Truth Comes Before Reconciliation:

WASP Culture and Canadians' need for accountability and healing

Yesterday I learned that a young man I worked with, fishing shrimp in Labrador, Canada, had died. Today, the first day of 2026, I learned that he took his own life. I wish I could say it was a shock, but honestly it’s what I expected… he isn’t the first I’ve known who’s died this way, and I know he won’t be the last. It feels like every year brings another such loss to the far northern communities where we landed fish for so many years, and I’ve lost count of the number of men I knew who took this step. I knew none of them well, and never for long, as they passed through my life only briefly, fishing two or three trips with us every summer and then moving on so a different crew could take their place, but I spent nearly twenty years fishing all over the Nunatsiavut territories, and I know every loss is devastating to a community which is all too familiar with grief and tragedy.

Far more of the community who fished with us has been lost to disease, to accident, to drug and alcohol abuse, than to suicide, but the root cause is the same: colonial genocide. Lack of access to medical care and screening, meaning that cancers are beyond help by the time they’re detected. Poverty and malnutrition, a population addicted to the colonizers’ sodas and candy as much as to our drugs and alcohol. Men and women lost at sea or on the ice because our federal government doesn’t allocate the resources for more than a single search and rescue team to cover the entire Labrador territory. Mothers fighting for more SAR resources instead of having the time and space to mourn the loss of their children, mothers who care more about protecting the next parent’s child than about their own grief. Mothers suffering the loss of their children to a biased and exploitative foster care system, which allocates funds to white foster parents, but “can’t afford” to provide health care, addiction and rehab services, or income support to Indigenous parents.

I sit here in my clean and warm home, paid for with Labrador shrimp and crab, with a robust support system and the kind of wealth privilege that even my fellow white neighbours can only dream of, and try to make myself feel even a tenth of the grief that everyone in Makkovik must be feeling right now. Because the one thing that they have in abundance, that I can only observe from the outside and wonder about, is community. I’ve seen time and time again how close-knit the Labrador people are. How happy they are to be reunited with their families, even after only a few weeks at sea. How excited to see old friends on the wharf. The way they pull together to support each other through tragedy. And the deep, deep chasm between their lived experience and mine.

Photo by Kindel Media: https://www.pexels.com/photo/brown-and-white-crab-lot-8352010/

I sit silently with my family and hear the way they - the way we - talk about the workers who come aboard our boats. We talk about what a waste it is when a brilliant and hard working young man, who should, by our standards, own his own fishing enterprise by now, succumbs instead to drug use and trafficking charges. We talk about how inconvenient it is that they’re so unwilling to leave their families for a few weeks that they hold us up at the wharf for days waiting for them to arrive so we can go fishing. Don’t they understand we’re on a schedule? Don’t they understand that we’re also far from home, for months on end, and want to get back to our families? We demand empathy but offer none. Their needs are irrelevant in the face of our bottom line. We have a business to run, after all.

We’re completely steeped in WASP supremacy, which only assigns value to humans based on how well they can perform in a capitalist patriarchy. The work ethic is everything. Fuck your feelings, we have bills to pay. We think our unquestioning devotion to the WASP work ethic justifies every violent action we take against the communities we exploit: we’ve worked hard for everything we have. Nobody handed us anything. Every generation believes it’s new; none of us believe we’re accountable for our ancestors’ crimes. And so the cycle repeats.

My father is the hardest worker I know. He built a fishing enterprise from nothing - if you don’t count a huge inheritance of land from his late father the year he got married. That inheritance meant he didn’t have to put funds into a starter home for his young wife and newborn daughter (me), but could build a 65-foot crab boat instead. We won’t talk about why my family owns so much land - upwards of a hundred acres of wood- and farmland - in the middle of the traditional territory of the Mi’kmaq people; that’s old news, irrelevant to the present discussion (/irony). We won’t talk about why white settlers own the majority of the fishing licenses our federal government requires to be allowed to fish “legally” in “Canadian waters.” We won’t talk about the rampant anti-Indigenous bias within the fishing industry, the way we curse the need to have “them” aboard our boats so that we can profit off their resources, and grudgingly pay them a generous share of “our” catch for the privilege of being treated like trash by ignorant and biased white settlers.

My father is the hardest worker I know, and in the WASP mind, that means he’s entitled to everything he has. He’ll be seventy this month, and spent most of this past November dragging for cod on the South Labrador Sea. He’s told us in so many words that he doesn’t want to retire from fishing even though he has plenty to keep him busy here at home, because that kind of work “doesn’t mean anything.” It breaks my heart that he feels he doesn’t have value outside of his ability to land fish. It makes me question my value to him now that my body is no longer capable of the hard labour fishing demands. I feel guilty that he continues to pay me a living wage for a few hours of bookkeeping a week, because I don’t feel like I work hard enough to earn my right to a bare minimum subsistence salary. Even though I literally broke my body in service to the WASP values of shut your mouth and don’t ever complain. Push through when it hurts. Rest is for the weak. Quantity first; quality second; safety third.

