An Oracle Concerning Canada

Every September 30th, Canadians mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. The day is set aside to remember the children who never came home from residential schools, to honour the Survivors who did, and to reckon with a country that built far too much of itself on stolen land and broken promises.

It is a young observance  (only officially recognized since 2021 )  yet the grief it holds is much older. The graves of children do not observe a calendar.

Across the country, Canadians wear orange. Politicians read scripted acknowledgements. Government buildings and bridges are lit up at dusk. Classrooms across the nation tell the story of Phyllis Webstad, the Secwépemc child whose orange shirt was taken away on her first day at a residential school, stripped from her body as a sign that everything she was, everything she loved, was unwelcome. Dirty.

To wear orange is easy; to confront the legacy that orange represents is harder. 

For a really long time, Canada has loved to tell itself a tidy story: a nation of peacekeepers, of multicultural tolerance, and politeness. But underneath this myth is a more tangled, more brutal narrative.

Enter the prophets

Isaiah. Amos. Jeremiah. Micah. Ezekiel.

These are some of the prophets we read about in the Hebrew Bible. To say they had a difficult job would be an understatement. Their task was to bring news of God’s displeasure with the people’s wrongdoing, to warn of the consequences of injustice, and to hold out the promise of reconciliation that would one day come. They often spoke in oracles — direct communications from God, cast in sacred verse.

Prophets were rarely beloved. They lived on the fringes, howling in the wilderness, wearing camel’s hair, eating locusts, or walking barefoot through the streets. They confronted kings and queens, priests and generals, with the one thing nobody wanted to hear: the truth. 

And the truth, more often than not, cost them dearly.

To be a prophet was to accept ridicule, rejection, sometimes even death. Speaking truth to power has always carried consequences.

When institutional Christianity needs a prophet

The church was never just an innocent bystander to Canada’s sins. It was not merely a hand-wringing neighbour, powerless to intervene. 

Nope. Too often it was the chaplain to colonial power.

It stood at the schoolhouse door and told Indigenous children their languages were shameful and their families unfit. It preached that their very identities were barriers to salvation.

My own denomination, the United Church of Canada, helped run residential schools. 15 of them. We thought we were saving souls, but in truth we were breaking spirits. Sometimes, more than spirits . We broke bodies, too.

For years, we told ourselves it was God’s work, but now we know what it really was.

Evil.

The United Church, like other denominations, has been trying for decades to repent and repair. Apologies were made in 1986 and again in 1998. Healing funds were created. Partnerships have been sought. Commitments to reconciliation have been etched into liturgy and church constitutions.

But atonement cannot bring back the children who never came home.

Prophets in Canada

Canada, too, is being confronted by prophets who will not let us forget. They name the truths we would rather bury: treaties signed with no intent to honour them; whole communities uprooted and forced onto isolated reserves; children stolen and sent to residential schools; the “60s Scoop” scattering families and severing kinship ties.

They remind us that today—not yesterday—First Nations still live under boil-water advisories while their neighbours drink freely from the tap. They call out the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit People, their families still holding up photographs, begging for their daughters’ lives to matter.

The prophets include Indigenous writers, activists, and Elders who speak of land and water with a reverence many settlers have yet to grasp.

As it is with prophets, they are rarely popular. They are shamed, dismissed, gaslit. They are told to “move on,” as if centuries of dispossession could be resolved with a shrug. They are accused of being divisive, of dwelling on the past, of making “old stock Canadians” uncomfortable.

But prophets have never been in the business of comfort.

What Would a Prophet Say?

If Isaiah or Amos walked through Winnipeg’s North End, or stood on the unceded territories of British Columbia, what would they say? 

If Micah sat through another parliamentary debate about whether Indigenous communities deserve clean water, would he tear his clothes and cry out like he did in Jerusalem? 

If Jeremiah stood at the site of another uncovered mass grave, would his lament be any less raw than it was two thousand years ago?

Prophets do not flatter nations. They do not clap politely while justice is delayed.

And so, if a prophet were to stand in Canada today — outside Parliament, on the steps of a church, at the edge of a reserve where water still cannot be drunk…

…what would they say?  

Here is a thought.

An Oracle Concerning Canada

O Canada, your myth is built upon an illusion of peace,
 yet your temples rest upon graveyards,
 where tombstones are etched by lies.
Remember with anguish the landing of your ancestors,
 claiming territory not of their birthright,
 seeing only emptiness where they had not yet disturbed.

With ink to paper, and finger to nose,
 promises were made to your maltreated hosts,
 and accepted under duress and false pretense.
Yet, still you despised your covenants;
 stitching with threads of contempt,
 tailoring treaties to suit your body alone.

Listen! Tears of despair flood the night!
 Young ones bawling for their mothers.
 Women keening for their babies.
You snatch children like chattel,
 Until entire villages mourn,
 Silence the reminder youth no longer lives among them.

Yet generation piled on generation you sit, nodding your head in silent accord,
 Convinced as you are by the false prophets,
 Unaware of the violence hanging contemptuously from your tongue.
You claim the Lord’s will, though it is not known to you.
 You judge craving and sloth, though it is of your own making.

Lord is mighty and strong, and you will deny justice no more.
 Like fires engulfing the dry Northern lands,
 The wrath of the Lord will ultimately consume.
And you will cry and cry and cry*, the pain too much for your malnourished bones,
 Repentance can only lead to hearts breaking open.
 What begins in the heart ultimately engulfs the soul’s entirety. 🦢

Rev. Bri-anne Swan writes for tender hearts and tired souls. She’s a minister, multidisciplinary artist, and someone who feels the weight of the world more days than not. You can find her congregation, East End United Regional Ministry, here.

*“Reconciliation” by Rebekah Tabobondung, Muskrat Magazine, March 4, 2013