Welcome to Canada: Now Forget Everything That Actually Happened

F*ck Canada Day

Every July 1st, Canada puts on its clown costume of flags, fireworks, and bullshit. I used to have a special sentiment towards it as a newcomer who arrived here more than 30 years ago, shortly before the big holiday that would celebrate Canada as being 125 years old.

I think we went to Niagara Falls to witness the celebrations. I was underweight, anemic after a bout of chickenpox and it was just hitting me that I now lived here and that I temporarily lost everything I loved: my culture, language, my friends… my identity. It was a rough realization to deal with at 15 years old but I was charmed and distracted by the festivities and I laughed at my dad’s joke about 125 years being the age of the oldest citizen in Poland. In a way it seemed like our very own welcome, the fireworks and flags and the balloons. Indeed, for newcomers, Canada Day is a big deal, a celebration of a new life in our new country. And for settlers, it’s a chance to feel proud.

For many Indigenous people, however, it’s a reminder that this country loves a story especially when it isn’t true.

I became a citizen two years after our arrival. I remember flipping through the citizenship study guide, trying to memorize dates and names for the test. I remember the pictures of smiling Mounties. I don’t remember reading that the country I was joining was founded on stolen land, broken treaties, and cultural erasure. I haven’t been able to get a hold of the copy of that guide from 1994 but we now have Discover Canada that was most recently updated earlier this year (2025) and that Indigenous scholars and advocates continue to critique calling it “violently obsolete,” “revolving around a racist history” and just generally failing to fully meet TRC Call to Action 93¹ for a revised, inclusive newcomer resource.

Right away, the booklet serves up a lie: that the ancestors of Indigenous peoples “migrated from Asia” across a land bridge 15,000 years ago. This theory – called the Bering Land Bridge hypothesis – is old, tired, and still widely contested. It is also a colonial smokescreen. By suggesting that Indigenous people “migrated” here, the guide subtly frames them as earlier immigrants rather than original inhabitants. It sets up a false equivalency between settlers and the people they displaced. We all came from somewhere, it implies – as if genocide and immigration are comparable processes. This theory also ignores what really matters – that Indigenous nations have their own origin stories, many of which place them here since time immemorial. Their relationship to the land is spiritual, ancestral, and continuous. Presenting a debunked scientific theory as the truth while ignoring Indigenous knowledge systems isn’t just ignorant – it is erasure dressed up as education.

Then there are the treaties that are presented like a friendly handshake agreement. There is a brief talk about the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and the Constitution Act of 1982, as if those documents sealed the deal and everyone lived happily ever after after high-fiving each other. What it doesn’t say is that many treaties were misunderstood, misrepresented, or flat-out ignored by the Crown and that oral traditions – which are crucial to Indigenous treaty interpretation – aren’t even mentioned. It doesn’t say anything about the fact that treaty rights are still being fought for in courtrooms across the country.

The guide also fails to name the Doctrine of Discovery, a 15th-century Christian legal principle that justified taking land from non-Christians. This doctrine still underpins Canadian law but there’s no mention of it in the guide, because naming it would force us to confront the foundational theft at the heart of Canada’s existence.

Moving on… Residential schools? The booklet calls them “a dark chapter,” which is like calling a devastating and fatal collision a “rough patch.” It offers no real accounting of the scale of more than 150,000 children taken from their homes, forced to abandon their languages and cultures, abused, and in thousands of cases, never returned. There are no mentions of the unmarked graves being uncovered. Nothing about the Sixties Scoop — the systemic removal of thousands of Indigenous children by welfare agencies from the 1960s through the 1990s. No discussion of the intergenerational trauma still rippling through communities. Just a little, muted, regretful aside about those unfortunate schools before moving on to inventions and hockey.

And that’s the tone throughout the booklet. I know that booklets by nature are dry and not very literary with text that makes the reader feel 10 years old but, honestly, when the guide mentions Indigenous peoples, it’s mostly to acknowledge their “contributions” – canoes, maple syrup, snowshoes – as if their only value lies in what they provided to settlers, a kind of polite racism that smiles while silencing. And, in 2025 the booklet still uses broad, catch-all terms like “Aboriginal” without distinguishing between First Nations, Inuit, and Métis.

But maybe the most disturbing thing is the context: this is a citizenship guide. This is how new Canadians learn about the country they’re pledging allegiance to. It’s our official script. And it trains immigrants not to see the full truth, but to recite the approved one. We are asked to become good citizens, but the education we receive is shallow, sanitized, and soaked in nationalism.

I mean are we actually welcomed here on the condition that we don’t ask about what came before? That we don’t learn about the land we now share and recognize the genocide that made room for our arrival? And then we’re told to feel nice and proud about all of that and wave the flag on July 1st. Honestly, fuck Canada Day – to me and to you Canada Day shouldn’t mark freedom or equality. What Canada Day is actually celebrating is the signing of the British North America Act. It is celebrating the beginning of a federal system that excluded Indigenous nations and that criminalized ceremonies and that legislated assimilation.

If Canada is serious about reconciliation – and not just the optics, not just the half-assed land acknowledgments, but the real work – then it needs to start acknowledging its real history and having it reflected in Discover Canada. I for one would like to see a complete reimagining of this text that would center Indigenous voices and that would challenge newcomers to understand the full truth of this place. Maybe then the ceremony of becoming a citizen wouldn’t be just another symbolic act of pretending that this corp is so good at. And as for Canada Day – it should be a day of mourning and reflection. Perhaps starting with acknowledging how this country is still lying about how it began, feeding its pretend story to newcomers, many of whom escape regimes already built on lies and destruction to find a better life here.

In 2021, after the discovery of unmarked graves at former residential schools, numerous Canada Day celebrations were canceled by municipalities, and thousands participated in vigils and marches as part of the #CancelCanadaDay movement. I remember reading the Internet and all the opponents of the protests who were complaining about not being able to have barbecues and balloons, how the protests were putting a damper on such a nice festivity. A friend argued that this was a holiday for the fresh newcomers who couldn’t afford a lot of things and who liked to gather in parks to watch the fireworks, how dare people rob them of this fun occasion! As if the real tragedy was the missed photo ops, not the fact that we’ve been told to dance on graves the whole time.

1. We call upon the federal government, in collaboration with the national Aboriginal organizations, to revise the information kit for newcomers to Canada and its citizenship test to reflect a more inclusive history of the diverse Aboriginal peoples of Canada, including information about the Treaties and the history of residential schools.