For then last 18 months or so, perhaps the largest part of my job with the Canadian Ecumenical Jubilee Initiative has been in the area of indigenous justice. Together with the Aboriginal Rights Coalition, we have been running an education and advocacy campaign focused on the need for a new way for us, as a nation, to approach the land and resource rights that are inherent to the Aboriginal peoples of Canada. In seeking this new approach, which has at its heart the full recognition of the human rights of aboriginal peoples, we are seeking a new relationship between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples in Canada. This is not something that you do overnight, easily, or without resistance.

It’s a process built slowly on education and empowerment. We have spent the better part of a year doing that work, in partnership with Aboriginal peoples, across the country. One of our biggest tasks was to revisit history and understand the roots of our current relationship. It is a relationship and a history built on the dispossession of Aboriginal peoples from the land. We learned this history through something called the blanket exercise. Blankets are laid out, representing North America before the arrival of the Europeans. Workshop participants stand on the blankets. Then a European arrives and a process begins whereby people are removed from the blankets by war, disease, trickery and legislation. As history is related, the blankets become smaller and smaller, and are isolated from each other. We finally end up with a few little piles of blankets with peoples stranded on them. Dispossession is complete. What was once a source of comfort, livelihood, and spirituality –the blankets, the land– has been taken away.

Recently we wanted an opportunity to highlight this work, to have a series of media and community action moments across Canada and, ultimately, in Ottawa. We decided to reverse the blanket exercise on the grounds of the Supreme Court, and to do so using blankets which we gathered from communities across the country on a 5 day train trip from the four directions. The train would not go as far East as Canada goes –there are no trains in Newfoundland– but neither did it go as far West as Tofino or as far North as Pond Inlet. It did go just about as far South as you can go in Canada – Windsor.

When we first came up with the idea of the blanket train, I knew I wanted to ride it. And so I volunteered to be the national staff contact on the Eastern train. As the dates for my journey drew nearer, I began to grow more apprehensive about the trip. I worried about logistical details but I also worried about how I would cope, having to travel with people I had never met and get off in communities along the way to collect blankets from people I only knew as an email address or voice on the telephone. They would know me only by my bright red "blanket train engineer" T-shirt which I was not even sure I liked. I did not know whether we would meet with violence in areas such as New Brunswick, where tensions between aboriginal and non-aboriginal peoples run high these days. I worried about indifference. I did not know what to expect on this journey, I was apprehensive about it, and I felt guilty about my apprehension. After all, I was a professional justice-seeker. I have been to rallies, workshops, summits, government meetings, and demonstrations galore. What’s so scary about a train ride?

I will ruin the end of the story and tell you that it was an incredible ride, and an incredible moment on the Supreme Court grounds where we laid out more than 1000 blankets. I have yet to find the words to really describe it. What I do have are some stories of the people I met, and the journey we made together.

Cornwallis Park in Halifax, just across from the VIA station. Betty Peterson, a local activist and Raging Grannie who identifies herself as "Rambo Grannie" on her answering machine, has pulled together the event. She expects 30 or 40 blankets; we leave with twice that many. One of them, a quilt from an Anglican parish in Fall River, is hand-delivered by a chain-smoking hard-living version of me. At first glance, she is the last person I would think I’d see in a church and the one of the first I’d think would complain about "those damned Indians." At the end when I thank her for the blanket, she refers to the gathering, "isn’t this the thanks? How could I not do this?"

Moncton: a huge crowd at the station. 30 boxes of blankets already stowed as cargo. The chief from Big Cove, along with many people from that community have worked together with the local Jubilee and Ten Days groups to plan this event. They hold a purification ceremony and blessing on the train platform. I have to get back on the train before it is all complete; a woman from Big Cove sees this and cuts across to reach me, she takes my hand and passes me a quilt that she and other women and girls from Big Cove have made. She looks me straight in the eye and says,"Now you take care of our blanket." I think I nod assent. Then it is onto the train, where the steward has opened the top half of the door and beckons me to "wave goodbye to your people." Another woman from Big Cove yells, "I like your shirt!" This is the shirt about which I was so ambivalent. "Can I have it?" I laugh out loud, "I can’t take off my shirt!" I have one more in my luggage; it’s for gkisedtanamoogk, ARC-Atlantic’s co-chair, whom I’m meeting in 2 hours in Miramichi. I figure he won’t mind; I get it and call to the woman as the train is just about to leave the station. I throw it to her and a great cheer goes up, hands wave in the sun, and we are gone. By now I’m beginning to really like the shirt.

I go back to my compartment and open up the quilt I’ve been given; it is decorated with pictures and signed with names. The lower left hand corner grabs my attention; a drawing of a dream catcher and written in an unsure hand below, "make my dreams come true." First, the commandment given when the blanket was passed on to me and now this. I literally have to stop, sit down, and catch my breath.

This train trip was about much, much more than media and public spectacle. For Christine Augustine, who drew that picture and wrote those words, for the woman who handed me the quilt, for the First Nation near Sioux Lookout which contributed a blanket that was, as they said, infected with the indigenous justice virus, this train trip was about making something new. It was about building a new relationship. And there were risks. People who had been systematically abused by society and the church were willing to take the church at its word when it said, " we want to do what’s right."

That trust, embodied for me in the commandment to "look after our blanket" is also a responsibility. I wasn’t shaken by the exchange in Moncton because it was some kind of dare. I was shaken because one of those people I was so unsure of meeting chose to meet me on equal terms. She accepted my reasons for being there and decided to hold me accountable. She had expectations of our meeting that went beyond the train platform, beyond the next day’s action at the Supreme Court, and demanded of me a commitment to the long haul. Now it’s up to me to figure out how I live out that commitment.

