TO DREAM OF ORANGE POPPIES

It looks much smaller in the picture.

That was my first thought when I visited my chosen mural, a wide expanse of poppies on the side of a Veteran’s centre, branch 73. It covered every inch of the south facing wall, rolling into a solemn graveyard, a string of medals, and a downed plane surrounded by smoke that reached up to the edge of the brick.

With so much to take in, the poppies almost felt overshadowed.

The ward I was assigned for this writing, ward 20, mostly houses murals when it comes to public art. Big, beautiful murals, stretching under overpasses and across storefront walls. This one is, relatively, more hidden, tucked into a side street off the Danforth with little else around.

I don’t think it would be my first choice if I was just wandering the area, but it felt too serendipitous to ignore at this time of year.

In my childhood, poppies appeared annually like clockwork. Mandatory school assemblies were held on Remembrance Day, and you were expected to sit quietly, with a felt poppy neatly pinned to your lapel, and listen to a (white) veteran speak. The same poem was read at the end of each ceremony, and we were ushered back to class.

To this day, I’m unsure what this does for ‘remembrance’. We are not told the names of the soldiers who fought, nor are we told why. We are simply asked to ‘remember ‘faceless soldiers none of us have ever known.

I would refer here to the definition of the term: 

Remembrance: the action of remembering the dead.

I find it hard to remember something I do not truly know, to only remember those soldiers I’ve never had the chance to forget.  

In my adult life, the act of remembering feels much more complex in that all are not remembered equally.

In our history of military commendation, we did not ‘remember’ to recognize the work of Indigenous veterans until they fought for the right to be visible.[1]

In our written histories we still do not remember – any semblance of whole truth dissolved by the seizing and interreference of records on the part of the Department of Indian Affairs. Obfuscated by bureaucratic incompetence.[2]

In contrast to the blurriness of administration, I wish to be clear – I am of settler-colonial blood. I do not want to mislead anyone into thinking that this is my fight, but I also cannot stand the thought of ignoring the hurt that has been done in favour of praising the poppy, the military, uncritically.

I also do not want to imply that those soldiers who are remembered under the poppy should not be – every individual who risked their life for our country deserves that respect. Rather, I want to enforce the idea that that remembrance should be equal. That the Indigenous soldiers that fought in those trenches should be remembered not just for their sacrifice on the battlefield, but also for the pain we put upon them when they returned. That no solider is ignored.

When I looked up at those poppies, they felt overshadowed. Not necessarily by the tableaus framing them, but by the heavy weight of inequity that lay in the air behind.

Perhaps they will only rise back into the sun once orange poppies sprout plentifully around them.

[1] Kirkup, Kristy. “The Road to Recognition Has Been Long and Hard for Indigenous Veterans.” The Globe and Mail, 7 Nov. 2021, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-the-long-road-to-recognition-indigenous-veterans-to-be-honoured-on/. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021.

[2] Kulkarni, Akshay. “Indigenous Veterans in B.C. Call for Recognition, More Support on Their Day of Remembrance.” CBC, 8 Nov. 2021, https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/aboriginal-veterans-day-2021-1.6239775. Accessed 10 Nov. 2021.