In the Anishinaabe creation story, the figure of Nanabozhoo plays a major role. As I understand it he is the first being in human form to walk the Earth. Since we are the last species to be created, he walks the land and learns from other species. They teach him -and us - the way humans should live.

The memorial of the 27 children who died while attending residential school in Chapleau moved me deeply. The country that I love tried to erase these children. We tried to erase the languages they spoke and the cultures they belonged to. How do we even start trying to make things right?

What can non-indigenous Canadians do to address the depths of damage our society inflicted on generations of children in residential schools? To find out I attended the National Gathering on Missing Children and Unmarked Graves and Burial Sites. The fifth such National Gathering since the discovery of the 215 unmarked graves of children in Kamloops in 2021, these are hosted by the Special Interlocutor appointed to help communities now running searches at dozens of residential school sites across the country.

A copse of trees huddles on a slope between the road above and a rail line on the valley floor. The trees are birch, pine and spruce, spaced close enough together to block out most of teh sun. Somehow flowers more commonly associated with the prairie have crept in around the edges, like smooth rose with their little pink bell-shaped buds.

Je suis au volant encore une fois, de retour dans le nord de l’Ontario. Je suis en train de retracer chemin jusqu'à Chapleau pour assister à une cérémonie pour honorer les enfants morts dans l'école résidentielle de la ville.

But I don’t come at this as a neutral outsider. I believe all of us who have benefitted from what Canada has become owns the good as well as the bad. But I also had a direct ancestor who played a role in expanding and deepening the residential school system.

As I pursue my explorations through Northern Ontario, I'm trying to come to terms with the harm we have done to our indigenous fellow citizens. There is a sense of remorse in this, but it's mixed with hope that we can do better. Without hope, there can be no progress.

As I drive through the northern stretches of the Great Lakes, I’m discovering chapters of Canadian history that are new to me. Many of these chapters feature more positive relations between First Nations and Europeans – chapters in which the two appeared to interact with some degree of mutual acceptance and some degree of mutual respect.

The League of Nations, founded only two years prior, was based on the principle of the sovereign equality of nations. The world had embraced the vision of national self-determination celebrated by U.S. President Wilson in his Fourteen Points.

I wrote about one nation that has lived in relationship with the land where I now live, the Haudenosaunee. Today I am travelling to the heart of a second such nation, the Anishinaabe. And learning about the Prophecy of the Seventh Fire, an origin story we should all come to embrace.

Hier j’ai vu des framboises sauvages, les plantes rubus idaeus. C’est mon amie Annie Legault qui les a identifiées lors de notre randonnée autour de la Mer Bleue, une tourbière dans le sud-est d’Ottawa. C’était un matin chaud et humide de juillet et les framboises rouges flottaient au-dessus des herbes hautes, la majorité déjà piquées par les oiseaux.

This land that I now live on, just above the Don River, has been in relationship with humans for thousands of years. As I build my own relationship with it, I want to know those who have cared for it before.

I live not that far from the centre of Toronto. This morning I took my dog Cinco through a break in the fence two blocks from our home. Twenty metres down all I could see was green, even if the noise above reminded me that six million other Canadians live close at hand.

The people who first lived in this land have offered us a way to bring ourselves together in common purpose. We say the following words at the beginning of any serious undertaking, such as the building of a new nation. We draw on a thousand-year tradition of diplomacy in committing ourselves to relationship with the land and with one another. I give thanks to the Haudenosaunee Confederacy for offering this "ThanksgivingAddress" for us all to say: