30 June 2017•Update: 30 June 2017
By Barry Ellsworth
TRENTON, Ontario
Canada will mark its 150th birthday as a nation on July 1 with celebrations across the country, with the biggest event in the capital of Ottawa.
About 500,000 revelers are expected to attend the bash on Parliament Hill and the government has spent an estimated half-a-billion Canadian dollars on the celebrations.
The Canadian Maple Leaf flag has blossomed virtually everywhere as 38 million people show their pride in the world’s second largest country.
But not everyone is in a party mood as shadows flit across the country.
Some Indigenous people, who were in “Canada” for thousands of years before Europeans and the Fathers of Confederation signed papers making Canada a country on July 1, 1867, will not be celebrating what they say is colonization and oppression.
A teepee was erected Wednesday on Parliament Hill by a group of Indigenous people as a protest.
Chief R. Don Maracle of the Mohawks of the Bay of Quinte, the 10,000-member Tyendinaga Territory Indigenous community in southern Ontario about 60 miles (100 kilometers) east of Toronto, believes Canada 150 and his people could co-exist.
“It is a time of celebration [and of] peace and friendship,” he told Anadolu Agency during a telephone interview. “We wish Canadians well.”
But the chief noted that rather than celebrate 150 years of Canada, “We also celebrate our thousands of years” on the land before Europeans arrived.
Chief Maracle catalogued the abuses heaped on Indigenous people, such as the forceful removal of children from families and their placement in residential schools run by church groups in a bid to stamp out their Indigenous history, convert them to Christianity and turn them into members of Euro-Canadian culture.
That system began in 1880 and before the last school was closed in 1996, about 150,000 children attended the schools where they were often abused and neglected.
A Truth and Reconciliation Commission was recently formed to hear from former residential school attendees and address about the wrongs committed.
Other abuse or “neglect”, as Maracle termed them, included poor conditions on many reservations across Canada, with substandard housing, a lack of clean drinking water and transportation.
The government has promised financial help to rectify these inadequacies but many communities have chalked it up to lip-service.
“We haven’t seen the money,” Maracle said, but he did express optimism the “abuses can be (rectified.)”
Member of Parliament Neil Ellis, who represents the constituency adjacent to the Tyendinaga Territory, admits the government has not done right by Indigenous people and must bring drinking water and transportation “up to the standards other Canadians enjoy”.
He told Anadolu Agency the Liberal government is working toward that goal but that “our government inherited a lot of challenges”.
Ellis acknowledged the treatment of natives at residential schools was a travesty, but “we learn from our mistakes. We are on the right track”.
At an event Thursday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Canadians have failed Indigenous peoples and it is understandable many do not want to participate in Canada 150.
He urged respect by Canadians and officials for indigenous people who do not want to celebrate Canada 150. "That's what I expect of our security services and that's what I am expecting to see," he said.
Also looming over celebrations is the shadow of Daesh.
The terror group specifically named Canada and the United States as targets following a deadly attack on May 22 in Manchester, U.K., that killed 22 victims at a pop concert.
During a visit to Toronto earlier this week, Trudeau said intelligence and police forces are doing “everything necessary” to keep Canadians safe during the celebrations.
Security has been beefed up and the country’s elite terrorism unit, the Joint Task Force 2, will be present in Ottawa.
“I hope this will not scare people away from having a good time,” Canadian Security Intelligence Service director Richard Fadden told a television news program.
