When a nation dies and never ascends
from the ashes of its own destruction, one circumstance must always
be present. That nation forgot where it came from. It lost sight
of its roots. The struggle for identity and the fervid quest for
nationhood disappeared into the mists of time. The nation gave up
on the quest. Outsiders came in, and this nation denied its heritage.
Vision and hope faded; customs became suppressed through assimilation
and doubt. Those people, who's forefathers and mothers would hold
nothing to be impossible in their vision of a nation, joined in
the hopelessness and despair. They forgot where they came from.
They lost sight of their heritage. And when men forget what is at
the heart of their nation, they lose their identity and their past,
and become one with a people foreign to them and their ways, and
disappear.
Yet I can see in the Métis of today
the faces of the great Riel and Dumont, and the faces of those who
struggled at Batoche, and I realize that our nation yet lives. I
have seen the faces of the Métis people from the prairies to the
lakes. They are the faces of a nation still strong, a reflection
of the past, yet with the strength of the present. We can go back
to the Red River and to the fur trading routes of the north, and
we can see the same faces of the men, women and children who live
today, who, like their ancestors, share in the making of the Métis
nation. Our forefathers passed on a legacy of backbreaking toil
and the turmoil of revolution. Their faces gazed from the backs
of the Red River carts, from crude huts on the traplines, from the
trenches at Duck Lake. They saw change, and they saw years of despair;
until now, when the Métis nation is again to take it's rightful
place in this country.
I see their faces throughout the whole
story of the Métis people. We have been given our heritage, this
land that we honour, through the dreams and visions and struggles
of our forefathers and mothers. The cost has been high, but the
price that they paid has been worthy of them. To forge our nation
took men and women who were willing to become a new people. And
they did that. And it is up to us to tell our children and they,
their children, to the seventh generation, that we remember our
identity, and from this identity we will shape our nation.
The Métis nation must
not be forgotten and allowed to die. We owe it to those who passed
this way before us, who gave us our grand heritage, who carved our
nation with their hands and their hearts, that we will carry on
with the struggle, and that we will write the history of a new nation,
strong in our belief in the Creator, a love of our land, and a faith
in our people.
John Roberts, adapted
from Carl Sandburg
