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Each July, two neighbouring countries celebrate their founding: Canada Day on July 1 and Independence Day on July 4. Beneath the flags, fireworks, and long weekends, there's an older story about how these countries came to be. Both holidays commemorate the founding of settler states established on lands that Indigenous peoples have lived on, governed, and cared for since long before either country existed. Those histories include violence, dispossession, and the displacement of Indigenous peoples.
For those who understand that history, the day holds weight and complexity. It's also a time for mourning, reflection, learning, unlearning, accountability, and reconciliation. For many newcomers, these celebrations can bring mixed feelings. Many arrive with hopes for safety, opportunity, or a better future while learning that the countries they are entering are also shaped by histories of colonization, displacement, slavery, and ongoing inequities.
Belonging doesn’t require choosing between gratitude and honesty. It asks us to hold both. It asks us to reckon with the full story of the places we now call home.
Indigenous peoples have lived and thrived across this continent for thousands of years, with distinct nations, languages, laws, and ways of life. To treat a country's age as the start of the story erases everyone who was already here. During one set of national anniversary celebrations, Inuk filmmaker Alethea Arnaquq-Baril said, "Every single time I see the logo, I want to take a Sharpie and add a couple of zeros to the end of it."
The names sit atop that older history. "North America" and "Canada" are settler names for land that many Indigenous oral traditions know as Turtle Island. Indigenous communities aren't interchangeable, and their cultures, languages, and ways of life differ as much as those of separate countries do. The story of Turtle Island appears across many Indigenous traditions as a creation story of how this land came to be. The same pattern of renaming exists in the United States, where treaty territories and nation names sit beneath the map most people were handed in school.
Nations have ideals they celebrate and histories they keep reckoning with. The distance between the story a country tells and the record it leaves is where accountability begins. A fuller story doesn’t ask us to celebrate less. It asks us to celebrate more honestly. That’s what allows a country to deepen its understanding of itself rather than weaken it.
In Canada, that record includes the residential school system. The identification of unmarked graves at the sites of former residential schools, beginning at Kamloops and continuing at sites across the country, drew sustained attention for a time. Much of that attention moved on, while the searches, the advocacy, and the grief didn't. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation's Memorial Register has documented more than 4,000 children who died in the system, a count it describes as conservative and still incomplete. Understanding that history and the present-day realities of Indigenous peoples is part of marking Canada Day honestly.
The United States has its own history of reckoning. The federal Indian boarding school system pursued the same goal of assimilation through the same means, removing children from their families and communities, and its harms are still being documented today. The Declaration celebrated on the Fourth of July declared that "all men are created equal," while the country it founded relied on slavery and the dispossession of Indigenous nations. Frederick Douglass captured that contradiction in his famous address, What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? He argued that the country had yet to live up to its own ideals and that naming the gap was an act of faith in them.
Institutions tell part of the story, too. The force now known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police was established in 1873 as the North-West Mounted Police, created to extend the authority of the new Dominion across the West. As the authors of An Unauthorized History of the RCMP put it, it was designed "to control the Aboriginal and Métis populations, and to facilitate the transfer of Indigenous territory to the federal government." Teegee, a Takla Lake First Nation member, has said Mounties are known in his community as nilhchuk-in, "those who take us away," a reference to their role in removing Indigenous children to residential schools. That history connects to ongoing realities, from the Sixties Scoop to the crisis of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirit people. Examining honestly how institutions were built and whose interests they were built to serve is part of reconciliation, not an attack on it.
Colonialism isn't only something to learn about in history books. Its legacy still shapes language, institutions, public policy, and everyday life.
A few examples are worth reconsidering: calling something your "spirit animal," which flattens a long-standing belief system; using "tribe" to mean your friends or "powwow" to mean a meeting, both of which trivialize what those words actually name; and using "Indian" as a catch-all, where "Indigenous," "First Nations," "Native," or a specific nation's own name is generally preferred.
The legacy of colonialism continues to shape whose lands and rights remain contested, whose communities receive investment, and whose knowledge and leadership are recognized. That’s why, beyond the fireworks, what we learn, acknowledge, and do still matters.
Solidarity is more than avoiding certain words. It's an ongoing practice, and a holiday can be a good prompt to begin something that lasts all year.
Rethinking how we mark Canada Day and Independence Day is an acknowledgment that countries, like people, are shaped by both their ideals and their histories. We can't change the founding, but we can decide how honestly we tell the story from here. It asks us to approach these days with greater honesty, deeper understanding, and a stronger sense of responsibility for what comes next.
This blog is not meant to be a static guide, but rather a compilation and reflection of our learnings to date. Everything changes - from technologies and innovations to social norms, cultures, languages, and more. We’ll continue to update this blog with your feedback; email us at hello@feminuity.org with suggestions.
This resource was written collaboratively by members of the Feminuity team.
If you wish to reference this work, please use the following citation:
Feminuity. "Beyond the Fireworks"