The best part of the blanket train experience for me was the train ride back to Toronto, chatting with a few other people with whom I’d spent the day, swapping experiences and points of view, getting to know each other. Being stuck on a train for hours is a brilliant way to build community.

The second most wonderful part of the blanket train experience for me was actually seeing the blankets spread out on the lawn of the Supreme Court of Canada –– more than one thousand blankets of all sizes and colours. They symbolized very graphically the desire of a small but growing number of non-Aboriginal Canadians to live in a country where Aboriginal land rights are restored and protected once and for all –– where we can experience "right relations" with Aboriginal people for the first time in our history together. I think the blankets also were a sign of a learning process many of us have entered into.

Yet –– and this is where I find myself turning into a bit of a "wet blanket" - one of the questions I was left with at the end of the day is this: Are symbolic acts of solidarity, such as sending blankets to the Supreme Court lawn, enough to lead to the kind of changes that are needed? Do they show an adequate sense of the urgency of the need for justice in this country? None of us wants violence, but we also need to act in a way that takes account of the fact that for many Aboriginal people, Canada is a violent country, not a very safe place.

A few months ago, Canadian church leaders issued a letter in support of the Jubilee land rights petition. Their letter calls for "the growth of a generous sense of moral urgency" with regard to Aboriginal justice in Canada. They also acknowledge the extent to which the mainstream Canadian churches were allied with the powers of empire and conquest. When it comes to Aboriginal land rights and land justice in Canada, we have had to adopt very modest goals in comparison to other campaigns and causes. We are presently aiming to get 50,000 signatures on the Jubilee land rights petition to be presented to the Prime Minister in September this year –– but we got more than 635,000 signatures on the Jubilee debt cancellation petition a few years ago. Why is foreign debt easier for us than Aboriginal justice?

Here’s another troubling example. Some years ago, the United Church established a Healing Fund to finance projects of healing among Aboriginal people who had been abused in our church-run residential schools. It took many years for the Healing Fund to raise a million dollars from United Church members. But when there was a massive hurricane in Central America in 1998, United Church folk spontaneously donated $1.2 million dollars in 6 weeks for humanitarian aid for hurricane victims. We celebrated the generosity and concern of United Church people.

Do we have a log in our eye when it comes to injustices in our own nation? What is the log, and how do we get it out of our eye? I want to give an example of this "log in the eye." In May this year a terrible tragedy occurred when a five-year-old white girl from Edmonton went missing and was found dead several days later. There was a great outpouring of national grief, with front-page coverage in the national newspapers and further articles on the inside pages.

In the Globe and Mail, however, underneath the extensive coverage of that child’s tragic death, there was a much shorter article describing the disappearance of a 3-year-old Native girl in a small community north of Edmonton. She too was found dead in the forest several days after her disappearance. But the language used in the newspaper to describe her death was not nearly as emotive and passionate as that used to describe the tragedy of the white child’s death, nor did the Native child’s death get anywhere near the amount of space in the newspaper, and certainly not front-page coverage. I took this as a very striking message about whose life is more valued in our society. And there’s a kind of violence in this, that needs a strong, spontaneous response from us.

On the train from Toronto to Ottawa with us on June 21 was a group of indigenous people from the Philippines who were in Canada as guests of the Anglican Church. They came along to show their solidarity with the struggle of First Nations people in Canada for land rights –– a struggle they were very familiar with from their own experiences. As we marched from the Supreme Court to the Human Rights monument several blocks away, one of the Filipinos asked, "Why are we just walking on the sidewalk? In the Philippines, we would take over the whole street for our demonstration!" Then we had to explain that we Canadians are very polite in our protests. We want to make our point but not alienate anyone or cause any trouble. The Filipinos were a little perplexed.

Assembly of First Nations National Chief Matthew Coon Come asked a poignant question earlier this year at a meeting in the Maritimes: "Are we the only ones that can see that these [federal government] policies and actions, this deliberate dispossession, are the root causes of the human catastrophe facing our peoples?" Matthew Coon Come’s question suggests to me that Aboriginal people still feel very alone, and largely unaccompanied by non-Aboriginal Canadians in their struggles for justice. That is why I think the Jubilee blanket train was such an important action, such an important step. But it was very much only a beginning, and I sense that Aboriginal people are understandably cautious, a bit dubious, waiting to see how far we are really prepared to walk in this struggle. Are we prepared to walk in the streets, and not just on the sidewalk? This fall, for instance, when Indian Affairs Minister Bob Nault brings forward his legislation to amend the Indian Act, legislation which the Assembly of First Nations has condemned as unilateral and imposed –– another act of colonization –– what actions will we be prepared to take to derail this legislation, the First Nations Governance Act? Will we get a million signatures on a petition?

In closing, I want to celebrate and affirm the blanket train initiative. It was a huge organizational undertaking, and most important of all, it brought Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Canadians together in a common undertaking, sitting together on the same train for hours. The train is a strong symbol of the journey we hope has started –– a journey of learning histories of violence that have been hidden or denied, a journey of seeing how the violence continues today, a journey of repentance, and hopefully a journey toward justice and right relations. We want the train to speed up, and to get more people on board. And for those of us who are not the original peoples of this land –– those of us who have been on the other side of history –– we need to struggle deeply to understand our own silences and complicity, to find a new way of humility and respectfulness, so that by Gods grace it will become possible to share break and drink wine together in a new community.