My family tree

genocide, colonization, privilege, and being an immigrant in your own land

I want people to stop for a moment and think about their family histories.

Think about your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and everyone who came before them.

How EXACTLY did you get here?

Who was already living on the land when your ancestors arrived? What happened to those people? What did your ancestors witness? What opportunities did your family receive? And what do you know about the people whose land became the country you now call home?

I have been asking these questions for more than 20 years while researching my own family history.

Recently, APTN Investigates brought attention to the 1862 smallpox epidemic and the devastating impact it had on Indigenous peoples in British Columbia. The investigation, Weapon of Genocide, examines historical evidence and accounts suggesting the disease was deliberately spread.

The BC Centre for Disease Control also acknowledges historical evidence that infected materials were deliberately distributed and that colonial authorities forced Indigenous people from Victoria, burned their homes and sent people back to their home communities while infection was spreading.

This was not simply a story about a disease arriving and people dying. It was a story about colonial power, displacement, land and human lives.

The epidemic devastated Indigenous communities. The Tsilhqot'in, Haida, Heiltsuk, Stó:lō and other Nations have their own histories and accounts of what happened. Their experiences deserve to be heard and taken seriously.

And we cannot separate this history from the wider colonization of the land that became British Columbia and Canada.

my own family history

My great-great-grandfather arrived in Victoria in 1862.

My great-great-grandmother, Eliza, was Songhees.

My great-grandfather was born in 1867, nine years before his parents married in 1876 — the same year the Indian Act was passed.

Those are the facts I have uncovered.

Why did they marry when they did? What was happening in their lives? What did Eliza experience as a Songhees woman during that period? What happened to her family during the smallpox epidemic?

I can ask these questions. I can search the records. I can listen for what my ancestors may still have to tell me.

But I will not invent answers simply to fill the gaps.

I have spent more than 20 years researching my family history, and there is so much I still don't know.

My great-grandfather's 1881 diary records ordinary activities: pulling turnips, digging ditches, killing a panther and hunting deer with someone identified as Indian John.

I have fragments of their lives, but I want to understand the people behind those fragments.

My Portuguese grandfather left home at just 14 and worked aboard a whaling ship. Portugal has its own long history of maritime conquest and colonialism. What did he know? What did he witness? How did he understand the world he entered?

I don't know all the answers.

But I am willing to ask the questions.

That is what researching family history should do. It should make us curious about the lives our ancestors lived, the decisions they made and the histories that shaped them.

It should also make us look beyond our own family trees.

the Indian Act was not the beginning

The Indian Act was passed in 1876, but colonization and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples had begun long before that.

The Act consolidated earlier legislation and gave the federal government sweeping powers over First Nations lands, resources, governance and legal identity. It became a central instrument of colonial control and assimilation.

Indigenous peoples already had their own laws, governments, economies, cultures and relationships with their territories. They did not need Europeans to bring them civilization.

Yet colonial governments treated Indigenous peoples as populations to be controlled, displaced and assimilated.

The consequences were profound: loss of land, restrictions on cultural practices, interference with families and communities, residential schools, and generations of harm.

We cannot discuss Canadian history honestly without acknowledging the violence and the policies that helped establish the country.

And we cannot pretend the effects ended when the laws were written or when the people responsible passed away.

now think about privilege

I want people to consider something uncomfortable.

You can come from a family that struggled. Your grandparents might have arrived with very little money. They might have worked hard, experienced discrimination themselves and sacrificed to give their children better opportunities.

Those experiences matter.

But they do not erase what happened to the people whose lands your family settled on.

You can recognize the struggles of immigrants and acknowledge Indigenous dispossession at the same time.

You can love your ancestors without pretending they lived outside history.

You can be proud of your family's achievements while asking how the society they entered was established and who paid the price.

Privilege does not mean that every person has an easy life. It does not mean that every newcomer is wealthy or that every descendant of settlers has been handed a comfortable existence.

It means looking honestly at the opportunities, protections and advantages that some people receive while others are denied them.

And it means recognizing that the history of this land is not simply a story of newcomers arriving and building a country.

People were already here.

immigrants in their own land

Here is what particularly troubles me.

Indigenous people have lived on these territories since time immemorial. Their descendants are still here, yet they continue to face racism, discrimination, poverty and the consequences of colonial policies.

Meanwhile, people born and raised in Canada are increasingly being treated as though they are the problem when they cannot afford housing, find secure work or make ends meet.

People who have lived here their entire lives are struggling to find a place to live. People who worked, paid taxes, raised families or contributed to their communities can find themselves priced out of the places they call home.

Some feel like strangers in their own neighbourhoods. Some feel abandoned by the country they grew up in.

And Indigenous people have experienced the dispossession of their own territories on a far deeper historical scale.

These are different histories, and we should not pretend they are identical. But both demand that we ask difficult questions about who has power, who gets access to resources, who is pushed aside and who is blamed when systems fail.

We should be able to discuss housing, immigration, wages and public services without turning vulnerable people against one another.

Newcomers are not collectively responsible for Canada's housing crisis. Indigenous people are not responsible for the poverty imposed on their communities. People struggling to survive should not be treated as disposable simply because they have less money or less power.

The real questions concern the policies, economic decisions and inequalities shaping our lives.

Who benefits? Who is excluded? Who has a voice? And who is expected to carry the consequences?

what do we owe one another?

I am not writing this to tell every person alive today to feel guilty for having ancestors who came from somewhere else.

We did not choose the circumstances of our births.

But we can choose whether to learn the history honestly.

We can choose to listen when Indigenous people tell us what happened to their families and communities. We can learn whose territory we live on. We can acknowledge the violence of colonization without dismissing it as ancient history.

We can also refuse to accept a society in which people who are struggling are blamed for their circumstances while those with the greatest power and resources escape scrutiny.

We need to stop treating human beings as problems to be removed.

Whether we are talking about Indigenous communities, immigrants, people experiencing homelessness, people living in poverty or families who can no longer afford the cities where they grew up, we should be asking what has gone wrong and what we can do to make things better.

A person's worth is not determined by the size of their bank account, the colour of their skin, the country their parents came from or whether they have a permanent address.

i want people to think

Look at your family history.

Ask where your ancestors came from, why they left, what they experienced and how they came to live where they did.

Then look at the history of the people who were already here.

Learn about the 1862 smallpox epidemic. Learn about the Tsilhqot'in chiefs who were hanged in 1864–1865. Learn about the Indian Act, residential schools and the policies that attempted to break Indigenous connections to land, family and culture.

Consider what your ancestors may have witnessed and what opportunities became available to their descendants.

You don't have to reject your family to acknowledge the truth.

You don't have to deny the struggles of immigrants to recognize the genocide and dispossession experienced by Indigenous peoples.

And you don't have to accept a system that treats people born and raised here as disposable when they fall into poverty.

We cannot change the past, but we can stop pretending it never happened.

We can stop blaming the people with the least power for every problem we face.

We can listen. We can learn. We can question the stories we were taught. We can make room for histories that were ignored or deliberately silenced.

I am still searching for the story of my great-great-grandmother, Eliza. I want to understand her life, her family and the world she lived in.

Her history matters to me because she is my ancestor.

And the history of Indigenous peoples matters to all of us because it is part of the history of this land.

Before you decide who belongs, who deserves help, who is privileged or who is the problem, take a look at the history that brought us here.

Who was here before your ancestors arrived? What happened to them? What advantages do you have today? And what are you going to do with what you learn?

Those are questions worth asking.

Not to divide us, but to help us understand one another, confront injustice and build a country where nobody is treated as an unwanted person in the place they call home.