This Land Is Not Our Land

A Canada Day Reflection

“On a day built for pride, a harder look at whose land this really is — and what honesty might ask of us now.”

The Eighth Day Report

Last night, the sky over our home turned violent. Tornado warnings sounded across the region; winds bent a tree more than a hundred feet tall so low that it disappeared behind my neighbor’s roofline and dropped hail the size of golf balls on the ground not far from where I live. By the time I sat down to write this, the power had gone out too. Storms of that size are rare in Ontario — but they are not unheard of, and whatever we make of the frequency, the intensity of them is not something anyone can honestly deny.

There was something fitting about writing a Canada Day reflection in the dark last night. Because today, I find I cannot write the newsletter I would normally write.

Most years, Canada Day is a day for flags and lake water and pride — pride in this land, in its resources, in the idea that we are its guardians. And there is real love in that. I love this country. But this year, when I sat down to write, I found I could not simply celebrate. I found myself needing to confess instead.

The Land Was Already Occupied

Before a single European ship reached this coastline, this land was not empty. It was inhabited — governed by its own peoples, structured by its own laws and traditions, some of which, I believe, trace back further than most of us have ever been taught. I have written elsewhere about my conviction that the peoples we now call under one name, “Native Americans,” carry a deeper inheritance than history books credit them with — descendants, I believe, of the tribes scattered from Israel, present on this continent long before it had the name “America.” That is a longer study for another time. But whatever one believes about their origin, one fact does not require any special research to establish: this land had people on it, with lives, families, cities, and governments, before we arrived.

Scripture is not silent on what it means to occupy land that belongs to someone else.

“The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine. For you are strangers and sojourners with me.”  — Leviticus 25:23 (ESV)

Even Israel, given this land under covenant, was told the ground itself was never fully theirs to sell or seize outright — they were tenants under God, not owners in the fullest sense. If that principle held for a covenant people receiving covenant land, what does it mean for a nation like ours, which took land under no covenant at all, from a people who were already there?

What We Did

We did not simply arrive and settle beside them. We fought them. We destroyed the food sources many nations depended on. And we brought diseases their bodies had never developed defenses against — smallpox, measles, influenza — which swept through settlements the way a single plague swept through Egypt, except this plague did not stop at one household. Whole communities were wiped out, sometimes deliberately hastened, in the well-documented cases where infected blankets were distributed as a means of “clearing the land.” Historians differ on how widespread that specific practice was, but the broader pattern is not in dispute: disease, displacement, and policy together devastated Indigenous populations across this continent on a scale that reshaped who would end up governing it.

What the Land Actually Shows

It would be easy to say the government gave back a large share of this land to its original people. It did not. Reserve lands — the small parcels officially set aside under treaty — make up less than half of one percent of Canada’s entire land mass. That is the number Canada points to. It is not the number that matters most.

The number that matters most is this: across huge stretches of this country, no treaty was ever signed at all. In British Columbia, roughly ninety-five percent of the province sits on land First Nations never ceded, surrendered, or sold to the Crown by any agreement whatsoever. On Vancouver Island, only a handful of small areas near the southern tip were ever covered by treaty — the Douglas Treaties of the 1850s. The rest of the Island, like most of the province, remains unceded to this day. Legally and historically, in the eyes of the very courts of this country, that land was never surrendered. The Supreme Court of Canada has confirmed as much in cases like Delgamuukw and Tsilhqot’in, ruling that Aboriginal title continues to exist on land no treaty ever touched.

So there are two very different maps of this country. There is Canada’s map, which treats unceded land as Crown land the moment a fence goes up or a city is built on it. And there is the map First Nations themselves would draw — one where the vast majority of this land was never given away at all. The gap between those two maps is not a rounding error. It is the whole argument.

The Question I Cannot Shake

Scripture tells us what happens to a tenant who breaks agreement with a landlord:

“He will come and kill those farmers and lease the vineyard to others.”  — Mark 12:9 (NLT)

If any of us broke a lease, stopped paying rent, and then continued living in a house as though we owned it outright, we would expect consequences. If a landlord came and found the terms unmet for generation after generation — or found there had never been a lease signed at all — we would understand if he finally said, “This is still my land.” I do not ask this rhetorically. I ask it as a real question for a nation that calls itself just: if the first peoples of this land stood at our city halls today and said “this land is ours, and it was never given away,” how would we answer them?

Would we hold our heads high because we are Canadian? Or would we, if we are honest before God, lower them in shame?

A Different Kind of Canada Day

I am not writing this to shame anyone reading this, nor to suggest guilt belongs to those of us alive today for choices made by governments and settlers generations before us. But Scripture does call nations to remember, to reckon honestly with the past, and to walk humbly rather than proudly forward from it.

