This has been a July unlike any other. On Canada Day, tens of thousands across the country expressed solidarity with Indigenous Peoples by attending an Every Child Matters march. Most Canadians did not know until recently that thousands of Indigenous kids died while attending residential 'schools' between the mid 1800s and 1996. We should have paid more attention to the artists who tried to educate us, and less attention to successive governments who tried to bury the brutal history of the residential school system along with the deceased children. In 1989, a film called Where The Spirit Lives was featured at Toronto International Film Festival, and I was lucky enough to see it. The film told the story of Komi, a young girl of the Kainai Nation who is abducted from her family by an "Indian agent" of the Canadian government and brought to a residential school. Her best friend Poona suffers ongoing sexual abuse, runs away to escape those horrors, and dies during her journey. The film's soundtrack was composed by Buffy Sainte-Marie, who has always told us the truth about the brutal history of colonization. Two and a half decades later, terminally-ill Canadian music legend Gord Downie (of The Tragically Hip) recorded The Secret Path, a final passion project to raise awareness about the horrors of the residential school system. In song, he told us the true story of Chanie Wenjack, a young boy who died while trying to escape from the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School in Ontario. But Gord wanted us to do more than cry. Collaborating with the Wenjack family, he set up the Gord Downie & Chanie Wenjack Fund to improve the lives of First Peoples in Canada and recommend ReconciliACTIONs that we can all take. This is what the greatest artists have always demanded of us: that we do something after we learn about an injustice. The actions have only just begun here in the unceded territories that some call North America. As we learn how to move forward together, let's listen to some inspiring work by Buffy Sainte-Marie and traditional drum group Northern Cree: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpRp4WTg9J8