CANADA DAY

Canada Day is a national celebration that marks the anniversary of the creation of the country in 1867.

It is celebrated every year on the first of July with a day off, barbecues, fireworks and lots of patriotic songs, flags and
decorative maple leaves.

Killa Atencio, an indigenous activist, entrepreneur and writer, whose ancestors belong to one of the First Nations in
Quebec, refuses to celebrate Canada Day in this text dated 2015. Indeed, she blames her country for refusing to
recognize/acknowledge the harms and traumas of its colonial history, the killings, the dispossession/theft of land
and culture, the broken treaties and the assimilation policy applied with the Indian Residential School system (a
government-funded network of Christian boarding schools for indigenous peoples that were practically like
concentration camps). She cannot rejoice when the legacy of the past is still so deeply traumatizing for so many
people like her who still feel like second-hand citizens.