My parents are kind and generous and loving, family- and community-oriented, and willing to give the shirts off their backs to those in need - as long as they’re deserving. I’m not sure they see how ruthlessly they divide people into deserving and not. I’ve only just learned to see it myself, after years of relentless pro-humanity education and deep introspection. And even with this awareness, my silence confirms my complicity. My fear of being ostracized - or worse - by my fellow WASPs reinforces my silence. I don’t know how to open this conversation, to begin to undermine the very foundation of my parents’ identity. I’m terrified to hurt them, to give them the pain of this self-awareness, to make them feel guilty for being privileged within a system that places them on top of a heap of corpses we can’t even begin to comprehend.

I stay up at night thinking about how to re-Indigenize this land, when it eventually passes to me. I try to reconcile the hypocrisy of us as Canadians being violently outspoken about the events of injustice happening among our neighbours to the south, or the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but shut down whenever Indigenous rights here at home are mentioned. We pride ourselves on being “less racist” than Americans - a grievous injustice to the many, many Americans I know who are fighting tooth and nail to reclaim their humanity, as well as representing the lowest of low bars, given the history of both our nations’ presence here on Turtle Island.

I’ve known many men just like Mickey Fox, late of Makkovik, in the unceded Nunatsiavut territories of Newfoundland and Labrador. Young men who felt they had no other recourse than to take their lives. And I’m ashamed to say this is the first time I’ve cried for any of them. Today is the first time I’ve felt personally responsible for yet another senseless death of a man I never spoke well of in life. I watch the mourning and the grief spread across my news feed, as all of coastal Labrador comes together to support each other in their grief, and I wonder what it would feel like to belong to a real community. I wonder how we can ever make reparations for seven generations and counting of relentless colonial violence. #landback is also the lowest of low bars, the absolute bare minimum of what we owe to these broken and suffering nations. We are Israel, and our Gaza Strip is still enduring genocide at our hands.

We can’t undo the past, but we can look it in the face and own it. The educators I follow tell me that the first step, for me personally, is going on my own healing journey, because until I can free myself from the grip of the WASP work ethic - my shorthand for the Atlantic Canadian version of white supremacy culture, unique to this region in its specific manifestation, but identical in its aims to the colonial project as carried out by white Europeans across the globe - I can only replicate these systems of harm everywhere I go. I don’t have to be conscious of white supremacy culture to carry out its aims, but I have to become conscious if I want to have a chance of stepping free of it, and coming back into common humanity with the global majority.

This is what EAGER is here to help us do. And we need resources to help support us as we do it. I’d like to invite my white friends and neighbours here in Canada to subscribe to this publication, and read the stories of others’ healing journeys that get posted here, as well as the work of Kokayi Nosakhere, who literally puts his life on the line to try and reach us in a meaningful way. If you can, please donate to @EAGERCommunity on PayPal (or other payment apps where available), or become a paid subscriber or founding member of 60K and Below here on Substack. If you don’t have funds to spare, please come join us in the EAGER Community group on Facebook, or find information about our Signal chat at joinEAGER.com. We can also direct you to any number of brilliant and dedicated pro-humanity educators who devote their lives to helping us learn. Amplifying their voices is a low bar that’s easily reached in our online world.

This isn’t easy work, but you don’t have to go through it alone. We’re all learning how to be in community together, and how to keep each other accountable and (relatively) regulated as we un-hijack our minds and our nervous systems from centuries of conditioning. My personal inbox is open to anyone who wants to have a one-on-one chat about anything related to anti-racism work or white supremacy culture; you can find me at alljoywillseternity@gmail.com. If you’d like to write about your own experiences within WASP culture or your journey in waking up to the reality of white supremacy, we welcome submissions to this blog, and can even offer a (small) financial incentive. Please email me for submission guidelines.

Above all, if reading this made you uncomfortable, know that this is the way we begin our healing journey. Your discomfort means you still have a conscience in a culture that wants you apathetic and distracted. We live in a world that caters to white folks’ sense of comfort, and part of the journey is learning to get used to the discomfort of reckoning with reality, and to channel that feeling into meaningful action. Your discomfort is a sign that you’re in the right place. Please, join us and begin to learn how to channel that discomfort into meaningful action for real change. You are welcome here. Please don’t ignore this call to step into your full humanity.