To think that as teenagers my friends and I thought it was cool to sneak into the abandoned “Old Indian School”, as we knew it, and explore it with flashlights, frightening each other with rumours of haunting and dead children buried below us. We had no idea.

In 2005 I painted the picture, Whitewashed, with which I tried to illustrate the effects of what this nation has inflicted upon its indigenous people. But, now I realize that - in spite of a decade of tidbits accumulating within me to form a compassion since my clueless, teenage excursions - that painting was still inspired with no real grasp of Canadian aboriginals and their plight. Tonight I sit here disgusted with that ignorance, but especially with my country.

Every Canadian needs to see the documentary, Unrepentant: Kevin Annett and Canada’s Genocide. Please watch it here on Google Video or download the torrent here. I also encourage you to visit hiddenfromhistory.org.

“Kevin is more deserving of the Nobel Peace Prize than many who have received it in the past.” - Dr. Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

As a self-employed artist I basically dictate my own work schedule, but in order to do so I’ve had to structure my life to where I have very few financial and familial responsibilities outside of the basics required to keep me smiling, ie: budgeting for occasional pizza deliveries and trips to get hugs from my niece. My life is far from ideal, but I can enjoy it, because it affords me the time to mine for inspiration deep within a plethora of things that pique my curiosity and expand my consciousness. To what end, though?

There were times in our distant past when poets, philosophers, writers and artists had a much more symbiotic relationship with laborers, businessmen and the rest of society. Each had an intimate and articulate appreciation for the roles another played in the health of the community as a whole. That symbiosis is scarce now and we are all to blame for that disconnect. It has seen the entire system we rely on fail on a grand scale, but nobody wants to hear of their participation in that truth. Nobody wants to hear they are wrong. Hell, nobody wants to hear anything outside the televised salve the failed system itself offers. That willful ignorance does nothing but secure us as imminently fucked. We’ve spun far beyond what Howard Beale hollered about over thirty years ago…

But, we don’t have to be so imminently fucked. There is hope, but not the promise, of a new tomorrow. The truth is out there; it just won’t be broadcast by the six voices that whisper behind your back. The truth is being mined, smelted, polished and offered to you daily by those who have taken care to do so, but the packaging isn’t necessarily pretty. In the same way as a farmer’s hard work yields him a harvest of fresh produce, so I see the fruits of well-researched intellectualism, in that the less manufactured processing they endure, the better they likely are for consumption. A body that gets its daily bread from fast food chains can expect the same nourishment as a brain that gets its information from mainstream media outlets.

Bleh. I’m all over the place. I just wish we could wake up and collectively end our torrid love affair with a system that is killing us in every sense of the word and return to a more harmonious relationship with our planet and each other. Yeah, yeah… I’m a dreamer, I know.