(Re: Citizens Aren’t Racist, They’re Just Angry — letter, Aug. 17)

I AM also a citizen of Thunder Bay and I am also angry.

I am angry that I live in a rich country where some communities are forced to live without clean drinking water for decades.

I am angry to live in a nation that has spent millions of dollars fighting court rulings that seek to ensure that Indigenous children receive an equivalent investment for health and education as non-Indigenous children.

I am angry to have my pension invested in extractive industries that are destroying the planet by stealing Indigenous people’s land, here and abroad.

I am angry that the white-supremacist ideologies of my forebears justified the monstrous and genocidal policy of stripping Indigenous children from their parents and placing them in schools where they were abused. I’m angry that, today, we all have to deal with the legacies of intergenerational trauma.

I’m angry that I have to be ashamed of so many of my elders who react rather than inquire, who cultivate resentment rather than compassion, and show such moral cowardice they can’t even be honest about their own racism.

Max Haiven

Thunder Bay