By Zamboni
Today is Olivia de Havilland's 105th birthday — the first birthday that Dame Olivia herself is not around to celebrate, alas. It's also a not-so-happy Canada Day.
The Montreal Canadiens are down two games to none in the Stanley Cup finals. Wednesday was a brutal night for Les Habitants.
But let's talk about the real habitants: the Indigenous peoples whose lives were upended and destroyed by the arrival of Europeans on the North American continent. In the last century and a half, with a mighty assist from the Catholic Church, Canada removed Indigenous children from their families and placed them in so-called residential schools — where cultural genocide, torture, sexual abuse and even murder appear to have been routine. The discovery of mass graves at the sites of the former schools has shocked the country.
So today seems more like a day for reflection than for celebration.
But hey, Neighbors to the North — cheer up! We Americans haven't even begun to reckon with our crimes against humanity. There's everything we did to our Indigenous populations, from infecting them with smallpox to the Trail of Tears and beyond. And you guys were smart enough to abolish slavery in 1834. We didn't. In fact, in many ways we're still fighting a Civil War that ended 156 years ago.
Truth and reconciliation are not in the American DNA — but they might be in yours, Canada. We cats hope so, and we PURR.
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