In December 2025, I visited the McMichael Canadian Art Collection with my husband, a visual artist. The McMichael holds a special place in our relationship, a place where he, an American, met many of the Indigenous artists who survived colonization and its aftermath to make art exploring the heart of Turtle Island’s beauty, torment, and sources of healing. This art has been important to me for most of my life.
As a white girl born into the racist culture of a US/Canadian border town, I grew up hearing and reading stories of white beneficence toward “backward Natives.” My real education began with a teachers’ college friendship, not with an Indigenous person, but with a friend who during this period identified as a Black woman. Before we had words like settler, and intersectional feminist, and systemic racism, and cultural genocide, we didn’t address the obvious inequities in schooling that led many whites into professions and People of Colour into the less-than positions open to “minorities.”