“No, O people, the LORD has told you what is good, and this is what he requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.”  — Micah 6:8 (NLT)

Justice. Mercy. Humility. Not one of those three is compatible with a Canada Day built entirely on pride.

What Can We Actually Do Today?

So this Canada Day, I want to ask a harder question than pride or shame. We cannot give back all the land. That much is true — we have built cities, highways, hospitals, and generations of lives on top of it, and no undoing that clock is realistic. But that is not the end of the conversation. It is only the point where the real question begins.

Because right now, in this country, so many First Nations communities live in poverty on the very land that was never rightfully taken from them under any signed agreement, while the rest of us live in relative wealth on the same map. The numbers are not hidden. In 2024, roughly eighteen percent of Indigenous people in Canada lived below the poverty line, compared to about eleven percent of the non-Indigenous population — and that figure does not even include most reserve communities, whose poverty is measured separately and is often worse. Some northern and remote First Nations still lack clean drinking water decades after boil-water advisories were first issued. This is not ancient history. It is happening now, in this country, in our lifetime.

So if we cannot undo the past, what can we do in the present? Can we support Indigenous-led businesses and initiatives instead of only speaking about reconciliation? Can we press our local governments to finally close the gap on outstanding Treaty Land Entitlements — land literally owed and never delivered? Can we learn whose traditional and unceded territory we are actually standing on, not as a ceremonial line read before an event, but as a fact we let change how we treat our neighbors? Can our churches and ministries build real relationships with Indigenous believers and communities near us, rather than only writing about them from a distance?

I do not have every answer. But I believe the question itself is the beginning of obedience. A nation that keeps asking “what can we do” is in a very different posture before God than a nation that stopped asking anything at all.

So this year, on this day, I will not hold my head high for the accomplishments of Canada. I will bow it in prayer — not for the natural beauty of this land, which is real and worth thanking God for, but in honest reckoning, before God, for what was done here to a people who occupied this land fully before we ever called it ours, and in asking what I, personally, am willing to do about the part of that story that is still being written.

A Prayer for Today

Lord, thank You for this land — for its beauty, its resources, and the life it has given so many. But today we come before You not in pride, but in honest reckoning. Forgive us, as a nation, for the ways this land was taken rather than shared, for lives destroyed rather than honoured, for promises made and never kept, and for treaties that were never even offered. We cannot undo the past. But give us the humility to see the whole truth of our history, and the courage to do something, however small, about the poverty and injustice that remain today. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

— The Midnight Watchman

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Logos Recalibration

MORNING EXERCISES (33) — “RISING WITH STRENGTH”

EXERCISE 1: AWAKENING BREATH — “First Breath of the Day”

SCRIPTURE:

“This is the day the LORD has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.”  — Psalm 118:24 (NLT)

MOVEMENT:

•  Lie in bed or sit comfortably

•  Place one hand on your chest, one on your belly

•  Take a slow, deep breath in through your nose for 4 counts (feel your belly rise)

•  Hold for 2 counts

•  Exhale slowly through your mouth for 6 counts

•  Repeat 10 times

MODIFICATIONS:

•  Bed-Bound: As described

•  Seated: Same movement while sitting

•  Standing: Same movement while standing

•  Breathing Difficulty: Use shorter counts (3-2-4)

SPIRITUAL REFLECTION:

You’re breathing. That means you’re alive. That means you survived the night. This is the day the LORD has made — not yesterday, not tomorrow, but today. This breath you’re taking right now is a gift. Each inhale is receiving God’s gift of life; each exhale is releasing what you don’t need to carry. Even before Israel had breath as a nation, God’s Spirit was the one who first breathed life into man — “the LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and the man became a living person” (Genesis 2:7, NLT). The same breath that formed you is still sustaining you. You’re here. That’s enough.

ENCOURAGEMENT:

You woke up. You’re breathing. That’s victory. Start here.

WEEKLY RECALIBRATION:

Once a week, pause a little longer on this. Not every breath needs unpacking, but this one does. Ask yourself: what did I carry into yesterday that I’m still holding onto this morning? Anxiety, an old grudge, a fear you keep rehearsing — Scripture calls us to “not be anxious about anything” but instead bring everything to God in prayer (Philippians 4:6, ESV). Let your exhale today be a literal releasing of one thing you name out loud. Recalibration isn’t starting from zero — it’s remembering Whose breath you’re running on in the first place.

THIS WEEK’S RECALIBRATION LINE:

“I am breathing on borrowed breath — His breath — and today I release what is not mine to carry.”

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EIGHTH DAY PROPHECY FOUNDATIONS

What If Everything You Were Taught About Hell Is Wrong?

If God is love, how can billions of souls burn in conscious agony forever? Scripture’s own definition of “eternal fire” — and Daniel’s overlooked 45 days — tell a different story than the one painted on cathedral walls.