Real Talk | The Inheritance of Truth

As National Day for Truth and Reconciliation approaches, I feel it tug at me in ways that are hard to explain. For many, it’s a national day of mourning, of reflection, of learning. For me, it is family history.

I am the granddaughter of residential school survivors. That truth lives in my bones. It lives in the silences my grandparents carried, in the fragments of language and culture that had to be hidden to survive, and in the resilience that kept them standing when the system tried to erase them.

Sometimes I think about what it means to inherit survival. Survival is not clean. It is not easy. It leaves marks. But it also leaves a trail, a path my grandparents cleared through fire so that I—and my son—could walk it.

My son has never set foot in a residential school. He has never been told that his language, his prayers, his very existence were shameful. But he is not separate from that history. He is a continuation of it. He carries both the burden and the brilliance of survival in his blood.

I tell him stories—not to weigh him down, but to ground him. I tell him about his great-grandparents, how they lived through something designed to erase them. I tell him that he is living proof they could not be erased. I want him to know that remembrance is not optional. It’s responsibility. It’s honour.

The truth is that reconciliation is not just something Canada owes to survivors. It is something we carry forward as descendants. It is how we live, how we teach, how we refuse to let history be rewritten or forgotten.

When September 30 comes, I put on orange, and I stand with my son. I remind him that even though he will never know the inside of a residential school, he walks in the shadow of their walls. And he walks in the light of those who endured them.

That truth is our inheritance. That reconciliation is our work.

~smy