole their car and burned it, or how my people were conquered, or how my people are lazy and dirty with no ambitions.
My anger grows at the absolute hypocrisy of the current settler population’s belief that immigrants are stealing everything and should be sent back to where they came from. That is exactly what they did to us.
The settler population that is demonizing the word immigrant and trying to differentiate themselves from these people are laughable, if it were a humorous situation.
So, yes, I do have suppressed fury. Sometimes it’s not even suppressed, it’s just fury. But I also know joy, because I know that when I leave this earth walk and go back to the spirit world, I will finally get peace.
Until then, I will continue to use my voice, my suppressed fury, to tell the truth.
My final thought is this. The great flood, where Noah built an ark … it was told to me that God was so angry with the evil of the human beings in the world that he destroyed it with a flood. How evil must they have been, in comparison to the evil that we are witnessing now all over the world?
What fate are we bringing on ourselves?
All my relations.
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Cory Bilyea is an Indigenous journalist working for Midwestern Newspapers. She is a member of the Six Nations of the Grand River, better known as Onkwehonwe, the original people. Cory is a survivor of intergenerational trauma caused by residential schools. She can be reached at cbilyea@midwesternnewspapers.com.
