SASKATOON -- Nearly twenty year ago, John McDonald, a Cree/Métis activist from Prince Albert who was 19 years-old at the time, got an opportunity to study history at the University of Cambridge in England on a summer scholarship.
On his way to Saskatoon to get his passport, the person he caught a ride with said, “You’re heading back to the land of the colonizers. Wouldn’t it be funny if you discovered their country?”
“I thought of it as a joke but as the trip went on, we started fleshing out the idea a little bit more,” McDonald said.
Growing up and taking part in numerous activist events in Saskatchewan, McDonald decided to go ahead on the idea. He packed with him the Canadian flag with an Indigenous leader holding a ceremonial pipe printed over the maple leaf with him to England.
“You see it at any protest, if you went to the rez (reserve), you saw it on their window, it was on somebody’s wall,” said McDonald.
On July 27, 2000, McDonald dressed in a buckskin jacket; he braided his hair with an eagle feather and wore a T-shirt of Chief Big Bear and walked into Queen’s College Park in Cambridge.
He announced to a small crowd: “I’m a visitor from a strange land and I see a people who have their own culture, their own government, their own way of life and buildings, their own way of praying but in the time honoured tradition of Columbus, of Cartier, Cabot and all these explorers, this didn’t exist until I got here. This is all new and I claim it. For the first peoples of the Americas.”
McDonald then stuck the Canadian flag with the Indigenous leader on it in the ground and people began to clap.
“I started looking over my shoulder for the cops,” McDonald recalls, laughing.
Some media outlets covered McDonald’s small act of activism in the park. He said he was happy it opened many eyes and started positive conversations about the effects of colonialism in the world.
“People were coming up to me and saying, ‘Well, I didn’t know that.’ Everybody stuck to the Columbus narrative of 1492. The one thing I would always say is, just because (Columbus) arrived here and found people, he didn’t discover it. You can’t discover something when someone is already there.
"It would be like me going into your house and saying, ‘I’ve discovered your TV, I’ve discovered your kitchen, it’s mine now. Even though you lived here your whole life, its mine now.’ I try to put it in that perspective for people to understand. You can’t claim something and take something that isn’t yours.”
McDonald says he also did it because he wanted to change the narrative he was learning about in his history studies and wanted to counteract what was being taught in schools back home.
“This was part of the history that was being taught. The history of exploders coming from the Crown heads of Europe to claim this land to fill the coffers of European Kings and Queens. (North America) is our ancestral home. We’ve been here since time immoral. Our ancestors are the Earth and you can’t just come and take that.”
When asked if things are getting better with reconciliation efforts in Canada, McDonald said, “there is still lots of work.
“There’s a lot of tokenism that’s been happening. A lot of political correctness being checked off with land acknowledgements, it’s a nice gesture. I want (Indigenous people) at the table and I want us there as honest and equal partners. Whenever somebody has to make a decision on a municipal, provincial or federal level, not just there as tokenism, I want Indigenous voices at the table,” said McDonald.
Today, McDonald is an artist and writer who works for a local school division as an educational associate and as a knowledge keeper and cultural advisor.
“I am honoured to be a teacher and share with young people Indigenous culture and share those teachings and pass it on to the next generation.”
